Enduring with Ngo Thanh Phuong

Enduring with Ngo Thanh Phuong

Dat Nguyen

I. Palao (Hoi An)

a hollow cry 

echoes through the dome-shape theatre

people run frantically

they’re running away

running into hiding

running to keep going

a ritual

an image of a god

a celebration of life and death

a journey of rebirth

of finding one self

of finding answer

terra cotta pots

red for energy and strength

webs of fabric

white for purity and sacredness

two colors

flowing, undulating

a shattered pot at the end

an acceptance

a goodbye

a quietness

After seeing Palao (2018–2019), I went back to my hotel and immediately jotted down as much as I could, to keep my memories of the performance through the process of writing. I was surprised to witness such powerful imagery from a Vietnamese show. Palao tells the journey of the Cham people, one of the original inhabitants of Vietnam. Through historical struggle, the Cham have become an ethnic minority in their own land. Palao is an attempt at having Cham people preserve and celebrate their Indigenous culture amidst a society heading towards assimilation. The show weaves together traditional Cham elements with contemporary designs. Even now, six years after coming home, it’s still quite rare for me to see a dance piece tackling sensitive issues like historical conflict and ethnic identity in a Vietnamese landscape saturated with dance-for-entertainment. 

Palao was also my first encounter with choreographer Ngo Thanh Phuong, although it would be another year before I met her in person. You know what they say, the art does reflect the maker. Phuong is stern, strong-willed, disciplined, and straightforward. For Phuong, making art like Palao is not only a way to reflect but also a way to honor and celebrate traditions, all the while posing questions, sometimes provocatively, for the culture she is a part of. She understands that it takes courage to ask these questions, and tenacity to endure the answers.

II. Absurd Requests–Chum (Nha Trang)

Spring 2025. Investors in the beachside resort town of Nha Trang told Phuong they wanted to contribute to the local arts and culture by supporting a new show that reflects Vietnamese and local identity. Chum centers around the harmony of co-existing. It’s a work that not only showcases cultures but also employs people directly from four different ethnic minorities in Vietnam: Cham, Ê-dê, J’rai, and Kinh. For the minorities Chăm, Ê-dê, and J’rai, the word chum means kiss, reflecting the creative spirit that Phuong and the cast aims toward, which is the hope for reconciliation and amity between these groups.

After seeing the first draft of her new work titled Chum, they told her they want more EDM and girls in bikinis. This absurd request isn’t without its sensibility. Although culture holds significant value for nationalist propaganda, it can also be thought of as an exotic commodity sold to foreign tourists. According to this logic, ‘cultural dance’ can be mixed with techno music, and girls in bikinis moving around culture-signifying effigies can do wonders for our local art scene. 

It is frustrating, but Phuong is willing to put up with it and to try to understand what lies underneath these absurd requests. The suggestion of EDM stems from investors’ desire for the show to feature some high-energy moments. They want audiences to get excited, to experience a perceptible change in space-time through a thumping bass rhythm. Once Phuong identifies this desire, she finds a way to get on the same page by restructuring the music. Eventually, she arrives at a soundscape that uses traditional drums and percussion to achieve the energy shift without compromising the show's narrative coherence and cultural value. Chum is set to premiere in the second half of 2025.

This time Phuong managed to find common ground with her investors, but she wonders how much more she should tolerate because these kinds of requests persist, and the fight to preserve authentic artistry gets old. At the end of the day, artists shouldn’t be the only ones to carry the heavy burden of educating the society they live in, nor pandering to the investors’ belief that audiences can’t be receptive to new languages and experimental aesthetics.

III. X-Project

Hoang Anh (a male-identifying dancer) approaches Nguyen Nguyen (a female-identifying dancer) with disjointed movement, mirroring a robotic animal machine. He sniffs her, bites on her t-shirt, and pulls her up from the ground like a predator, a wild cat, carrying dead prey by its skin. Moments later, he maneuvers her so that she hangs on his shoulder and uses her leg as a machine gun, firing at other dancers. The duet ends with Anh grabbing Nguyen by her neck and spinning her around the stage violently while Nguyen tightly grips his arms.

Another duet: Nguyen Nguyen and Thuong Le stand side by side, touching their bodies while looking past the audience as if they were checking themselves out in a mirror, scanning for imperfections. They touch their own breasts and buttocks, then transition into touching and grabbing each other’s, all the while gazing intensely into the distance. Still holding on to each other’s buttocks, they perform small bouncy jumps. They start slowly and then get quicker and more intense, ending with both dancers looking up and releasing their breath, which gives off a bizarre sexual energy. Coupled with an insistent, emotionless expression, these aggressive little gestures take place in an eerie silence. They take out lipstick and smear it over their lips, releasing a coercive smile. Finally, they raise their arms and flex like bodybuilders while marching in place in a militaristic manner.

In the Q&A after the show, an audience member noted that only when Nguyen Nguyen and Thuong Le smeared lipsticks on were they reminded that the dancers were women. Before, they only thought of them as bodies in motion. Another audience member disagrees, seeing the duet between Hoang Anh and Nguyen Nguyen as obviously about the male-female dichotomy, power dynamics, and women’s oppression. For one observer, being a woman is not a concern until one is required to perform femininity (through the lipstick), while for the other, being a woman is seen as a voice that is whole and throughout, always existing and materializing. 

X-Project considers the chromosome X as the determinant of sex and sex as defining gender. Phuong asks what the body is actually constructed of, what of us is body and not body. As a choreographer, Phuong doesn’t shy away from strong images like those from X-Project. Letting images carry the weight of the human psyche–be it uplifting or revealing a dark nature–begs for conversation, instigation, and rebuttal. Phuong wants to make sure that every movement and moment matters. She understands the importance of presence and of being, of provocation and seduction. Why go on stage at all if you have nothing important to say or do? 

IV. Dissident Origins

“Why so shallow?” was the first question Phuong asked regarding almost everything she saw in dance after coming back from her 4-year study at the Folkwang University of the Arts. I know a lot of folks with an anti-colonial perspective will chime in and say, “Well, you can’t just apply a Western or German perspective to dance in Vietnam and call it shallow. You have to let the Vietnam dance scene have its own identity and take its own course.” However, Vietnamese dance culture didn’t have the chance to develop on its own because of our imperial and colonial history, as well as the wars we fought against the Chinese, the Japanese, the French, and the US. Even now, we are still constantly being bombarded with cheap, fast, mass-produced capitalist ‘culture ‘from the West, just as the absurd requests above demonstrated. “Why so shallow?” is only a fair question to ask of dance in Vietnam as we regard our emerging global performing arts identity.

Because Phuong was so frustrated with the state of dance in Vietnam, she sought an alternative path despite not knowing what it meant to do so at the time. She questioned whether there was any other way other than what is normally accepted. She had no idea whether/how one could be an independent artist, but that she didn’t want to maintain a status quo nor go corporate. There were no guidelines for a dissident choreographic voice like hers. 

From project to project, she actively sought to work with different types of people—circus artists, music/sound producers, culture producers, HipHop dancers, non-dancers. Because these communities are unrestricted by the didactic government artistry and education, working with them helps her find new voices and opportunities. Phuong participated in an exchange program in the US at the American Dance Festival, supported by an Asian Cultural Council grant. She was one of the key choreographers for Arabesque, the first private, neo-classical, and contemporary dance company in Saigon. Arabesque was also where she developed the OpenStage Project, an initiative that fosters experimentations and exchanges between artists from various disciplines, between students and masters. Her works earned her numerous awards and grants around Asia, and her perspective widened along with her connections. In the past few years that I got to know Phuong, she also started experimenting with performance art, screendance, and durational performance. Little by little, projects grew in significance for her and her communities, with whom she was both building and finding a home.

V. Resilient Strategy

Phuong is now living in Nha Trang. At first, she relocated there for a commission that eventually resulted in Roi Mo, a show that employed an impressive company of artists—dancers, musicians, puppeteers—in service of bringing a work celebrating Vietnam’s own unique form of water puppetry together with contemporary technologies. Reimagining mythological tales while interweaving hand puppetry with animation and video live feed increases the reach of Vietnamese culture, elevates Vietnam’s status in the imagination of the world, and keeps local artists working. After a few years of being in Nha Trang, she grew fond of it and started calling it her new home. She has been trying to grow the local art community, supporting and pushing friends and colleagues around her to reach further and explore their own potential. She initiated and mentored two projects for friends from the Cham ethnic heritage, carrying on the legacy of Palao. She co-founded MORUA, based in Saigon and Hoi An, creating a space and residencies for emerging dance artists to develop and challenge themselves artistically.

Although she invests a lot in the community, she’s also aware of the privileged and peculiar position she’s in. She understands that not everyone can live a life like hers. She calls both herself and me “magicians” of the dance field. A magician of their field, according to her, is someone so versed in their skills that they aren’t afraid to try and initiate new things. They are free from the worry of daily life regarding basic needs because everywhere they go, they can make things happen for themselves to get by. For other people, it’s not the same story. Sometimes, some of us have to leave the limelight to work out how to eat. That’s precisely what happened with some of these projects she helped mentor, where the artists couldn’t practically continue. I understand these sentiments deeply. Efforts from a few individuals are nice, but in the long run, we cannot sustain our practice without an infrastructure and a support system from the government in place, which is our current situation in Vietnam. Art projects here are often funded by foreign institutions with grants and visions ever-shifting to fit their current agenda. 

Despite these struggles, Phuong remains resilient and hopeful because, for her, making art is less a question of privilege than one of humanity. Considering the time and effort that was put in, she’s grateful for the journey and for the impact both big and small. She’s also respectful of friends who can no longer walk the same path because she understands things weren’t meant to be. In Vietnamese, we call this duyên, something written in fate, a predestined affinity. If you have duyên with something or someone, things will happen for you, or you will eventually cross paths with them. I have a lot of duyên to know and support not only a powerful choreographic voice but also a resilient human like Phuong.

Saigon, July 2025