I first learned of Moi Tran’s work in 2019, through her performance titled The Bolero Effect, which she had staged in an old French house in Hanoi and performed by a local community ensemble of untrained performers. The play incorporated Vietnamese ‘Bolero’ music, a style of music that had been popularised in Vietnam in the 1950s, and used it to examine the complex transnational identity of the Vietnamese diasporas and homeland.
As a Vietnamese artist born and raised in Hanoi, I was impressed by how Moi Tran, a Vietnamese person who had spent their formative years on the other side of the world, was able to capture Vietnamese history and its political discontents by combining performance and voice. Born in Vietnam and descended from Chinese heritage, Moi Tran’s family were exiled from Vietnam in the late 1970s, on a fishing boat via Hong Kong to the UK. The years of violent war between the Vietnamese Communists and the Americans had left the country ravaged. Vietnam, scarred by bombs, landmines, and political unrest, saw a mass exodus of Vietnamese citizens. The seas were suddenly filled with refugees, the so-called “boat people”. Tran’s family, a part of this refugee history, is a slice of the tragedy left over from one of Southeast Asia’s most traumatic Cold Wars.
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Having left a country that was once a colony only to grow up as a migrant in another country with its unresolved colonial history left its mark on the artist. Tran became increasingly aware of the lives of the diaspora community around her. Recurring in Tran’s work are themes of displacement, alienation, unbelonging, and shame that people of the diaspora community face. Tran’s works explore the use of music and song as “a process of repair, a political intervention, a site for resistance and contest, a mechanism for communication… [and] a document of social solidarity and conflict”.Bolero as a marker of Vietnamese identity returned to Vietnam in 2019 to create the performance The Bolero Effect. It was here that she met the 75-year-old activist and Bolero (a.k.a yellow music, or Nhạc vàng) singer Lộc Vàng, who was imprisoned for 10 years for singing Bolero. He would go on to become a recurring figure in her works. Before returning to the UK, Lộc Vàng gifted Tran a copy of his memoir Cung Đàn Số Phận, which was published in 2018 and was then immediately banned from public sale in Vietnam.
Tran was fascinated by Lộc Vàng’s life story, which she saw as resonant with her research on the diaspora community. Like him, many individuals put their lives on the line for human rights. They are the ones who do important work yet remain invisible. What does it mean to feel a voice? Tran used the book as a backbone for a performance titled Shy God Chapter Một, the first in her series of Shy God works which are inspired by Vietnamese folklore. Tran co-curated the performance as a part of Encounter Bow at the Chisenhale Dance Space, East London in July 2021. The Shy God series explores what Tran calls Events of Sonic Witnessing – performative acts that invite the audience to keenly feel the resonance of participant’s voices and in doing so witness their experiences. In Tran’s own words, “Voice is an embodiment of communality; embedded at the heart of this work is the emotional reckoning in experiences of ‘Sonic Witnessing’ in events of the voice.”
A traveling chorus of diverse voicesThe next iteration in this series of work is titled Shy God – A Community Chorus. This October, Tran will be gathering 20 people from a diverse group of community performers to choose songs in their first languages and create a ‘community chorus’. The choice of singing in the performers’ mother tongues rather than English provides a rare alternative to the prevailing hostile narratives of migration and refugees – here, members are invited to pay homage to their own cultures and languages rather than being forced to conform. By taking place in multiple locations in Ipswich, England as part of the SPILL festival, the chorus will incorporate the act of travel and journey as a means of referencing the nature of the diaspora as a migrant entity. Members will sing in at least 10 different languages and dialects, and in doing so explore how the unique grain of our voices reveals the aspects of our identities. “The performance will celebrate the unruly spaces of co-existing sounds, a cacophony of dissonant noise orbiting a harmonious space of co-existing,” says Tran. Knowledge that resides in the marginsIn June 2021, she launched her first solo exhibition with more than 10 artworks and installations at Yeo Workshop, Singapore. The name of the exhibition, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, is inspired by a book of the same name by Maxine Hong Kingston, a Chinese American writer. Tran explains that she is most interested in how knowledge is formed through emotional catalysis, in these ‘spaces in the margins’. She finds this to be particularly true of diaspora communities. Referencing Bell Hooks’ essay, Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness, to clarify her point of view, she says, “I am interested in how we might reconfigure our understanding of what constitutes ‘knowledge’.”Marginality [is] much more than a site of deprivation… it is also the site of radical possibility, a space of resistance… As such I was not speaking of a marginality one wishes to lose – to give up or surrender as part of moving into the center – but rather as a site one stays in, clings to even because it nourishes one’s cap
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