Growing up, my family had a Ford Econoline conversion van, the kind that had a convertible bed in the back and a tiny TV and VCR system that some years later I would annex into my teenage bedroom. We would use the Ford to drive from Richmond to visit family in Florida, and on these long rides, my mom would watch Chinese soap operas filled with soulful gazes, punctuated by kung fu sequences, and dubbed over in Vietnamese. Nowadays, my mom watches Korean dramas, with nearly no fight sequences but still dubbed over in her preferred language. Seeing posters for Vietnamese movies around the cities we’ve visited, they all look like local facsimilies of media from other countries.
I think that is why I was so affected by seeing this show in Hoi An. The phrase that kept coming to mind was, finally..something of our own. Exciting, vibrant, original and most importantly, a product of creative people, on their own terms. Everything in Vietnam is so often harkening back to the past, glorifying the non la reed hats, the form fitting ao dai’s, but this refreshingly different - tied to a history, but not bound by it.
These dancers and performers were powerful and sensual, but not in a way tied to the romantic ideas of colonists or tourists - they were just doing something really cool, for themselves and us. It was just so damned nice to engage with people outside the service industry, to see creatives plying their trade not only to please us, but to tell a story they felt like they wanted to tell.
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