Performances
selected works
ám ảnh | Haunt
ám ảnh translated from Vietnamese means to haunt. ám means to press against and ảnh means an image, evoking literally an imprinting of memory on and through the mind, body, and spirit. ám ảnh is the remnant of a multi-media performance installation that unravels the aftermath of communist revolution and war in Vietnam. Wooden panels fill vacant spaces with hauntings of lingering memories and inherited trauma. Burn marks on fabric sear the names of re-educations camps in Vietnam. White fabric lay to rest the souls of the deceased and lives left behind. Water, or nước, symbolizes the country/nation/homeland in Vietnamese, conjuring flux between postwar (be)longing and dispossesion.
Salt | Water
Meditating on the precarity of life and death over the ocean, trinity weaves ritual and poetry as practices of conjuring memory. Through collection, extraction, filtering, and dispersion of blood, sweat, and tears over salt and water, I explore the physical excrements of inherited memory as a child of Vietnamese boat refugees. My body becomes a site where the audience bears witness to divergent performances of oversaturation and extraction and the space in between as a place of memory's haunting.
How does the body manifest memory?
How does memory's haunting linger in the body/how is it excreted?
How does the violence of war and dispossession [re]membered?
Drag On
Drag On performed by Nước Ma’am a.k.a. Patricia Nguyen Nước Ma’am presents... a sensorial meditation on cross*cultural expressions of femininity, labor, abjection, and the body as commodity and spectacle through a 10-hour durational piece entitled Drag On. In this two-part performance, Nước Ma’am begins her performance, dressed in hyper-femme drag and a couture raincoat, circling Trúc Bạch Lake with a shopping cart full of bags of soil and bottles of nước mắm to juxtapose notions of feminized labor and memory in/of Vietnam by playing with the body in pleasure and pain, at home and homeless- in the liminal space between water/nước/country/home/nation.
Trúc Bạch Lake is where, the current U.S. Senator, John McCain’s plane was shot down in 1967, after he dropped several bombs on Yen Phu thermal power plant in Hanoi.
40.
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caught
Caught is a performance meditation on the hauntings of forced migration by boat after the Vietnam/American War in 1975, entrapment of refugee escape, and humanitarian aid. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), over three million were dispossessed as refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia and estimates of over 400,000 people were murdered or disappeared at sea (UNHCR 2000, 79). In many cases, due to unforeseen and uncontrollable conditions refugees experienced precarity at sea including tidal waves, typhoons and/or piracy resulting in forced drowning, murder, and rape. Caught between the poles of U.S. liberal war and Vietnamese communist revolution, Vietnamese boat refugees became the bodies of the dispossessed at sea - the leftovers from war.
The performance honors the lives of those who did not make it to shore or who could never escape.
the Good Subject.
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Memory Vs. Memory
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a lifetime collaborative project with Ly Hoang Ly
ABundance.
Abundance is the name of this improvised performance piece. During a time of extreme violence in Chicago, the U.S., and the world at large in the form of war, police brutality, and violence against black bodies and racialized communities of color, this performance seeks to embody ritual practices that call upon abundance to strengthen our collective and individual spirits, psyches, and bodies. Abundance is a performance installation created and developed by Patricia Nguyen drawing on the theatrical jazz aesthetic.