[FEEL] in/out : memories x movements | The Website of Tôn Thất An [Aaken]

[FEEL] in / out memories x movements (2016)

Artistic directors | Tôn Thât An & Sébastien Ly (for Cie Kerman)
Scenography & Technical Advisor | Patrick Wong Mui
Choreography Assistant to Sébastien Ly | Le Thi Mai Anh
Presenter | Institut Français, Cie Kerman
Partners | Arabesque, Quynh Gallery, The Factory, HBSO Company – Opera, Dance Center, Trường Múa TP HCM, GOC.
Venue | Ecole Colette

Opening on November 26th, 2016, at the Ecole Colette, Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City)

“memories x movements is the result of the artistic colaboration bewteen choreographer Sébastien Ly and composer Tôn Thât An. Their common taste for site specific performance and mixed arts brought them to envision this unique event.

In the actual exhibition spaces, dancers will perform several times in the course of the evening (4 hours), allowing visitors to enjoy the experience at their own pace.

This four hour long event is an open, artistic and aesthetic journey, with no beginning nor end. It is a metaphor of our relationship to memory, there always, but waiting to be recalled. Each member of the audience can thus create his / her own unique personal experience.”

PROGRAM:

Room 1

1. En leurs mémoires (In their memories) (Dance)
Choreography | Sébastien Ly
Performers | Nguyễn Thu Trang, Phan Thái Bình, Sùng A Lùng, Trân Hoàng Yến (from HBSO Company)

Four dancers are moving to words linked to their grandparents. Despite being an abstract dance, the performance gives a taste of loss and love, love which led to life.

2. Bao lâu rồi (How long ago) (Photography)
Photography | Bảo Vương

A versatile artist whose work was recently exhibited at the French Institute in Hanoi, Bảo Vương’s creations are stunningly precise and poetic, memory being a recurrent theme in his work.

Room 2

1. Wabi (Film)
Short film directed by Ronalds Mezmacs

Ronalds Mezmacs is film director and cinematographer from Latvia currently residing in Saigon. His short film Wabi, part fiction part experimental cinema is like an abstract essay on memory and its connections to isolation and creation.

2. Sous tes doigts (Film)
Short animation film directed by Marie-Christine Courtès

A French director and journalist, Marie-Christine Courtès has themed three of her films on Vietnam. The documentary ‘Le Camps des Oubliés’ focuses on the refugee camp of Sainte-Livrade, whereas her latest offering, French César and Oscar nominated ‘Sous tes Doigts’ is an animation short about a young Eurasian girl who, after the death of her grandmother, relives the history of the women of her family from the French colonial times to the isolation of a transit camp.

3. Feuilles de Printemps (Film)
Short film directed by Stéphane Ly Cuong

A French born Vietnamese film and stage director living in Paris, Stéphane Ly Cuong tells in his short fiction film the very simple story of two people, different in age and culture, who nevertheless share the same roots and learn to connect to each other.

4. Memory of Dance (in the city) – Three Times:
a. Taipei parking place / b. Ecole Colette / c. Gallery Quỳnh Đồng Khởi (Film)
Short dance films directed by Tôn Thất An
Music | Tôn Thất An
Editing Assistant | Nguyễn An
Performers | Tae Li (a), Mai Minh Anh Hoa (b), Hải Duy Lê (c)

A work in progress which started in Taiwan and goes on in Vietnam, this project aims at reconnecting the young generation of dancers with the cities they live in, to bring back forgotten stories and impressions that they themselves may not be aware of.
For the event, one of the three dancers, Mai Minh Anh Hoa will perform a live solo as the same time as the film in which he’s featured.

Room 3

Au delà de l’absence (Beyond the absence) I (Art installation)
Art + sound installation by Sébastien Ly

From the testimonies of former pupils of the Colette school, an object, placed in the room, calls the visitor to come in and listen. It will reveal through sounds, words and past feelings the stories of a time when the school was still ‘alive’.

Room 4

1. Culture/Debout/Limpide (Dance)
Choreography | Sébastien Ly
Performers | Lê Thị Mai Anh, Lisa Robert

Each member of the audience has the unique opportunity to enjoy a personal dance from three poems by Mathieu Dufourg, written for the eponymous work by visual artist Bảo Vương.

2. BO Zoom (Photography)
Hy vọng
Rầu
Photography by Bảo Zoãn (courtesy The Factory)

A young photographer born in Biên Hòa, a town in the Dồng Nai province, north of Saigon, Bảo Zoãn moved to the Saigon in 2009 where he worked as a mechanical engineer for two years. His modest background compelled him to wait until March 2013 before he could save enough to buy his first camera, a wish he had been nurturing for a long time.

Room 5

1. Odyssey / Noah the Boatman / Một đêm lạ (A strange night) (Painting)
Three Paintings by Trần Nguyễn Trung Tín

An illustrator and painter born in 1992 in Saigon, he studied at the Fine Arts Academy where he mastered in silk painting. From his childhood, his world had been populated by strange, mythical and imaginary creatures. These legends helped him carve his artistic path, blending his memories and his creativity.

2. The Walls within
Sound installation by Tôn Thất An

Room 6

1. Limpide (Limpid) I (Dance)
Choreography | Sébastien Ly
Performers | Lê Thị Mai Anh & Lisa Robert

The dance duet is built in the manner of a two-headed solo. A dance setting to the poem ‘Limpide’ by Mathieu Dufourg, written for the eponynous work by Bảo Vương

2. Autel / Limpide / Le garçon et son palais (Painting + Photography)
Visual art works by Bảo Vương

3. Grandmother’s Funeral (Painting)
Painting by Trong Gia Nguễn (courtesy Gallery Quynh)

4. And what streamed before us was not the future (Video Installation)
Video installation by Choncy Shu & Sean Wong Gaffney

A video collage/essay from various footage shot throughout Choncy Shu’s life, which plays with the trope of memory and time in what tenuously shapes us as individual beings. The audio files are collected from Sean Wong Gaffney’s personal recording and found audio.

5. Au delà de l’absence (Beyond the absence) II (Film)
Dance film by Sébastien Ly & Anthony Magnoni
Performer | Sébastien Ly
Music | Allegri’s Miserere

Inspired by the interviews from visitors of the homage exhibition to French director Patrice Chéreau, at the Yvon Lambert Collection Museum in Avignon, France, the film links words and dance for a sensitive and spiritual narration on what remains alive in the depth of our memories.

Room 8

1. mémoires x mouvements (Painting + Drawing)
Mural fresco and installation by Florian Nguyen

It was during ‘Memory and Oblivion’, an exhibition presented in June 2016 at the IDECAF by the Institut Français du Vietnam that Florian Nguyen and Sébastien Ly discovered all the many questions they had in common.
memories x movements is their first collaboration. In the course of the rehearsal sessions with the six dance students, Florian Nguyen collected raw material for future drawings, whether on paper or painted directly on the wall of the school.

2. Oraison (Oration) (Dance + Painting)
Choreography by Sébastien Ly
Paintings & Drawings | Florian Nguyen
Performers | Châu, Dung, Quang, Vũ, Uyên, Yến

Based on movements from funeral dances, Oraison is a prayer for those who left in dialogue with the drawings of Florian Nguyen.

Room 9

1. Culture/Debout/Limpide II (Dance)

2. Au delà de l’absence (Beyond the absence) III (Spoken words + Dance)

Room 10

1. Reversed Scenery (Photography)
Photography | Ho Ho Lin
Music | Tôn Thất An

A photographer and cinematographer from Taiwn, Ho Ho Lin has photographed abandoned movie theatres in Taiwan as mirrors of a bygone era, memory of an uncertain identity and troubled time, and also the reminder of his vocation to work in film.
The musical score by Tôn Thất An which was commissioned for Ho Ho Lin’s exhibition was thought of as a layered sonic remembrance of the images that the screens and walls of those theatres have seen – and kept.

2. Reversed Scenery II (Dance)
Choreography | Nhung Hồng Vô
Music | Tôn Thất An
Performers | Nhung Hồng Vô, Lê Thị Mai Anh & Lisa Robert

This dance solo takes all its substance from Ho Ho Lin’s photography which is exhibited in the room, in dialogue with Tôn Thất An’s music. It is performed every half hour, with two other solos have been been created to offer an alternative at a different time, and at a different moment in the music.

Room 11

Cartes Postales (Photography)
Photography | Sébastien Ly

Room 12 (Gymnasium)

“The poet Hàn Mặc Tử was a regular guest at the family house in Hue, as my maternal grandfather was an art lover and loved to surround himself with artists and musicians. My mother, then a little girl of six, still remembers those afternoons very vividly. Later on, she started translating Hàn Mặc Tử’s poems into French, as a way to keep her father alive in her memory, and also to share his work with the younger generations. This passing on continues, as I became totally infatuated with the poems, as much as Hàn Mặc Tử was himself infatuated with the moon…”

Courtyard

memory x movement
Performers | Tôn Thât An & Sébastien Ly
Nguyễn Thu Trang, Phan Thái Bình, Sùng A Lùng, Trân Hoàng Yến, Lisa Robert, Nhung Hồng Vô, Mai Minh Anh Hoa, Chika Tatsumi, Lê Thị Mai Anh, Châu, Dung, Quang, Vũ, Uyên, Yến & Đạo Thủy Thúy Vân.EDIT