“…Just like that some people vanish, they become one with the air we breathe and the air all of sudden becomes suffocating, I develop asthma, I am suffocated, God has poisoned the air…” (Lê 1998, 23-24)
“…What about your father’s letters, those you once treasured? Burn them all. Noone lives with the dead, Destroy, Take all of the past to the pyre, raze to the ground…” (Lê 1998, 31-32)
1936 is a virtual two-channel performance, which took place on Zoom and was live streamed on Youtube. Each screen occupied by a character — one identified as the typist, the other dp1936 — features what seems like two separate stories, but at times appear to be responding to one another. Characterised by words, geometric shapes and movements, the correspondence suggests a discrepancy in terms of time and space — making audience constantly question the locales and juncture of the characters, while simultaneously utters in a rather spontaneous manner their personal ruminations on grandiose philosophical concepts of a human life such as freedom, the truth and eternity. It seems, the typist retells what they remember of a person and what they said to each other in the past; and dp1936, whose screen blinks throughout the performance (perhaps suggests a continuous jump of time), reads out fragments of diary entries while performing a series of repetitive actions. The performance, conceived and directed by choreographer Ngô Thanh Phương, forms the second chapter in her three-year performative endeavour “Through the door then…”, which aims to explore the different dimensions of confinement, privacy and solitude. If the first chapter unpacks these keywords quite crudely—bodies are presented in a claustrophobic container under strict and hostile CCTV surveillance for eight hours straight, 1936 shows a rather subtle approach with two characters presumably broadcasting from their own personal spaces voluntarily. The performance then probes the question on the necessity of CCTV cameras as a means for surveillance, and physical enclosure for imprisonment. Just several clicks of the mouse, one could easily gain access into the most personal spaces: the home and the laptop screen.
Data collection and the making of the script
Just how my early curatorial hero Hans Ulrich Obrist always emphasises in his writings on curating, all ideas and projects—whether realized or unrealized—first begin with conversations. The inception of 1936 is of no difference: we gathered on Zoom, asked questions and listened to Trần Diễm Phương—whom later is known as dp1936 in the performance, and her own account of being in strict confinement for five years. Conversation after conversation, we all were confronted by an overwhelming influx of information: personal history as told in neatly chronological order, which was frequently punctuated with Diễm Phương’s own justifications and reflections. Over the course of two weeks, Diễm Phương constantly opened up about her personal life, and so often the rest of us followed suit. We all agreed that though we might not know each other before or stay in the same room, the stories and thoughts we shared with each other surpass the level of intimacy and closeness of friendship. However, that poses another dilemma: how to retell Diễm Phương’s story without stripping away her presence completely, and at the same time not arriving at a point of generalisation in which we view her as a mere source of inspiration. Diễm Phương on the other hand is also aware of the fact that her experience could not speak for those of other people.
As a result, the construction of the script—a textual document, which takes the form of a back-and-forth exchange between selected sentences from Diễm Phương’s diary, and the dramaturge’s narration of their conversations. At the end of each day before going to bed, Diễm Phương and her fellow roommates retreated to their own world by updating their journal. According to its owner, the diary serves as a daily logbook mostly documenting what Diễm Phương ate, saw, read, watched, heard and occasionally felt that day of which she thought could be useful to her in the future. Every now and then, she still revisits the journal—now with its hackneyed cover—so as to not forget. An entry always starts with an exact date, time in the diary, as contemplated brilliantly in the famed novel “Crossroads and Lampposts”—echoing a post-structuralist viewpoint—is an infinitesimal dot between the bygones and the anticipation, so insignificant that the existence of reality in the journal is always contested (Trần 2010, 25). The act of keeping a diary from an outsider’s perspective thus slips between archiving and fabricating a reality due to the concoction of both facts and [un]consciously self-generated facts or personal interpretation. Both ritualistic (in the classification of the content) and random (in the facts and information she extracted from books and newspapers), her diary carries an air of individuality but ambiguity at the same time. The script then heightens this sense of ambiguity by removing the date of each entry as well as using sentences that are either neutral or descriptive. When interlacing with the dramaturge’s distilled recollections of the same period as told by Diễm Phương, time as interpreted in the script seems to stretch and expand outside of linearity, and the selves — you and I — become indeterminable. The you and I, as later on being typed and uttered out in the performance could be anyone: it could be the pronouns that the characters use to refer to one another, or the characters to the audience.
Day…month…year…
“I saw a treehouse today.”
“A black silicon stool in the bathroom.
Today I saw a rainbow on the wall.
Pulling radish.
Knock knock knock, who’s there?
Today’s night sky was beautiful.”
“What do I want?”
You talked about the time when you — playing the role of a communist revolutionary,
re-enacted the girl’s sacred fall into eternity.
The re-enactment of the past through archival memory and the repertoire
Diễm Phương’s well-kept diary and recalled memories provided us with an enormous amount of materials to work with, however, words could only do so much. The diary—falling under the category of archival memory, and the script are materialised with written language, which obviously have gone through the process of selection (first by Diễm Phương based on the future usefulness of the information, and the general structure of the diary; second by the dramaturge, based on the relevance and the meaning of the content), and so could only conjure up an incomplete pastness in her story. The embodied memory or the repertoire—gestures, movements, singing—though still being mediated, compliments what the text could not do in the transmission of her experience. Choreographer Ngô Thanh Phương’s take from the same series of conversations we had are the movements and actions, which signify the dullness of planned routine and Diễm Phương’s own effort, however small, in breaking away from the monotonous lifestyle. Isolated from their original habitat, the movements—Diễm Phương’s body/muscle memories are then subjected to constant repetition, at the beginning to evoke their theatricality and then as Diễm Phương assumes the role of dp1936 in the performance to teach her own body. Rehearsal after rehearsal, along with the choreographer’s need to string together a series of sequential movements, Diễm Phương started to suggest other actions which at first appeared to her too mundane to mention. Perhaps, it is through the process of reenactment of body knowledge that gradually awakens behaviours, which did not strike to her as memorable or noteworthy at first.
The past is never over as long as the archive and memory endure. With the reenactment of embodied memory — in this performance, they are gestures, habits and even singing, the past drags into the present and becomes live again. Rebecca Schneider (2011, 37) notes on the power of reenactment: “An action repeated again and again and again, however fractured or partial or incomplete, has a kind of staying power – persists through time – and even, in a sense, serves as a fleshy kind of “document” of its own recurrence” [emphasis mine]. To Diễm Phương, the reiteration of movements lets her re-live the emotions of the past. Though now in a completely different setting and with slight modification, they still evoke a sense of familiarity for her. The reiteration of crocheting (figure 1) reminds her both of the good memories she had with her friends, while making her realise that she has abandoned such activity for a while now that each of them moves on in their separate ways. The reiteration of a body search act (figure 1), according to her at the time happened too often that it became a matter-of-factness, now reminds of the indifference she felt, and that there was once she was stripped off basic human rights. The reiteration of the squatting position (figure 3)—though she would still squat down now and then—conjures up the feeling of unbearable helplessness and uneasiness, which she always disdains. The act of reiteration happened almost every day during the rehearsal period, yet each time it felt new; and in the course of reminding her of past experience, it too prompts her to reflect on her current situation.
From left to right: figure 1, figure 2, figure 3. Screenshots from video documentation of 1936. Courtesy of Bước qua cánh cửa thì…
Reenactment offers the “here” and “now” to the “then” and is never just one thing but always at least double (Schneider 2011, 51-56). Thus, reiterated acts invite different readings among audience or witnesses. Those who did not go through the same thing as Diễm Phương (but again, can everyone’s experience of one event, one place be the same?), or were not informed of her story prior to the performance could see these reiterated acts as anomalies—people do pace, jump, squat in their every day. When strung together and juxtaposed against the typist’s screen and with the context that this is a performance, it is very possible that the audience would try to make sense of the choreographer’s intention and ascribe different meanings to each of the actions and the performance as a whole. After two weeks of not attending any of their daily rehearsals and being unaware of the new changes, I was almost new to the work-in-progress performance. The crocheting gestures become so velvety (perhaps thanks to religious practice) that they could be interpreted as the dance of the hands or drawing in the air. Together with the humming, the effortlessness of the movement echos a state of tranquility. The body search, with its apparent rigidity mirroring a particular tension, could be read as make-believe/imagined freedom or arrested autonomy. The squatting position, initially rendering Diễm Phương helpless, now reverses the power dynamic related to the act: with her staring straight into the camera, perhaps it is the audience who is being inspected, not her or dp1936 any longer.
After performance
One of the biggest concerns as we worked on the piece was the consideration of a full disclosure of Diễm Phương’s background as well as the how and the when. Information about the performance and its characters released prior to the premiere was rather scant and generic. The intention is to not foreshadow any sentiment for both of the characters and the piece before the audiences even become witnesses. Such decision was constantly debated for fear the audience could not relate to such individualistic experience, or that the performance is not interesting to look at—a lack of spectacle. However, just as the performance ended, an audience gave an immediate response claiming that they felt a strong connection to the piece—reminding of their own precarity and limbo, they were moved, and that they were feeling trapped in the experience. Perhaps, this is the immense power of the reenactment of memories—both archival and embodied, in the transmission of lived experience and of affect, which occurs in the in-between of the self/other, in the atmosphere or monitors and between bodies (Schneider 2011, 51-56).
Works Cited
Lê, Linda. 1998. Tiếng Nói. C. Bourgeois.
—. 1998. Tiếng Nói. C. Bourgeois.
Trần, Dần. 2010. Những ngã tư và những cột đèn. Nhã Nam.
Schneider, Rebecca. 2011. Performing Remains: Art and War in times of theatrical reenactment. New York: Routledge.
Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and The Repertoire: cultural memory and performance in the Americas. Duke University Press.