Dancing Memory with Modernity:
Ea Sola’s Drought and Rain, Vol. 2 at the Hue Festival, Vietnam
Located on the banks of the Perfume River, Hue is a place of dramatic mountain vistas, dragon boats, and crumbling tombs of former Nguyen dynasty kings. My friend Hang and I are here tonight to see Ea Sola’s Drought and Rain, Vol. 2. We make our way through a sea of motorbikes and heavy, hot, exhaust-filled air toward the citadel’s Ngo Mon Gate, the entryway into the royal Nguyen “Forbidden Purple City.” Outside the gateway, children carry glowing neon trinkets and fly fluorescent colored kites. The setting is chaotic and dramatic. We are welcomed along cobbled stone pathways by rows of small, flickering candles. The citadel’s stairs and pathways have been brushed with glittered paint that sparkles in the candlelight. We cross moats full of deep green lotus leaves and pale pink flowers, barely visible as dusk turns the sky.
The lights rise on a stark, pale stage. The twelve Vietnamese dancers begin with discrete, repetitive motions, at first in silence and later accompanied by the palpitating heartbeat of drums. In concentrated synchronicity with the drums and the lone singer’s haunting traditional chanting, the dancers ricochet across the stage with skilled, fierce force, slippling seamlessly between anguish, ambivalence, and recognition of their necessary, yet uncertain, connection to one another. Periodically interacting with framed portraits, similar to the kind used on traditional Vietnamese memorial altars, they begin to make personal connections to violent world events through individual lives ravaged by war. Ea Sola had told us, “I don’t accept physical violence, intellectual domination, domination of our sense, our sensitivity, our sensorial body…” As the performance develops, the dancers come to notice and question their consumption of mundane excesses in their everyday lives. They move in constant rush toward an unfulfilling nowhere, slowing their frenetic pace for only short gasping breaths and spare moments of calm, centering clarity and reflection. In these stark moments of what Ea Sola might express as “taking consciousness,” the dancers slowly come to realize their connections to other people and places, recognizing their responsibility to one another. “We cannot say that a war is just between two countries. There are connections [to individual lives],” asserts Ea Sola. Arms and hands outstretched, the dancers ask the audience to join in that recognition.
Though originating from Vietnamese perspectives and in many ways inextricable from Vietnam’s own history of violence, this dance is dedicated to the world’s youth, those who are inheriting complex humanitarian and environmental responsibilities in an increasingly globalized political landscape. “[People often] don’t care [about violence in other places] because it is too far,” says Ea Sola. “If it is not your war, it does not affect your thinking, but in order to address important things, you have to face the world…I prefer to say ‘take consciousness.’”
Contemporary dance, especially with artists of political orientation, is a relatively new phenomenon and a particularly risky undertaking in post-war Vietnam. Since returning there in 1995, Ea Sola has been steadily pressing the confines of artistic practice and expression. “Contemporary dance is built by questions,” she says, “and that brings the form.”
She speaks to us about the interconnectedness of global politics and her commitment to making dance. As she speaks, her long black hair falls over slim strong shoulders, her eyes half-hidden by large framed sunglasses. She embodies a graceful power. Though she has experienced a great deal, she is still compelled to learn more, question more, and deeply explore through dance what it might mean to enact a more ethical relation to others, no matter how globally dispersed or seemingly remote. She says of the young dancers in this performance, “They imagined themselves far from this violence, [but] we are connected…we do not need to cross a war to have consciousness—and to say no to all those [violent] things.”
Born in South Vietnam, Ea Sola and her family escaped to France as the Vietnamese-American war was coming to an unsteady close. She could have continued her successful career in Europe, but found herself drawn back to her home country. Her dances are always, in some part, an exploration of her memories of war and her diasporic, transnational identity.
The first Drought and Rain project, featuring older female rice farmers who had never danced, sought to explore the memory of war from the viewpoint of Vietnam, with the intention that “this [would] put the anonymous in the foreground.” Volume 2 is a continuing exploration of that memory, but from the viewpoint of a new world. “The old ladies of Drought and Rain,” she notes, “didn’t pass on their dance to the performers of Volume 2...Young people are the ones who want to build something. And maybe they can rebuild and remake [a different world where] we can economize our energy [natural resources and environment] and do things without war.”
Ea Sola and this performance, like Hue itself, destabilize times and places, holding fast to unsettling complexity. “These days,” she says, “we [are not asked to] remember so much. The memory is something quite strange…always in the body, of the body…In this dance, we have to update and to rethink what it means to be civilized, [and what it means to embody and enact a thoughtful consciousness of living in a shared world.]” Drought and Rain Vol. 2 invites us to remember our own connections to people we do not know and places and times in which we ourselves have never lived. As you partake in this dance, let your thoughts move toward imagining a world where it is not necessary to make war, and where we might practice new ways of being together.
A special thank you goes to Ea Sola, and to my friend Le Thi Thu Hang.
- Rivka Eisner
