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Abstract
This performance review examines Alain Destandau's Antigone Viêt Nam, a Vietnamese/French, bilingual adaptation of Sophocles's play set in dynastic-era Vietnam and presented at the 2008 Hue Festival. Performed with a cast of Vietnamese and French actors, the play juxtaposes Vietnamese classical opera (Tuong) with Western performance traditions to create an aesthetic hybrid in the service of critical engagement. Such transcultural theatre productions, particularly those inhabiting the borderland between colonial nations and their former colonies, as this one does, are fraught with ethical challenges of representation. Destandau attempts to navigate these challenges by shaping the performance around two critical commentaries: the first interrogates the long history of gender inequality within Vietnamese society; the second reads the legacy of unequal power dynamics between France, the United States, and Vietnam to offer an alternate narrative for the birth of the modern Vietnamese nation. I argue that while Antigone Viêt Nam flirts with some of the common pitfalls of intercultural theatre, it ultimately manages to steer clear of them through its incisive critical commentary. This production thereby offers a useful template for artistic practitioners or critical scholars working at the intersection of intercultural performance and postcolonial hybridity.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the doctors who attended the English language class he team-taught with his wife at the Hue University College of Medicine and Pharmacy in June and July 2008. Their overwhelming generosity made Vietnam the most hospitable place imaginable. The author would also like to thank his colleagues David Terry and Andrew Wood, whose critical insights were invaluable at a late stage of revision, as well as Heidi Rose, Heather Carver, and the two anonymous reviewers, whose support and comments helped shape this piece. Finally, the author thanks San José State University for providing travel expenses for this research through a College of Social Sciences Foundation Research Grant.
Notes
1. The intercultural in the context of theatrical performance has been much theorized. My use of the term here is indebted to Rustom Bharucha's description of it in The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking Through Theatre in an Age of Globalization, in which Bharucha opposes the “multicultural” and the “intercultural.” He links the multicultural with “the official cultural policies of western democracies,” while he defines the intercultural as “a voluntarist intervention” (Politics 33). Whereas the multicultural is state sanctioned, state controlled, and often deployed in preserving the interests of the state, the intercultural lies “outside the direct control of the state,” and therefore, has “greater flexibility in exploring—and subverting—different modes of citizenship across different national contexts, through subjectivities that are less mediated by the agencies of the state” (Politics 33). The intercultural, importantly, recognizes the power imbalances between its various influences and “embraces all the possibilities of dissent” (Politics 25). The recognition of power imbalance is a necessary component of the intercultural; hence, why Robert Gordon refuses to extend the term to productions that do not in some way reflect these imbalances.
2. I attended Antigone Viêt Nam on June 4 and 5, 2008 at the Hue Festival. After Hue, Antigone Viêt Nam played in Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, and then the Avignon Festival in France, with a tour of France planned for 2009. The performance itself and its subsequent travel costs were funded by the French Embassy in Vietnam, L'Espace French Cultural Centre of Hanoi, and the Vietnamese Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism.
3. For more information on the Hue Festival, see the festival website at: http://www.huefestival.com
4. Oscar CitationSalemink makes a similar point (Salemink). Salemink also notes that local leaders, in arguing for the festival to be held in Hue, initially fought indifference from Hanoi, Vietnam's capital city, due to the perception of Hue as a cultural backwater and not fit to host such a grand international festival.
5. The population of Hue is approximately 300,000.
6. For more on the notion of topographical performance, see CitationSpangler.
7. The so-called “Battle of Hue” ran from January 31 to February 25, 1968.
8. Unpublished interview with writer and director Alain Destandau and Bétina Schneeberger, who played the role of Ti An's aunt in Antigone Viêt Nam, June 7, 2008. The interview was conducted in French.
9. Unpublished interview with Alain Destandau and Bétina Schneeberger, June 7, 2008.
10. Hector CitationAmaya offers a compelling twist on discussions of acculturation and transculturation through his notion of “performing acculturation” in the context of transnational migration. For Amaya, performing acculturation is “not the equal of being assimilated nor of losing difference.” Rather it is “reflective behavior that tries to account for the immigrant's need to make experiences reliable again and the need to reconstruct a social environment” (210). Performing acculturation, thus, involves not so much the process of losing one's cultural heritage, but the deliberate construction of something new.
11. Unpublished interview with Alain Destandau and Bétina Schneeberger, June 7, 2008.