Brooklyn / Hanoi 

Dance

Presented in English, with French subtitles

November 24, 2022: 7.30 pm

November 25, 2022: 7.30 pm

November 26, 2022: 7.30 pm

Anh Vo’s evening-length solo, BABYLIFT, attempts to conjure the ghosts of the Vietnam War (a.k.a. the Resistance War Against Imperialist America). Named after a 1975 mass evacuation of children from South Vietnam to Western countries—which resulted in a plane crash that killed 78 of those children— BABYLIFT is first a memorial to the unmourned and unremembered. Striving to queer linear masculinist history, Vo weaves together cultural memories of the US Civil Rights Movement, freedom fantasies of the 1960s, contemporary pop culture, and current leftist activism. Set to a disorienting soundscape, BABYLIFT juxtaposes repetitive ritualistic movements with sexually provocative gestures, speculating on the erotic of haunting that can be both terrifying and pleasurable.

Anh Vo is a Vietnamese dancer, writer, teacher, and activist. They create dances and produce texts about pornography and queer relations, about being and form, about identity and abstraction, about history and its colonial reality.

Talkback with the artist following the November 25th performance — Hosted by Kim-Sanh Châu.

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All ticket holders (November 24th, 25th, and 26th) are invited to Weak Body, a ceremony that will take place on November 24th from 2:00 pm to 6:00 pm. In this four-hour ceremony, Anh Vo will occupy the liminal space between the physical realm and the spectral realm. The public is invited to witness the last hour of this ceremony, from 5:00 pm to 6:00 pm.

Weak Body is loosely inspired by the Vietnamese phrase “yếu bóng vía” (clunkily translated as “weak aura”), which refers to people who are sensitive to spectral presence and susceptible to haunting. Insisting on modes of embodiment that can weaken the connection to physical reality and heighten the sensitivity to other entangled worlds, Weak Body juxtaposes Anh Vo’s ongoing practice of dancing with ghosts and the northern Vietnamese folk practice of feasting around death. The ritual evokes the wandering ghosts emerging in the wake of the Vietnam War, calling on the public to tend to the dead and bear the weight of what it means to live on.

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