About this Event
Free admission, booking recommended.
Entry is flexible throughout the day, and you’re welcome to spend as much time as you like.
Resurrection #3: death divination is a durational performance featuring a dancer and a musician. Conceived as a sacrificial exercise, the performance will offer the body as a vessel through which neglected spirits, energies and histories – both those in the space and those brought by the audience – might find temporary forms. Movements and songs will be repeated relentlessly, building up through the process until repetition begins to loosen the performers’ consciousness. Improvisation becomes less an act of individual expression than a ritual of possession: a practice of making oneself available to forces that cannot be fully named or anticipated.
The performance grows out of Anh Vo’s ongoing research into ca trù, a northern Vietnamese chamber music tradition they have studied through intensive apprenticeship with master practitioners Vũ Thuỳ Linh and Phạm Đình Hoằng in Hanoi, alongside ethnomusicologist Barley Norton, a longtime researcher of the form. Norton will continue this process with Vo in death divination, providing live musical accompaniment for the performance. In ca trù, tightly disciplined musical structures create conditions for extraordinary rhythmic elasticity and responsiveness between performers. Here at YDP, Vo and Norton will extend this tension between form and formlessness into an improvised encounter, where a limited vocabulary of movements and songs will be repeated to exhaustion, becoming a container through which something unforeseen might pass.
About the Artists
Anh Vo
Anh Vo (b. 1995, Hanoi) is a Brooklyn- and Hanoi-based Vietnamese choreographer and writer working in the expanded field of performance. Their practice mobilises the naked body in its variations to make explicit the entanglement of power and apparitional forces that cut across flesh. Their work emerges from the unlikely lineage convergences between Downtown New York experimental performance, Hanoi performance art and Vietnamese folk ritual practices. Vo is indebted to Miguel Gutierrez’s unapologetic queerness and amorphous excess, Moriah Evans’s speculative commitment to the depth of interiority, Julie Tolentino’s durational poetics of intimacy, Juliana May’s improvisational wizardry, Tehching Hsieh’s existential sense of time, and Ngoc Dai’s guttural sonic landscape of post-war Vietnam. Their formal training is in performance studies, studying with esteemed theorists and practitioners at Brown University (BA) and New York University (MA). Vo is currently an adjunct instructor at Cooper Union.
Barley Norton
Barley Norton is an ethnomusicologist, musician and filmmaker. He specialises in Vietnamese music and has conducted fieldwork in Vietnam for many years. His publications include: the book Songs for the Spirits: Music and Mediums in Modern Vietnam, which explores the role of music in spirit possession rituals; and the ethnographic film, Hanoi Eclipse, about the pioneering experimental music group Đại Lâm Linh. Over the last year, Barley has collaborated with Anh Vo on artistic projects that reimagine ca trù, a style of traditional music that he learnt to perform during his first trips to Vietnam in the 1990s. He is Professor of Music at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Event venue & nearby stays
YDP, 19 Bedford Square, London, United Kingdom
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