Drought and Rain: re-creations in Vietnamese, cross-border heritage

Abstract

The Drought and Rain dance trilogy, by Vietnamese–French choreographer Ea Sola, evokes memory, history and everyday practices through song, stylised gesture and stark, graceful images. The performances aim not to represent ancient and wartime Vietnamese pasts as much as call attention to the ways in which the present and past invigorate and co-create each other. The unsettled, recursive and processual nature of Ea Sola’s performances suggest it is necessary to periodically re-encounter the continuing legacies of violence. The performances enact a different form of historical (re)productivity, not predicated on a linear materialism, but based on processes of temporal turn and re-turn. I employ the most recent performance in the series, Drought and Rain 2011, as both subject and lens for exploring the unfinished dynamics of memory–history, and as a site and practice of cultural heritage. Embodying a hybrid mix of multiple re-performance categories, the Drought and Rain performances stretch current notions of heritage and are cross-border in terms of culture, nationality, arts genre and aesthetics and political implication. Primary points of focus include: the non-originality of performance, the unfinished nature of the past, and the way in which the Drought and Rain performances propose a counter-memory of the future.

Keywords:

• re-enactment
• performance
• intangible cultural heritage
• Vietnam
• memory

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Ea Sola, So Kwok Wan and Dominique L’Huillier for their generous assistance. Many thanks also for the helpful comments from two anonymous reviewers and IJHS Editor Laurajane Smith, to Britta Timm Knudsen and Mads Daugbjerg for their insights and valuable feedback, as well as to the Danish Council for Independent Research|Humanities (FKK) for funding this research.

Notes

1. Drought and Rain (Sécheresse et Pluie) premiered at L’Hippodrome Scène Nationale in Douai, France in 1995.

2. This text, based on Ea Sola’s dramaturgy and sung in Vietnamese, comes from the opening Prologue Song in the original libretto for Drought and Rain 2011 and Drought and Rain (1995), which was written by esteemed literary figure Nguyễn Duy in collaboration with Ea Sola. The drum section was written by contemporary composer, and well-known Chèo musician, Nguyễn Xuân Sơn. This is Ea Sola’s translation from the performance programme.

3. Some of the figures are anonymous, while others depict historical Vietnamese figures of mythic status such as famed fourteenth/fifteenth century scholar and military strategist Nguyễn Trãi, the heroic rebel fighters and sisters Hai Bà Trưng (‘Hai Bà’ means ‘two ladies’), the tenth century emperor credited with unifying Vietnam after Chinese rule Đinh Tiên Hoàng, eighteenth century emperor and military hero Nguyễn Huệ, anti-colonial rebel Hoàng Hoa Thám, and the nationalist intellectual Phan Bội Châu.

4. Đoàn Thị Kết, mentioned at the beginning of this article, was one of the women Ea Sola met and worked with in Vietnam in the early 1990s.

5. See Knudsen’s helpful distinction between ‘authenticity’ as experienced feeling and ‘genuineness,’ as ‘the object’s character of being a genuine trace’ (2006, 10–11). Knudsen relates genuineness to specific places or objects, but I use it here to describe the sense of sincerity bound up in the performance and in Ea Sola’s social efforts.

6. Here I am referencing reviews of the Drought and Rain 2011 performances that took place in Edinburgh and London (e.g. reviews from The Scotsman, The Guardian, The Independent, and The Telegraph).

7. Although I use the term intangible cultural heritage to engage with current heritage discussions, I agree with many other scholars who contend that the various UNESCO categories of heritage (e.g. intangible, tangible, cultural, and natural) are problematic and reflect normative Euro-American assumptions (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2004; Kurin 2004; Smith and Akagawa 2009; Smith and Waterton 2009; Harrison 2013).

8. The UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage creates two lists, (1) The Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, and (2) The List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding (UNESCO 2003, Article 16–17). The latter list specifies the need for urgent protections, but repeated reference to ‘safeguarding’ is present throughout the Convention and is clearly considered a central focus.

9. As many scholars have stressed, the increasing commodification of heritage requires consideration of the heritage industry, particularly the growing field of heritage tourism and experience economies (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998, 2006; Smith 2003; Taylor 2008; Hitchcock, King, and Parnwell 2010; Knudsen and Waade 2010). One interesting aspect in considering the Drought and Rain performances within the heritage economy, is that they operate somewhat in the reverse of heritage tourism: instead of tourists travelling to a particular location to spectate, the heritage performance travels.

10. What I mean by ‘dialogic’ is akin to Rodney Harrison’s proposal (2013), with the inclusion of mixed and multiple cultural practices. The UNESCO website on intangible cultural heritage states that heritage practices can help promote cross-cultural dialogue and respect (n.d.). The point I wish to make is inclusive of these claims and also extends the possibility of considering some intangible cultural heritage itself as dialogic in its form, construction, processes, relationship to time, and/or the individuals, communities, and transnational cultures involved.

11. A striking example of how the performances enabled cross-cultural, cross-border dialogue that would not otherwise have taken place, occurred after a US performance of Drought and Rain in 1995. To their surprise, the full cast was invited by General Westmoreland and his wife to have lunch at their home. Thus, twenty years after the official end of the war, the Drought and Rain performers ended up sharing a meal and conversation with the top commander of the US military operations in Vietnam during the war’s most violent years.