My participation in the summer performance festival of NIPPAF was very much by chance. Seiji’s question: “Why don’t you do performance?” triggered everything.
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Ah yes, why? Up until then, I remained an outsider, observing and experiencing performance with the intuition of a spectator. All of the performances that I have seen in Vietnam were unprompted and mostly felt like an arrangement within the scope of advanced censorship. I did, sometimes, have the urge to carry out ideas that would be best done by performance. However, I only thought of playing solo in front of the movie camera; then developed and presented it in the form of a video art, a much easier option for the conditions I was facing in Vietnam.
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Seiji’s suggestion was therefore an opportunity for me to be on an easy path to performance. I came to the festival with much anticipation of new things and cumbersome preparations (a completely inappropriate characteristic for a program that was wide-ranging and constantly on the move like this one). The first time expressing myself in a relatively new form of art, and in a very different artistic environment compared to Vietnam, required me to change most of what I already had planned in my mind.
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Even though my initially determined mentality was to experiment and learn rather than to perform as a truly professional artist, there were unexpected changes to my plan when the program started. Instead of only participating in 4 performances as assigned by the organization board, I ended up getting involved in all the free performances on the streets and at the site of exclusive seminar for artists (for which, several minutes ago, in the Nagano forest, I refused to sign-up due to lacking ideas for my performance).
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My thematic idea for this festival was the human’s hidden angle of love in this era (and in particular, the environment in which I was living). I contemplated intensely about the choice of expression method for the limited conditions of the studio, which – prior to real life encounter – appeared boundless to me. There were unpredictable choices and changes, even sudden new ideas, which were all consequences of first-time stress and the abashed race against prescribed time. However, the final result was most important: I overcame the challenges and succeeded in manifesting my emotions throughout the program.
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The inspiration came from the urge to express my feelings about the love-thirst souls of the people around me who were trying to suppress themselves. I had seen into the self-imprisoned pain within the lonely cover of those running away from love and compassion. The conflict between emotion and reason are like layers of waves accumulating and breaking onto each other, sweeping people away from each other. Sensitive souls hide behind the safe masks of indifference, which divide human by transparent doors of prejudice (which does not seem to exist anymore in our ever changing societies). What was originally their basic instinct – desire for love – then became the hidden angle in each human. I therefore wanted to raise a voice for the solitary lives, the beautiful souls who had to always run away from themselves. Those thoughts could not be communicated in any form better than performance. The biggest encouragement to me includes Kana’s tears on the first performance night; the anonymous comment on the Nagano performance that “The girl who covered her face with hot wax and vigorously slapped herself made an especially powerful impression on me. The use of body language, not words, for expression had a major influence on the spectators’ imagination”; and the profound comments from the two spectators who stayed for dinner after the last performance in Kumagaya.
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Perhaps I have not managed to have all the urges within me expressed through the first performance. However, the 2006 summer festival had helped me with a confident start in this form of art.
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I have to say I was genuinely surprised about the enthusiastic contribution of the Japanese students, an important factor in the great success of NIPPAF summer performance festival. Also, through the trip, I had the fundamental realization that even in a country like Japan – where the development of performance was particularly strong – it had still not yet accepted and supported by the general public. NIPPAF and the young Japanese people, nevertheless, had the passion to pursue, proceed and develop a form of art that had never received much affection in life.
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My deepest word of thanks to NIPPAF and the young friends who were, and performed alongside, with me during the 2006 summer festival. My gratitude to Mr. Seiji’s family who reserved esteem and kind treatment for me. I hope, within my scope of effort, to one day reunite with you all in Vietnam for a large-scale and accepted performance. Always following your footsteps and wishing to share.
Himiko.Nguyen
( Thanks Nam Phuong for translating into English )
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