Artists Reach Out: Anh Vo

Dear friends,

Welcome to Artists Reach Out: reflections in a time of isolation. I dreamed this series of interviews out of grief for my work both as a documenting arts writer and curator of live performance. In this time of social distancing, we are called to responsibly do all we can to safeguard ourselves and our neighbors. It is, literally, a matter of life and death.

But there's no distancing around what we still can share with one another--our experiences, thoughts, wisdom, humor, hearts and spirit. In some ways, there are more opportunities to do so as we pull back from everyday busyness out in the world and have time to honor the call of our inner lives.

So, let me introduce you to some artists I find interesting. I'm glad they're part of our beautiful community, and I'm eager to engage with them again (or for the first time) in years to come.

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Ahn Vo

Ahn Vo selfie

Ahn Vo performs in their work-in-progress BABYLIFT,
New York Live Arts' Fresh Tracks 2019
(Photography by Maria Baranova)

Anh Vo is a Vietnamese choreographer, dancer, theorist, and activist. They create dances and produce texts about pornography and queer relations, about being and form, about identity and abstraction, about history and its colonial reality. Their next evening-length solo, BABYLIFT, will be premiered in Brooklyn Fall 2020. More information at anhqvo.com

Do you have a current or planned project whose progress is affected by the pandemic?

All of my projects are up in the air right now with the waves of postponements and cancellations coming in, and I feel okay about it. I am mostly sad about the closure of studio spaces, but I’m trying to adapt as much as I can. Right now, I spend a significant amount of time writing songs for the rap/music project non-binary pussy, which is a very new and exciting process for me.

Briefly, tell me about how you got involved in the arts and in your particular practice.

Artistically, I was a late bloomer: I found dancing through the club when I was 17. The club was my first queer haven, allowing me to be in touch with my body, to be unapologetic with my pleasure, to surrender my individual self to the rhythm of music and the intimacy of collectivity.

The desire to find a daytime equivalence to the nightclub led me to dance formally when I came to the US to study at Brown. My initial plan was to major in History, focusing on the Cold War as a way to confront the traumatic wake of the Vietnam War. I also had this naive dream of returning to Vietnam and overthrowing the authoritarian Communist government. I cannot explain why I decided to pursue dancing professionally instead, though this early obsession with history and revolution is very much present in my artistic practice as well as my writing.

In a more specific way, what are you practicing? And what are you envisioning?

I am practicing being aware of the many histories that I inherit and how they live through my body. If Western ideology gives me the illusion that history can be transformed and transcended, I try my best to listen to the historic recurrences and stay within their messiness. I do not fantasize about the post-colonial—rather, I ask questions about how my body has been colonized and how my being reproduces the insidious colonial logic.

The world I envision would not be powered by the imperative to progress forward but by the desire for revolution and reparation—it’s not a coincidence that the etymology of revolution refers to the motion of rolling back. I don’t think a revolution has to mean big, sweeping changes. I’m much more invested in small revolutions that happen among interpersonal relationships. For me, the erotic or the pornographic emerges as a productive yet often overlooked site to experiment with revolutionary ways of being.

How does your practice and your visioning align with what you most care about?

I deeply care about relationships. Relationships here can mean structures and feelings we develop for people, objects, or things. I want to not only build communities that support marginalized experiences, but to also account for and tend to the relationships that we’ve been fucking up. History is full of those fucked-ups that we are bound to repeat, and at the same time, it is full of unfinished social experiments that give us clues into how we can better relate to one another.

How does your practice function within the world we have now?

It is difficult to imagine alternative modes of relationship in this extreme time of social distancing. I’m a bit skeptical to explore virtual ways of coming together. Not that I have anything against digital technologies, but I think there’s a capitalist imperative to connect with one another at all costs. So right now, I try to not do anything productive and only maintain a virtual presence when I have to work for money.

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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Hiep Thi Le, 46

Hiep Thi Le, Vietnamese Refugee Who Became Film Star, Dies at 46
by Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, December 23, 2017

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Kronos Quartet brings "My Lai" to BAM Next Wave

Tenor Rinde Eckert (left) as Hugh Thompson, Jr.
and musician Vân-Ánh Võ in My Lai
(photo: Richard Termine)

On the morning of March 16, 1968, U.S. army soldiers fired upon more than 500 unarmed civilians--elders, children, infants, women, some raped and mutilated--in the South Vietnamese hamlets of My Lai and My Khe. More innocents would have been slaughtered in this Vietnam War atrocity--since known as the My Lai Massacre--were it not for the witness and persistent intervention of a young American helicopter pilot, Hugh Thompson, Jr. His three descents into the chaos, though futile as attempts to halt the killing, ultimately saved lives, including, on his final landing, a young boy rescued from his dead mother's arms.

For Thompson's courageous efforts and his official reports of the massacre, he at first became a pariah in Nixon's America, as much a non-surprise as it is heartbreaking. His story inspired a concise, deeply affecting opera, My Lai, now in its New York premiere run at BAM Harvey Theater for BAM Next Wave. It was composed by Jonathan Berger with a libretto by fiction writer Harriet Scott Chessman for Kronos Quartet, tenor Rinde Eckert and Vân-Ánh Võ, a master performer of traditional Vietnamese string and percussion instruments.

Running at 70 minutes, the work suggests the dissonance between cultures--the flare-ups and gusts of Western strings set against Vân-Ánh Võ's measured, airy and delicate tones. Sounds converge and diverge; their players become factions physically separated by Eckert and the set the way Thompson's chopper, on its second descent, kept murderous soldiers from reaching potential victims. The set at the center of it all depicts a sterile hospital room: ceiling-to-floor white curtains, a couple of chairs, a table covered in prescription bottles. The curtains serve as screens for the ghostly shadowplay of helicopter blades and the gleam of wind-blown grasses. Here Eckert gives voice to an aging Thompson consumed by ugly memories and dying of cancer. The heroic pilot died in 2006.

Once Eckert parts the curtain and emerges before us, haunted and restless, the work maintains tight focus on him; the singer maintains his own tight grip in a performance of exacting force and endurance. He is almost never not singing, compulsively remembering, compulsively reporting, dreaming, desiring escape from the body, desiring, ironically, to share with his remembered young son the beauty of flight. He hallucinates his testimony as a game show.

Once you land, there's no turning back.... You can't just hover.

At one point, the bewildered Thompson asks, "How has this happened?" It's a question with no one good answer--or far too many. It resonates and disturbs as much today, in the Age of Trump, as then, in the Age of Nixon.

Kronos Quartet:
David Harrington (violin), John Sherba (violin), Hank Dutt (viola) and Sunny Yang (cello)

Direction, set design: Mark DeChiazza and Rinde Eckert
Video projection design: Mark DeChiazza
Lighting design: Brian H. Scott

My Lai has one final performance, tonight at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here. For information on other BAM Next Wave events, click here.

BAM Harvey
651 Fulton Street, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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Listen to their stories: women and the trauma of war

Im Heung-soon Explores the Horrors Women Endure in War
by Jason Farago, The New York Times, July 30, 2015