KVT – Together Higher at Nha hat lon

KVT blown away by contemporary dance

Tuesday night at the Opera House and a cultural event that will be difficult to eclipse this year….if nigh on impossible!

The Vietnamese contemporary dance company Together Higher, presented the first dance in their two night season at Nha Hat Lon.

Together Higher has evolved into Vietnam’s most famous contemporary dance company and the fact that its dancers are, in the main, speech and hearing impaired does not elicit one word of condescending praise from this opinion giver…because they need none! They are a very, very, very good company and head and shoulders above anything else home grown that I’ve seen in Vietnam…and for that matter, are just about equal to most I saw in my travels over the past two years

Saw a four dancer troupe in Lisbon last year that pulled my socks off with excitement with their frenetic, upper body moves. The Together Higher group of four dancers in the hour long, ‘A Group of Individuals’ did the same, albeit slower and steadier but no less effectively with their grounded choreography… slow, deliberate and intense.

I first saw the company in 2009 at the Youth Theater in Hanoi where their widely acclaimed production of ‘Sigh Memory’ was one of the best thing on stage in Hanoi in what was one of those years when good cultural stuff bubbled and foamed like champagne frothing out of a bottle as the city got into the mood for celebrating its big one thousand year birthday in 2010.

The company has got good reviews and press for its dancing wherever it has traveled in the world as instanced here. The dance that shot them to prominence was ‘Stories of Us’, conceived in 2002, about people with aids related problems and a review from Chicago, just before the company moved on to New York says:

Review

Thursday night, On the Boards

The performers in Together Higher were not originally trained as professional dancers. Many of them still work as handicraft artists, dollmakers and embroiderers to rehearse at night. They have an unaffected directness, a kind of modesty, that adds immediacy and humanity to this work.
Long frames his choreography with complex lighting designs and a lovely theatrical design. Textured rice-paper hangings suggest both city streets and enclosed rooms. Lights flare suddenly brighter at moments of recognition between dancers, or introduce geometric, hieroglyphic patterns into the space. Black cylinders are carefully placed and moved, changing the geometry and suggesting the piers of a dock or a city fence.

Composer Nguyen Van Cuong performed his intriguing score sitting in the wings using traditional instruments as well as computer and soundboard. The costumes, by Luu Thi Thu Lan (softly colored business suits for the men, sharply differentiated street dresses for the women) added glimpses of character.

Together Higher offered a rare and heartening glimpse of how contemporary dance is being interpreted in a culture very different from our own.

And for dance lovers, and others, who want a look into the genesis of the company (and what parts of Hanoi and other Vietnamese places looked like in 2005 before the cities started to get eaten by monster cars) here’s a very good documentary directed by Paul Zetter.

The company owes its existence to founder and choreographer Le Vu Long and his wife Luu Thu LAN whom I consider should be enshrined as national treasures.

Now for my take on the dance which was like an excellent piece of modern chamber music in seven cohesive movements…..and if my interpretation differs from any that of others…including the choreographer…then that’s just as it should be with such a beautiful piece of abstract art.

The set was superbly minimal. To my mind, a cat’s cradle of ropes

bounded and enclosed the four dancers as they moved under and through its intricacies and constraints. Eventually they were stretched and broken and the dancers began the struggle to find their own individuality outside the conservative norms they’d learned to accept.

The earth toned, simple costumes of conformity were inveigled and led by and disciplined by an individual in crimson carrying and twirling a crimson scepter. Allusions sprang to mind immediately and because I recently visited places where the Catholic Church is being hauled over red hot coals for hiding and colluding with child sexual abuse, I was immediately in tune with that as one personal reading of the scenario…though Vietnamese would have their own loaded metaphors.

Not that a plot or story line was at all necessary for one to be wrapped up in this engrossing dance….I mean I could just as well have grabbed hold of a theme like climate change and still have been happy with my interpretation.

The wall of cardboard boxes that filled up the back of the stage set were as fragile as are the eventual histories of any wall built to enclose or confine and as Shelley said in his poem, Ozymandius…………..

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

And at the end of the dance the wall was mined through and pushed and broken to rubble, as it had to be …and still individuals found it difficult to rise up and take control of the dystopia that was around them. It was a sobering finale because, after all, did the dysfunctional, authoritarian protagonist end up controling all again with the same tired dogma?.

Brilliant set deign, brilliant lighting design

Spectacular choreography…and I loved the symbolism of the repetitious, stiff legged, animal walk on all fours…..plus all the rest of the choreography which, surprisingly, never grew tiresome. Even though there was not much physical interaction between the individual players in the drama.

The electronic musical score by composer Tri Minh who was also the head sound technician????

It was superb! The best bit of new (or old) music I’ve heard for a long, long time. Dramatically excellent.

And when the lone female danced her solo to cello…or double bass…a lovely reference to Bach…the whole thing became sublime.

Tri Minh has collaborated and composed for the company before and if his compositions are always going to be as riveting as the last two…and this one especially…may the collaborations prosper.

The sort of dance performance I wished I could see again to catch all, or more of its nuances.

Tonight, Wednesday, is a completely new program by the company… and will I miss it….no way!
Sorry…no images of the dance as everyone seemed to conform, surprisingly, to the sensible dictate that photography was not allowed…which was a relief as there were no iphones etc madly being held aloft around me with their lit screens catching visual attention.

This was another in the long line of cultural events that would have been impossible without the financial assistance of the Danes and their CDEF fund….Long may the Danes and Denmark prosper!