The Novel Hall Dance Series returns this weekend after a year’s absence with more than a dozen middle-aged and elderly women farmers from Vietnam paying tribute to the decades of war that ravaged their homeland as well as the eternal, seasonal struggle that peasant farmers face with the climate. That alone should demonstrate that dance lovers can expect the unexpected with this year’s four-part Asia and New Look (亞太新勢力) series.
And that is just what the program’s artistic director, Cloud Gate Dance Theatre (雲門舞集) founder Lin Hwai-min (林懷民), wants from the series, which he has always envisioned as pushing the edge of dance from around the world.
The first production, Drought and Rain (旱‧雨) by the Company Ea Sola from Vietnam, may draw comparisons with Lin’s piece Portrait of the Families (家族合唱). Lin himself noted the similarity at a press conference in Taipei last week, but said while his work was like a novel, Sola’s piece was pure poetry.
All photos courtesy of Company Ea Sola
Both pieces look at and work from the collective memory of their respective societies, and revisit the horrors that war and bloodshed wrought on each. Both were revived by their creators last year. However, the similarities end there. While Lin’s work is performed by lithe, supple young bodies, the performers in Sola’s piece are women in their 50s, 60s and 70s who didn’t have to learn about the horrors of the past second-hand, they survived them: the first Indochina war against the French, the civil war, the Vietnam War.
French Vietnamese choreographer Sola was born in Vietnam, left in 1974 and ended up in Paris, where she became a performance artist. She also studied classical theatre, Japanese Noh and Butoh, and worked with the avant-garde Polish director Jerzy Grotowski. This diversity of experience is reflected in her stage productions.
A grant from the French cultural ministry allowed her to return to Vietnam in 1990 for what became five years of field work into Vietnam’s traditional music and dance and led to the original production of Drought and Rain.
While conducting her research, Sola often found that only the older women remembered the traditional dances and celebrations — though by tradition, women were expected to keep their hair pinned up and to stop dancing once they married.
Sola has gone on record and said her original aim was to create a piece of music theatre inspired by collective memory of the war. She soon realized, however, that she would have to use real women, farmers and others “who belonged to the story” to make the work truthful.
The reaction to the first production was largely shock, both in Vietnam and when the piece toured the US, Sola said last week.
“The reaction in the US was very strong,” she said. “I saw people cry. Performers and audience stayed after the show. Afterwards I received letters from mothers, fathers [and] brothers; the piece brought them a reconnection with the son, the husband they had lost.”
The reaction in Vietnam was predictably stronger — though in a more complex way. “There are layers. It was a shock aesthetically: the women were so old, non-professionals without makeup. Not beautiful. The shock that there’s no color on stage — it’s black and white — the aesthetic minimalism; the shock to see yourself, your music in this angle. The last shock is the subject — the memory of war. It brought debate,” she said.
When she was asked to revive the work last year, she had to find new performers. Many in the first troupe had been fighters themselves; many of the women in this second group had been sent to the front as singers, to console the soldiers and the wounded.
“After I choose them I discovered they had gone to the front. So the choosing is also about the person. I don’t ask them to do movement like a dancer, but I ask them to do something. So we walk together and I slowly begin to know them, their history. There is something in the relationship that makes the choice,” Sola said, adding that working with non-professionals can be difficult, but it is all part of the process of creating the work.
“There’s no bad performances … you practice until they are beautiful,” Sola said.
The music for Drought and Rain is traditional Vietnamese music and songs, performed by six musicians. But Sola created new lyrics for them.
“The lyrics are the story I wrote about the sun, the rain, the animals,” she said. “There was the sun and the rain and they fought and fought. Then they heard a complaint from the animals during their fight, and they realized how much they were blind, so they decided to create the seasons to give some rest and balance for the animals. ‘Still there is life, everything is possible’ — that’s the last line in the poem.”
It is the Vietnamese story, she said.
“The constant battle and struggles, if not in war then with the environment. You build, then a storm comes and destroys. Then you rebuild, then the rain comes ... Also fighting with the stranger who wants your land: the French, the US,” she said. “It creates the culture.”
“We are all working to be human. What does it mean to be human? You have to work to build. Everything is possible if you take that position … Being human is a challenge,” she said.
It turns out it has also been a challenge to have her work seen by Asian audiences, what she called “the chopstick culture.” This Taiwan visit is the first time her company has been invited to another Asian country to perform.
“We’ve been all over the world, to festivals all over, but not in Asia,” she said. “I wonder why?”
More Asia will be on view as the Novel Hall series continues with the Tao Dance Theater (陶身體劇場) from Beijing, on Oct. 13 and Oct. 14. Tao will perform two pieces, Weightx3 (重之三部曲) and 4 (四). New Zealand’s Mau Dance arrives the following week for three shows, Oct. 19 to Oct. 21, bringing with them Birds with Skymirrors, while the final troupe on the list is South Korea’s EDX2 Dance Company, who will perform two works, Modern Feeling and What We’ve Lost on Nov. 16 and 17.
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