Vietnam 2022

The team in Vietnam is creating a performance film titled Tangerine Womb, set in various locations such as a temple in a cave and a tangerine farm in the Lang Son province in northeastern Vietnam, where the video artist Red is from. Research for this production began in Lang Son in September 2022.

For TERASIA Online Week 2022, Red and the dramaturg Maho Watanabe, who flew over from Japan to participate in their research, will talk about this performance in the making.

Talk

Tangerine Womb – A Research-in-Progress

[Speakers]
Nguyen Hai Yen (Red), Maho Watanabe

[Language]
English with Japanese subtitles

*This research is supported by the Asian Cultural Council.

Streaming Schedule

From November 10, 2022 (Thu.), 12:00 p.m. [Japan Time], the recording will be available online indefinitely.

Speakers

Nguyen Hai Yen (Red)

Nguyen Hai Yen (Red) is a Lang Son (Vietnam) based video artist and independent art producer whose practice focuses on the multidisciplinary approaches which address the shifting boundaries between different forms of art, fiction and documentary, life and death, human and animal, living beings and spirits. Her practice focuses on reflecting one's landscape by questioning, what are the “gestures” of memory and belief?

Starting practicing at Hanoi Doclab, her video works were then featured at Seashort Film Festival (Malaysia), Fundacion PROA (Argentina), White Chapell Gallery (UK), ARKIPEL (Indonesia), and Fifth Wall Fest (Philippines), among many others. Before practicing as a producer, she had been involved in organizing activities involving experimental music, film, and performances with independent publishing house AJAR Press and Heritage Space in Hanoi. Her works as dance producer include various projects with H2Q Dance Company, Kinergie Studio, Mat Tran Ensembles, and choreographer Ngo Thanh Phuong. She also produces exhibitions for artist Giang Nguyen. In 2020, she co-founded MORUA—an artist-in-residency program based in Hoi An to support next-generation art practitioners. She was selected to join Asia Connection: Producers Camp 2021 & 2022, organized by Taiwan’s National Theater & Concert Hall.

Maho Watanabe

Maho Watanabe is a translator and dramaturg who works in and around art, media, and humanitarian work. In 2014, during her year abroad in the West Bank as an Arabic Studies student, she joined the director Yukari Sakata in Rashomon | Yabunonaka, a theatre co-production by Palestinian and Japanese artists. This marked her first involvement in performing arts, followed by numerous international collaboration projects, festivals, and workshops. Her translation of Lilac Duhaa (Death in the Era of IS) by Palestinian playwright Ghannam Ghannam won the 2019 Odashima Yushi Award for Drama Translation. She served as dramaturg for the original production of TERA (2018), and in May 2020, she was part of initiating TERASIA with Kop in Thailand and other artists. She is an Asian Cultural Council fellow for 2022.