[Ngô Trà My:]

I was born in the countryside in Vietnam in a small village called Ninh Phúc. When I was six my parents moved to Hà Nội. They wanted to change their life.

[Nguyễn Thanh Thủy:]

Arrival Cities: Hanoi is an experimental music theatre production, which was created in 2014 and 2015 by our group The Six Tones, the director Jörgen Dahlqvist and composer Kent Olofsson.

It seeks a new format for politically informed theatre, which is responsive to the challenges of a globalized society. Arrival Cities: Hanoi builds a narrative from the life story of Lưu Ngọc Nam, an actor and costume maker.

His experience of moving from the countryside to Hà Nội, the homesickness and the tension between traditions within Vietnamese Tuồng theatre, becomes the source for an expansive portrait of a city vibrant of memories from the Vietnamese countryside. In an interview with Lê Minh Huệ for the Hanoian newspaper Nông Nghiệp Việt Nam, Nam describes his perception of the piece:

[Stefan Östersjö:]

To me, the countryside and Hà Nội are like the two sides of the hand. One side is an overwhelming image of a modern city with offices in skyscrapers. If you turn the hand over you see a rural culture being broken to pieces. Arrival Cities: Hanoi expresses exactly what I have experienced: the transition from traditional to modern society Lê, MH. (2015, n.p).

[Nguyễn Thanh Thủy:]

This video essay explores the embodied experience of migration, by revisiting the process of making Arrival Cities: Hanoi. A central example will be a choreography, which was first performed by Nam as part of our interviews with him. We are interested in how memory is embodied, and how performative ethnographies can emerge from the making of documentary. But experiences of migration are also embodied by members of The Six Tones, just as expressed by Ngô Trà My in the opening scene.

[Stefan Östersjö:]

Since the group was created in 2006, the Vietnamese and Swedish members of The Six Tones have come to embody a particular form of intercultural music making, based on mutual learning and a wish to embrace friction between traditions, rather than to seek a resolution through world music oriented consensus. The music of Arrival Cities: Hanoi was created through a long-term collaboration between the Swedish composer Kent Olofsson and The Six Tones, starting already in 2009. Hereby, this music, through its performative and material manifestations, embodies other stories of migration and transculturation. We argue that the collaborative process, and the method of performative ethnography created a foundation for intercultural collaboration built on empathy and trust.

The Canadian journalist Doug Saunders discusses 21st century migration in his book titled Arrival City (2010). Building on research on five continents, his book chronicles the final shift of human populations from rural to urban areas, which Saunders (2010) argues is the most important development of the 21st-century. He argues that this migration creates “arrival cities,” 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.

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.

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).

The Six Tones have a long history of collaborative work with the Swedish director Jörgen Dahlqvist.

In May and June of 2014, we worked together in Hà Nội, making documentary recordings and interviews with people who had migrated to Hà Nội from the countryside.

Many of them were street vendors, a characteristic category of guest workers in the city. Together we visited migration zones in the city, but we also talked to people out in the countryside. The Long Biên market is one of the central arrival points in the city, where street vendors both live in sheds under the bridge and buy fruit and vegetables in the early morning.

[Nguyễn Thanh Thủy:]

When we approached street vendors in Hà Nội, it was initially not easy to convince them to participate in the interviews. Many were shy or unwilling to talk to us. We were aware of the fragility of their situation, and careful to ask for the consent from each individual. Often I had to approach them on my own to start a conversation, and if they agreed to make an interview, I would introduce the director and the other members of the group.

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.

[Stefan Östersjö:]

It is a hard life to work as a street vendor. You need to learn how to negotiate your existence in an area with the police (it is illegal to sell goods in the street), and even if you bribe them to be allowed to be there, there will be razzias when you suddenly have to flee away on your bike (people normally pass the message on when police are out looking for street vendors). Hà Nội is a city of paradoxes. The sound of the street vendors’ calls are often referred to in the tourist agencies’ depictions of the city. The tradition of street vendors goes far back in time, and the calls are a fascinating sonic signature of urban life in Việt Nam. There are calls concerning almost any kind of service, not just the obvious offers of various kinds of bread and fruit, but also for many other chores: to sharpen your knives and scissors, to sell your broken machines, to exchange your old pots and pans to new ones, and so on. It would be more correct to divide these activities in two branches: the actual street vendors who walk the main streets and aim at selling their items to bypassers and the various services offered to people in their own house and advertised with calls from the bicycle or motorbike. The latter category are the ones you hear the most. Today, most of them have pre-recorded calls which are played back from little horn speakers.

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.

[Nguyễn:] Cô trọ ở đấy một mình hay trọ với mấy người ạ?

[Hiệp:] Cô trọ cùng cả xóm nhà cô ở đấy, khoảng mười người.

[Nguyễn:] Mười người trong một nhà ạ?

[Hiệp:] Ừ, mười người. Cả xóm. Rủ nhau đi.

[Nguyễn:] Toàn là phụ nữ hết ạ?

[Hiệp:] Con gái hết. Toàn những người đi chợ như cô đây này.

[Nguyễn:] Thế chồng cô ở nhà làm gì ạ?

[Hiệp:] Chồng cô ngày trước nuôi lợn giống để đi lấy giống đực đấy. Nhưng bây giờ người ta bỏ lợn nái rồi, nên không có việc gì, nên bây giờ cứ ở nhà thôi, trông nhà với đi làm ruộng. Làm ruộng, rồi trông nhà trông cửa, có cháu trông cháu.

[Nguyễn Thanh Thủy:]

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.

[Nguyễn:] Hồi đấy là tự cô quyết định đi hay là bạn bè rủ?

[Hiệp:] Cái này nó là cuộc sống. Đi chợ kiểu này cô đi từ khi cô còn nhỏ cơ, chứ không phải đến lúc ấy cô mới đi. Cô đi mãi rồi, xong đến lúc lấy chồng, đẻ con đẻ cái thì cô không đi, xong đến lúc con nó sõi sõi thì cô lại đi.

[Nguyễn:] Cháu thấy đi bán hàng rong kiểu này toàn là phụ nữ, thế tại sao các ông chồng không đi bán hàng rong ạ?

[Hiệp:] (Cười) Chồng…Các ông chồng làm sao mà đi cả trưa nắng như các cô được, có lúc 40 độ ngoài đường, làm sao các ông chịu được.

[Nguyễn:] Các ông không chịu được ạ?

[Hiệp:] Không. Các ông chỉ đi thợ xây, trưa phải nghỉ trưa. Nó có giờ có giấc. Các ông không vất vả được. Chỉ có các cô mới chịu được thôi. Có lúc 40 độ cũng phải đứng ngoài đường. Có khi trong nhà 40 độ, nhưng ở ngoài 42 độ, có thời điểm nó thế đấy, các cô vẫn phải đứng ngoài đường.

[Stefan Östersjö:]

The collaboration between The Six Tones and composer Kent Olofsson started in 2009, long before the ideas emerged for Arrival Cities: Hanoi. In 2009 and 2010 he composed two shorter pieces which were released on CD in 2012.

The first two scores unveil some specific points of friction in the relation between his mode of composing and the musical background of the two Vietnamese performers. In particular, the rhythmical structures were difficult to master. But for the composer, the traditional Vietnamese instruments caused other difficulties that were only gradually resolved. However, and thanks to the sustained collaborative process, by the time of the recording sessions in 2012, a more in-depth understanding began to emerge which lay the ground for the music in Arrival Cities: Hanoi.

[Nguyễn Thanh Thủy:]

For each participating artist, not only was the experience of Hà Nội essential for the creation of the piece, but also, how the relations within the group deepened was even more important. As put by Jörgen Dahlqvist in conversation with Kent Olofsson:

[Jörgen Dahlqvist:] That’s why I think you have to experience, you know, the culture, to see a little bit who you are, in relation to who we are, and all the Vietnamese culture.

[Kent Olofsson:] No it’s interesting, because I really don’t think we could have made all the music, or not in that way really. It’s difficult to say. I mean if I hadn’t went to Hà Nội and, as you say… I mean, it’s both about Hà Nội, the city, and those places you visited. But of course it’s also getting to know you better, and also to know about your life and…

[Nguyễn:] What do you think when you are here in this area?

[Östersjö:] Well, first when we came to Long Biên, of course I was struck by the poor circumstances and the poverty that people live under here. But when we talked to people, many different stories emerged. So, I think first I was struck by how everyone we met actually had their families and their homes hours away from Hà Nội. They’re really guest workers here.

[Nguyễn:] Yeah…

But then you also see… There are also many stories of ambitions and hopes for a better life for your children. So, many of the women you see here are actually saving money to pay for their children going to university in Hà Nội.

[Nguyễn Thanh Thủy:]

We gradually came to see ourselves as participators rather than as makers of documentary. When we started creating the staged performance this became even more clear. The artistic idea emerged to include our individual experiences of migration to and from Hà Nội in the piece. Through these personal narratives we wanted to create a situation built on sharing and empathy within which the stories from the street vendors could be presented.

[Stefan Östersjö:]

When we met the women by the Red river, you cried. It reminded you of your own…

[Ngô Trà My:]

Yes…

[Ngô Trà My:]

When we met the women living there, I remembered a part of my life. It’s quite a hard part of my life. I rented a little house nearby the Red river, several years ago.

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…

[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 real-life situation (Forsyth & Megson, 2009). The stage is set up so that the three performers either play their instruments or tell stories, drawing on their memories from the creation of the documentary or from their lives in Hà Nội.

Arrival Cities: Hanoi aims to create a space where the boundary between fiction and documentary is dissolved. While the audience cannot really know whether the stories told by the performers are authentic experiences or scripted dialogues, these accounts place the performers onstage as individuals rather than as actors. As put by an audience member after a performance in Berlin in December 2017: “The performers are there as people, who only happen to be musicians.” This presence in the moment of performance accompanies the images of the street vendors and other people in the documentary.

[Nguyễn:] We all bring ourselves, out of our position as director or musician, but we are now in the same room talking with street vendors and Nam, here’s Trà My, here’s me, here’s Stefan, here’s Jörgen… We talk, we share our stories together. I think that’s what makes the piece work well, to me, as a way of presenting a character or presenting topics.

[Dahlqvist:] And that’s why it takes time also, to make it. Because of the labor.

[Olofsson:] You could not have done that in a year or half a year. It would not have been possible.

[Nguyễn:] Because it is still kind of a sensitive topic. It is not easy to just share our personal story onstage, in this… With some other people, the street vendors, they already shared their stories, and we also of course dare to share our stories in that context, to share with them.

[Nguyễn Thanh Thủy:]

The story that Nam told in the interview had the structure of a classic tragedy, and led up to the day when he had to give up his career as an actor and instead become a costume maker.

[Lưu:] Nhiều đêm không ngủ được. Nhiều đêm ứa nước mắt vì nghề.

[Nguyễn Thanh Thủy:]

Empathy, and the sharing of the individual life stories, became a method in the making of Arrival Cities: Hanoi. It is a piece of music theatre without a script, but with a musical and dramaturgical structure in which the narrative draws on the personal memories of the participating artists. The role of the documentary is manifold. It is a means for a political engagement, but also creates memories and images that can be shared and transformed in the performance.

[Stefan Östersjö:]

We now want to return to the choreography that Nam performed when we made the interview. It could be seen as a representation of his memory of Tuồng theatre. In Arrival Cities: Hanoi, The Six Tones in turn perform their memories of Nam’s choreography, as an expression of empathy with the actor and his personal experience of migration to Hà Nội. These individual choreographies are performed twice, first in the opening and then again at the very end, when the video of Nam’s performance is also presented.

If we think of performing bodies as archives, Nam, to a certain extent, performs a transmission of a Vietnamese theatre tradition. But the three musicians rather engage in an act of remembrance, not of this particular piece of Tuồng theatre but of Nam’s individual fate: a re-writing of movement which is also a transformation, shifting, perhaps, for a moment, our sense of time, opening a door to a much earlier time when the same choreography was studied by a fourteen-year-old boy in Hà Nội, who had just arrived, alone, from the countryside (Nguyen & Östersjö, 2019, p. 292).

[Nguyễn Thanh Thủy:]

In the performance, the stories of migration collected in conversations with street vendors are woven together with the experience of the members of The Six Tones. Through this performative ethnography, personal memories of migration and travel across continents are merged with remembrance of encounters with poor women, struggling to create a better future for their families, and lays the grounds for empathic engagement with the other.

[Stefan Östersjö:]

Intercultural music and theatre operates in a liminal space between traditions. Aesthetic choices are therefore difficult to negotiate. Without trust and empathy, these negotiations cannot reach beyond the surface. Intercultural collaboration always demands from each individual to give up a piece of the self. In Arrival Cities: Hanoi, composer, director and the three performers were all engaged in such transformative processes. This empathic engagement created situations in which a different mode of listening could emerge, pointing beyond traditional forms and structures. Arrival Cities: Hanoi is the result of the political engagement which underlies such an openness of listening.