The Imagined Audience and the Reality of Cross-Cultural Exchange: Anh Vo in conversation with Kim-Sanh Châu

Anh Vo: There is a memory I want to share with you. The only time I've ever cried after a performance of mine was in Montreal. It was the very last performance I did at Montréal, arts interculturels (MAI). I headed to the dressing room and just started bawling uncontrollably.

There were many reasons for the crying, but a lot of it had to do with you. I felt so connected to you and the Vietnamese-Canadian presence that you helped bring to support my work. This was back in 2022, when I hadn’t yet found a sense of diasporic belonging in New York City. I was also not as oriented within the performance scene in Vietnam myself, so I didn't feel held by that either. Somehow, in Montreal, that feeling of belonging snuck up on me and I really attributed that to you.

Kim-Sanh Châu: Thank you, Anh. I didn't know about that.

AV: I don't think I ever told you.

KSC: I'm very touched. At the time, I was surprised when you told me that there were not many Vietnamese people coming to see you perform. I imagine it has changed for you now, which is great. There are also a lot more Asian diasporic artists on stage, so there are more connections that have been built over the recent years. I’m seeing more and more people, like me, receive support from their cultural communities, which was not the case ten years ago. How do you feel about the transition, especially now that you have performed in Vietnam? You presented work I was surprised and impressed you managed to show in spite of the censorship. I don't know how you did that.

AV: I lost so much sleep last year trying to perform my “real” work in Vietnam, which always involves some variations of nudity. I could fly under the radar of the cultural authorities before because I would show informal, in-progress works. But in 2024, my work was included in this large contemporary art festival, Nổ Cái Bùm, so we had to go through the proper channels and ask for a permit to perform. The organizers of that festival, Red and chị Bee, dealt with the police on my behalf and shielded me from them as much as possible. I don't even know what actually went down. I think the organizers were very smart in seeking permission for the whole festival and not individual events, and it got to the point where my performances had to be excluded from all official communications. When we risked it and performed anyway, the police just stood on the side watching, probably assuming that I had the permit. 

The interesting thing about performing in Vietnam is that no one there cares about the parts of Vietnamese culture that my work draws from. They do not get fixated on identities like people do in the United States. So, I get to just care about form and content, and follow my curiosity around real basic questions. Why does this utterance or this gesture accrue that meaning? What is the gap between my intention and people's experience of the work? Whereas, whenever I’m in the US, I feel compelled to make empty blanket assertions about what I do, like, "my work investigates identity and folk rituals and abstraction."

I imagine you work in quite similar ways. I am thinking of your piece BLEU NEON. In all the different iterations that I experienced, you would be squatting the whole time, for forty-five minutes or so, while performing this abstract Vietnamese rap. It was abstract not because you willfully composed the abstraction, but because it expressed your real relationship to the Vietnamese language. You were still learning it as you were rapping. It was so honest, and so elusive. That really spoke to me and helped me articulate my relationship to place, geography and diaspora. 

KSC: I have been working with my Vietnamese background since about 2015. Going back and forth to Vietnam is a big component of my artistic practice. I started with showing things from the eyes of someone who has never been to Vietnam and who I affectionately call a tourist. Then, when I had more political content in the work regarding Vietnamese-ness and Asian-ness, I found that I had to use my own voice. The work had to become personal, which sometimes bothers me. People make the shortcut of thinking that it's autobiographical when it's not really a show about me. I can't talk for an entire population, especially not those living in Vietnam. So, I usually take the stand of being a diasporic person, one who was born and raised in France, now lives in Canada, and who goes back and forth to Vietnam a lot.

My intention is not necessarily to talk about myself, but I find there is a lot of expectation for me to situate myself in the work from both the Western audiences and the audiences I’ve met on the Vietnamese side. I'm personally more interested in understanding the expectations from the Vietnamese side than pleasing the Western side, though I depend on Canada for funding, as most of my work takes place there. 

AV: What is the Vietnamese expectation of your work?

KSC: For Việt Kiều , the overseas Vietnamese, specifically, I see a hope that I’m not just reproducing traditional Vietnamese images. That’s why, with BLEU NEON, I chose Vietnamese rap because it was contemporary. It was what was going on at the moment for young people. If you work with a medium that is current, I find it a little riskier. I imagine that the Vietnamese art community expects us to work with their world as it is now, and not just reproduce what our parents have transmitted to us. Here in Canada, the refugees from Southeast Asia all arrived at the same period of time, and you can definitely feel that this is when memory stopped. I’ve inherited a cultural memory stuck in the 1980s. 

I feel very inspired by Asian people in Asia and outside of Asia who work with their cultural background. But mostly, I am inspired by people who work with their artistic craft, their weirdness, and the beauty of their radical ideas. The core of the work doesn't have to be about their roots or their connection to migration, even when it includes that as a background.

AV: What I'm hearing is that in diasporic performances, there are these Vietnamese signifiers like áo dài or the sound of the motorbikes or images of food that get mobilized in ways that feel empty.  There is a difference between using the culture versus just making the work and letting the culture seep in.

KSC: Or at least doing something about the culture. Challenging it, not just using it as an object, but also giving it content.

AV: (laughs) I'm so guilty of exploiting my culture. For the past two, three years, I've been this champion of Vietnamese possession rituals. 

KSC: I don't think so. Also, that's not what I'm saying. You don’t just use and reproduce. It's part of your background, it's part of your instruments, and you do something with it, and then it gives it a meaning. I have this example of you making phở during your performance at the MAI. It’s not just that Anh is making phở during their performance. By standing atop of a boiling pot of phở broth, Anh is challenging the idea of intimacy, sweat, and risk. Are you going to eat my phở?

AV: I do get weary of how that kind of inquiry gets so supported. “They” want it. I get funding for it. Institutions like to see that kind of work, and then I get so protective. In a lot of recent talk-backs I’ve done, there has been this demand to explain what possession rituals are and what else I'm drawing from. And I feel the need to respond, to speak in this abstract way, and to lean into my intellectual maneuvers to not have to confess my culture. I'm also thinking of you pulling away from this confession of Vietnamese-ness and working with a mixed cast in your current project.

KSC: I've been working on a new show where we squat a lot. It comes from BLEU NEON. I find it very hard to actually use less Vietnamese references. Maybe I'm so used to it and don't know anything else. Maybe I'm stuck. One thing I can tell you is that since I'm working with less Asian references, I have much more trouble getting the funding. 

AV: It is so complicated when you shuttle back and forth to Vietnam but have to rely on money from the West. My whole model is basically funneling money from the US, mostly private philanthropy, however much I can, to support my work in Vietnam, which also ripples out to other artists in Vietnam. But then at the end of the day, I need to report to the funders in the US somehow and keep them interested.

KSC: It's hard to always be in the middle. Whenever I’m in the middle, I try not to compromise on integrity, but it is hard. These are two worlds that are completely different. 

I wanted to add one thing about the new work. Even though I'm going to premiere it here in Canada, my desire has been to develop and present it in Asia. I don't do the show just for a white Canadian audience. I imagine myself being in Vietnam and explaining what we're doing, how it’s not just about me being originally from Vietnam and the diasporic story that is common for so many people. I imagine explaining why we squat this way, and how we touch on intimacy and weirdness. All the choices that I make in my process, I make them because I imagine that I'm going to present the work there, and I'm going to talk to the Vietnamese art community.

AV: That imagined audience is so real! It's also fantastical, because you’re just making it up in your head, but it has real consequences in the work. That's why it's so important for me to go back and forth to Vietnam, even though it’s becoming more physically impossible. My health can barely tolerate that 30-hour trip. But it also reminds me of the question you asked me about how performing in Vietnam changed my work, because it changed my imagined audience in ways that I cannot fully articulate yet. The next project that I'm doing is rooted in Ca Trù, a northern Vietnamese chamber music tradition with a tumultuous history. I’m working with two folk musicians in Hanoi and I’ll be bringing them to New York City this spring. But it’s so important to me that the project's first draft be shown in Hanoi in January. 

Having the imagined Vietnamese audience in mind changed my relationship to provocation, for example. I no longer so much feel a desire to fuck with things, to be so polemical.

KSC: How do you feel about living in the United States when you're in Vietnam? 

AV: For various reasons, I can only make the work that I want if I'm not in Vietnam. That has been a really brutal and painful realization. I've always known it unconsciously. That's why I escaped from a young age. Within the Vietnamese context, my work is too sexual, too political, and also too abstract. The cultural police don't like things that they don’t understand, because then they feel paranoid that you are speaking behind their back. I tick all the boxes of what you shouldn’t do in Vietnam. 

I went through this phase where I told myself that I don't need Vietnam. And then, after performing in Montreal and being supported by people like you, it hit me that I actually do have this deep desire to show my work to “my people.” Still, the fear of persecution is so real. 

KSC: Here in Montreal, the development of artistic collectives or projects that center around Asian-ness has really risen. Especially this year, there were a lot of activities going on because of the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. Ten years ago, there was no Vietnamese art community in Montreal. Five years ago, we were a small community of people who didn't behave like a community. We were not structured, but I knew all the Vietnamese people in dance, cinema, theater, etc. Now, there is a subculture within the culture. We have different organizations. Some of them you relate to, some of them less so. 

Diasporic Southeast Asians, especially Vietnamese people, are very present in Montreal. It's hard even for me to follow what's going on. I see the beauty of support, solidarity, and community—but I also see friction. Now, when I perform here in Montreal for “my people,” as. In diasporic kids from Southeast Asia, there’s actually not one type of people. There are subgroups with different stakes and feelings and approaches to what our artistic and social inputs are as Southeast Asians in Montreal.

AV: I cannot relate. We don’t have that in New York City. Even as we’re working on this publication right now, there's not much happening around the 50th anniversary of the war in the performance world. There's a lot of stuff in other fields—there’s a big Vietnamese American literary scene — but for performance, it’s kind of non-existent.

KSC: Well, that’s one more reason for you to come visit Montreal then. 

AV: There are definitely no subgroups within groups — we barely have a group. It's a lot of solitude, though I find some relief in not having to navigate identity politics and being able to just focus on making my work and following my curiosity. This conversation makes me think about the segregation in Vietnam between the local Vietnamese, the Việt Kiều  and the expats. None of them really speaks to one another.

KSC: For sure. Language barrier is one big factor for me. As much as I want to connect with the local Vietnamese in Vietnam, it's really hard. 

AV: Do you have a concrete plan for bringing your new show to Vietnam at the moment?

KSC: I have no concrete plan, but I went to Vietnam in April. Basically, I want to do a version in Canada in March with a Canadian cast, and then I want to go to Asia and work with a Vietnamese cast. Of course, there’s the logistics: it’s less people to fly over, less expensive, better for the environment, etc. But also, I understood very early on that working in Vietnam was an essential part of my work. When I go to Vietnam, it really challenges everything I'm doing here in Canada. It makes me give up the things I do through mimetism.

In my creative process, there are things that I do just because that's what I see. I don't question it that much. But when I go to Vietnam, the performers constantly question why I ask them to do this or that. I have to have a good reason. It can't just be like, "oh, because it's cool." 

I always feel very inspired by the artists and the works I see in Vietnam. I know Vietnamese artists don't have the same means to produce. But the piece we saw of Rab, for example, where she is building a shelter…

AV: Yes! With so many red threads…

KSC: That stayed with me—the amount of time to do that, how meticulous it was, the focus. I am inspired by the texture and quality of the work, which I find to be more Vietnamese than using a cultural reference. Even though it's not readable to an audience that doesn't know anything about Asia.

AV: Yeah. That piece, mơ nằm trời đan lưới, stays with me too. It destabilized my own assumption of what performance is. It was so nonchalant. There was no real start, no real ending.

KSC: Rab was, at the same time, very relaxed, very focused, very dedicated to what they were doing. I really enjoyed it.

AV: I'm learning a lot from you, seeing how you develop your work in such a modular way. When I brought my work to Vietnam last year, I worked with two local performers for a month before coming together with my US-based cast whom I flew in later. This winter, for this next project, I'm also working with a local performer. But I feel so vulnerable working with Vietnamese people. It's really hard for me.

KSC: Because I'm a Việt Kiều and I don't speak the language, when Vietnamese people give me feedback, they're a bit shy. Whereas maybe with you, you understand everything. 

On the other hand, when I work with dancers, I can ask, “Is it a good idea to use this tool?” and they respond more freely, yes or no. If they say “no,” I reply, “Okay, great; let’s move on.” It's a very efficient way to have a direct conversation about the core of the work without going through superficial politeness.

AV: People there are not very polite. They don't try to take care of your feelings. They just give it to you straight, and it's so intense. I think it's important to bring that intensity in to not fetishize the difference in contexts. 

Whenever I feel like someone is going to give me feedback, I deflect. I'm not ready, ever. Growing up in Hanoi, which is a very shame-based and judgmental environment, I find most feedback to be quite triggering. For example, I did this improvisational duet with my friend Ethan Philbrick in a bamboo forest in Hoi An in 2024. Right after I finished the performance, this person, maybe ten years younger than me, came up to me and said, "That was so great, but I don't understand why you would end it that way. It was too neat." I was shocked, completely flabbergasted. I had just barely finished my performance and was still naked, both physically and emotionally. 

KSC: That reminds me… A long time ago, when I performed in a theater in Vietnam, a Vietnamese dance teacher criticized Việt Kiều artists for bringing Western art back into Vietnam in a colonial way. At the time, I couldn’t fully understand the comment. I didn’t speak Vietnamese well, and more than ten years ago there wasn’t as much general awareness around postcolonial practices. But I think about that moment often, because I do sometimes feel inherently stuck. Contemporary dance is, in many ways, a Western form. We can try to decolonize our practices as much as possible, but we still carry certain codes around how we think, how we rehearse, and how we structure a process. I feel both resistance and curiosity from Vietnamese artists toward that. There’s a kind of love-hate relationship.

That’s why I feel uncomfortable being asked to teach simply because I bring in ideas from the West. I want to tell them that my process isn’t better than theirs. It’s just different. 

AV: I agree that in Vietnam, there's a real desire and fetish for what comes from the West, and not without resistance. It's so ambivalent. 

What you’re speaking to is this friction between contemporary dance being brought from the outside by Việt Kiều and the stuff that grows locally. But it’s not just friction; there are also sparks of desire and collaboration. It’s really difficult to hold all of it together. 

So much of contemporary avant-garde art in Vietnam grows out of Đổi Mới, this moment when the country is opening up to the world in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Sparks of Western ideas began coming in, but they entered in a bastardized way, so people made their own meanings out of these ideas and did stuff that are so Vietnamese. That's basically one origin story of Vietnamese performance art: Amanda Heng's workshop at the Vietnam University of Fine Arts in Hanoi. My hope is that people can take a step back and examine why they feel certain ways when things come in from the West — why certain things spark desire, and why, in other contexts, they instead spark resistance.