FEER(5/23) Dancer,Composer Refreshes Vietnam's Theatre Scene By MARGOT COHEN IN HANOI and HUE IN A CLASSIC TALE from Vietnamese folk opera, a woman takes a knife to the throat of her sleeping husband. She doesn't intend to kill him -- she merely wishes to cut a stray hair. But when her husband suddenly awakes, he suspects the worst and swiftly banishes her from the household. As she bids him farewell, her voice rises in plaintive melody. That melody is resurrected in Requiem, the latest work by controversial performance artist Ea Sola. Adapting Vietnam's tra***ional arts, Sola wields a sharp knife of her own, slicing into her audience's psyche with haunting melodic fragments, bare percussion and dance that is sometimes frenetic, sometimes glacial. Don't expect any clear messages. Sola sets out neither to preach nor entertain, which makes her a rarity in the stultified world of Vietnamese theatre. Widely seen and warmly applauded overseas, Sola's works inspire more mixed feelings in Vietnam -- everything from admiration to dismay. That's been the pattern since 1995, when Sola produced her first work, Drought and Rain. For that, she worked closely with a group of elderly women farmers, bringing them on stage to evoke collective memories of the Vietnam War. Rather than serve as an uplifting ode to war heroes, the piece struck many painful chords -- particularly when the women thrust forward photographs of their own dead loved ones. Not everyone appreciated the raw authenticity. When Vietnam's then-deputy foreign minister, Nguyen Dy Nien, saw the work on tour in Paris, he walked out in the middle. "If dance is like this, why should {Vietnam} establish a school of choreography?" he grumbled in an official report. Yet Sola has shown a remarkable capacity to overcome official reservations and carry her cycle of five experimental productions to local audiences. Colleagues point to the time and energy she has spent on quietly explaining her work to Vietnam's culture tsars. And in doing so, she has arguably carved out a little more creative space for other artists -- while sparking fresh interest in endangered tra***ional performance arts. "Her work is richly imaginative and very close to the people," says choreographer Pham Anh Phuong. Scheduled to make its Hanoi debut from May 21-23, Requiem is Sola's most difficult and challenging work yet. For some viewers, the 75-minute piece may pack a powerful emotional wallop, offering lingering images of corpses (as played by dancers) and coffins. But for others, Requiem may come across as esoteric and inaccessible. That was certainly the case at an international arts festival held in May in Vietnam's central city of Hue , where Requiem was presented on an open-air stage. The work's powerful silences and pent-up emotion were lost in the din of a chattering crowd, and hundreds of people filed out in the middle of the performance. "Ugh, a corpse. I don't want to have bad dreams," said one young Vietnamese woman, as she hurried away from the venue. Sola has often been told that her work is "too dark" and "too tragic." Behind these remarks, however, lies a broader, highly sensitive debate over what constitutes "Vietnamese" art and whether there's a role for "overseas Vietnamese." But then Sola defies such easy categorization. Professionally, she's neither a trained composer nor a conventional choreographer. Her music is formed from phrases and fragments of tra***ional Vietnamese forms; the movements flow from a mix of deliberate design and rehearsal improvisation. Her biography, too, is hardly conventional. She passed a wartime childhood in the thickly forested mountains of central Vietnam. When the war escalated in 1974, she was forced to leave behind her Vietnamese father and follow her French-Polish mother to Thailand and then France. It was only in 1989, after 11 years in Paris, that Sola felt ready to return to Vietnam to begin researching tra***ional music and find new channels for artistic expression. Since 1995, the dancer (who's "approaching 40") has lived in Hanoi. "Her view of the Vietnamese people is filtered through a foreign eye," says Nguyen Vu Hoai, deputy general secretary of Vietnam's Dance Artists Association. While praising Sola's "patriotism" in exploring the riches of tra***ional music and theatre, Hoai maintains that Sola's dark work doesn't reflect the resilient national spirit: "If the Vietnamese were always filled with such sorrow and pain, Vietnam would have died a long time ago." Sola denies wallowing in pain. On the contrary, she views Requiem as an expression of rebellion against loss. Most important, she says, the work signals that personal liberation comes from surmounting obstacles. Sola's appearance on stage as a corpse, she says, broadly symbolizes departure. "Requiem is not a goodbye to somebody who died, but to something in your life that is finished, or dead." Mindful of her privacy, Sola declines to discuss the deaths that have shadowed her own life. But she does describe her struggle to overcome one major personal obstacle: The overwhelming feelings of alienation and dislocation she felt as a foreign teenager in Europe. Returning to Vietnam helped her get grounded, and she drew vivid inspiration from four years spent on research in the countryside, mostly in the northern Red River Delta. That's one reason she bristles at criticism that she doesn't truly understand "Vietnamese culture." Not many people, she says, can match what she's done: "To sleep in the village, to spend time with the rhythm of the villages, with their music, their difficulties, their joy." Đem đại nghĩa để thắng hung tàn, Lấy chí nhân để thay cường bạo
