PROJECT:  THE LEAVERS

 

THE LEAVERS is a theatrical work that examines the UNIVERSAL refugee experience through the prism of the Vietnamese diaspora and its unlikely splinters –from "TedToks" to Mr. Olympia and the Trail of Tears.

 

10 years ago, artist and producer David Raymond and I embarked on a film project to document the stories around the weeks when my family left Vietnam as fleeing war refugees in 1975. With a working title of DONG, we traveled across the United States and interviewed the 10 remaining members of my family that left together on the last day of the American-Vietnam War. As we never spoke of it to each other in great detail during our lifetimes, the film focused on the ways history and narrative intersect, and how they are disrupted by the trauma, forgetful nature and futileness of memories.

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For a number of reasons, the footage we obtained felt incomplete and incapable of telling the story effectively as we had hoped. Too many details and secrets remained unlocked. With a shared interest in surrealism, we nonetheless made a trailer using surrogates for my family, expanding on the universality of the immigrant experience, unbound by blood or basic ethnic resemblance. They spoke authentic words from the interviews, but the visual rupture found better alignment with the conceptual turn our project was taking. Even the song in our original trailer is not quite what it seems – a Vietnamese rock and roll tune produced in the 60’s, but here sang by a Detroit indie band (Saturday Looks Good to Me) who spoke zero Vietnamese.

 

In 2021, a devastating flood in New York destroyed the majority of my stored family archives and artworks. This swift “disappearing act” resembled my family’s unchosen decision to leave Vietnam at the end of the war. They took almost nothing and left behind everything. Just like theirs, my small chapter in history was smeared away in the blink of an eye, beyond one’s control.

 

But paradoxically, in order to recover history, THE LEAVERS necessarily approaches it from the vantage point of "erasure". 

 

In 2018, while living in Ho Chi Minh City, my partner Celine Alexandre, a Belgian art historian and former stage actress, produced a short theater piece called Exile, based on the diasporic novel Ru by Kim Thuy. Overlapping in many ways with my own experiences, Thuy's is a Canadian-Vietnamese immigrant’s account of the same postwar period, one of the all-too-numerous tales of forced adaptation and assimilation. Exile's poetic two-person performance incorporated soliloquies from Ru and dance choreographed by Linh Rateau. I produced a number of animations that were used as projections in the performance. Because of its sensitive subject matter, according to the Vietnamese government, Exile was banned in Vietnam and only performed privately at the French school and also in Hong Kong at an Amnesty International Festival (2018). Its importance and relevance were evident.

 

From a distance, Exile was a slice of the story that I also longed to tell. Through discussions with both David and stage director Brian Rhinehart, I decided to resurrect the DONG project in an alternative vein and eventually bring it to conclusion on stage, in collaboration with both these friends.