Performative Ethnographies of Migration and Intercultural Collaboration in Arrival Cities: Hanoi

This video article explores the embodied experience of migration by revisiting the process of making Arrival Cities: Hanoi. This piece of experimental music theatre sought a new format for politically informed theatre that would be responsive to the challenges of a globalized society. It is built on ethnographic fieldwork carried out by the Vietnamese/Swedish group The Six Tones, in collaboration with director Jorgen Dahlqvist and the composer Kent Olofsson. The role of this ethnographic process was manifold. It was a means of a political engagement, which also created images that could be shared and transformed in the performance. In Arrival Cities: Hanoi, the stage was set so that the three performers could play their instruments, perform choreography, and tell stories. A central aim was to make the individual memories of the performers a cornerstone of the dramaturgy. We are interested in how memory is embodied and how performative ethnography can constitute a method for an ethically and artistically grounded practice, within which we also emphasize the role of empathy and the sharing of individual life stories. In this video article, we give particular attention to the choreographies that were recorded and created as part of this process. Intercultural music and theatre operate in a liminal space between traditions, where aesthetic choices are difficult to negotiate. Without trust and empathy, these negotiations cannot reach beyond the surface. In Arrival Cities: Hanoi, composer, director, and performers were all engaged in such learning processes, and the music as performed can be seen as the embodiment of a particular narrative, grounded in an intercultural collaboration. Editor's Note: The acknowledgements section was missing from the original submission. It has been added to the transcript on 20/04/2020.


STILLS FROM THE VIDEO ARTICLE
Nguyễn Thanh Thủy interviews Lưu Ngọc Nam, a Tuồng actor.
His experience of moving from the countryside to Hà Nội, the homesickness and the tension between traditions within Vietnamese Tuồng theatre, Nguyễn  neighbourhoods and slums on the urban margins that are linked both to villages and to core cities, and that the fate of these centres is crucial to the fortunes of nations.

Music from Arrival Cities: Hanoi
A journey out on the countryside outside of Hà Nội also becomes a journey back in time. The Vietnamese economy has developed rapidly since the country opened up to market-oriented economic system with the Đổi Mới reforms in 1986. This economic growth has led to significant improvement of the living standards in the country, but the development has not been equitable.

Swedish premiere in Malmö 2014
A report looking at 18 years of economic growth concludes that while the country has developed from being a lowest-to middle-income country from 1990 to the present day, "poorer groups, ethnic minorities and rural populations have seen their share in economic progress decline. Income growth has been concentrated mainly around the large cities and in areas with export-oriented economic activities" (Vandemoortele & Bird, 2011, p. 8).
[  Eventually we managed to record a good number of interviews with street vendors, several of them made in the sheds and other locations where they stayed, often upon invitation from them, but also in the streets. Once the conversations got started, many generously shared their life stories, while others gave only sparse accounts, and we of course did not want to urge anyone to share more than what they wanted. The particular sound of this amplification situates the sound of the street vendors of today at the threshold between the ancient and the modern Vietnam. The women selling fruit in the streets rarely use any calls today; they rather walk up to people and address them individually, rather than with louder calls. Sometimes they also bribe policemen to be allowed to set up their bike with their goods in a certain spot and stay there throughout the day. This is the working situation which street vendors today prefer. In this respect, the fruit vendors walking the streets with their bicycles are some of the most silent of all inhabitants in Hà Nội, surrounded by the clamor of car horns and the many machines that fill the air from morning to night. The ability to contribute to the noise in the city is partly related to one's income. The stories that we collected were shared with us by people in fragile situations, and we felt the need to consider how these images could best be presented, both from an artistic and an ethical perspective. We also became concerned with our own role as individuals and artists in the process of creating this piece. It was not exactly a house. It was a kitchen nearby the Red river. It was a very bad condition kitchen and… the wind would come through from the roof, and also the rain would come through… It was not exactly a house. It was a kitchen nearby the Red river. It was a very bad condition kitchen and… the wind would come through from the roof, and also the rain would come through… [16:17] Vietnamese premiere in Hà Nội 2015 [Nguyễn Thanh Thủy:] The dramaturgy emerged from the creation of situations that would evoke the lived experience of the performers, similarly to how the scripts in verbatim theatre is drawn from interviews with people's experience of a reallife situation (Forsyth & Megson, 2009). The stage is set up so that the three  "It enacts the ways that performance itself is a social change agent: as a genre of representation, it attempts the act of transformative becoming." "It assumes that performance is imbricated with, and constitutive of, cultural ideologies and political economies." "It focuses on the ways that performance (narrowly or broadly conceived) is practiced and the ways it has effects, and it parses how these two valences are interconstitutive."

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"It moves easily but stringently between the micro and the macro. It presupposes that performance is culture-making." "It attends to the subjectivities engaged and probably transformed through performance." "It moves between the subjectivities of the audience, the performers, the ethnographer, and others." (Wong, 2008, p. 78) [ Actor on screen: Lưu Ngọc Nam

Performers: The Six Tones
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