performance that combines improvisational dance and sound to physically
materialize the haunting of the Vietnam War. Debuted in 2023 at the
American Academy of Arts and Letters, the first iteration of this
performance focused on the atmospheric quality of oppression through
humidity, urination, and experimental dance. This reprise shifts towards
the acoustic nature of despair, picking up on the resonance of militarization
as it creeps along one’s skin and leaks into the everyday. Performing this
work in Seoul, a city that is physically and sonically occupied by the
American military, Vo and Silber also reconsider the generational trauma of
US intervention across the younger Asian diaspora who have not directly
experienced war but still experience the effects of that violence.
In Seoul, Two Little Kids (reprise) reframes the Asian experience of
American military violence as neither straightforward nor discrete; there
is a tangled web of inter-Asian politics at play here. The Korean and
Vietnam Wars were borne of Asian and Western colonial occupations. They
both fought against the brutal Japanese empire, but Vietnam’s fight for
independence was preceded by centuries of colonization by France and
China. The United States mutated these post-colonial civil wars into a
deadly game of Cold War geopolitics at the cost of millions of civilian lives.
Yet, Korea allied with the United States in the Vietnam War, hypocritically
committing atrocious massacres and war crimes similar to what they
experienced less than two decades earlier at the hands of the American
army. The entanglement of violence, and its compounding consequences,
is still felt today; Vo has written that “most people [in Vietnam] do not live
but only know how to survive.” It is within this context that Two Little
Kids (reprise) looks to sonically transform a shell-shocked subsistence.
Reprise, a term used in music to denote an innovative repetition, also
means to resume or repossess. Vo and Silber’s performance is a reprise in
all of its definitions. Two Little Kids (reprise) is titled after Thach Lam’s
eponymous short story Hai đứa trẻ, in which two children in Vietnam’s
rural countryside experience poverty and perpetual despair, told through
the metaphor of light and dark in a never-ending cycle of ghostly
survivance and drifting sleep. Vo and Silber bring Lam’s haunting into the
present, animating the liminality of trauma and oppression. The body
becomes the medium for this reprise, stripped bare, a vessel through which
Vo embodies the compounding, oppressive psyche of historical and current
US military occupation as they vocalize, vibrate, sway, urinate, and sweat.
Their chants, recalling a ritual practice, reclaims a body lost to time and
rupture. This sonic landscape is heightened by sounds extrapolated from
water, which Silber extemporizes into an inescapable audial onslaught.
Experienced as a whole, Vo and Silber seem to ask: when the body (theirs,
yours, ours) becomes so resonant with sound, liquid, and movement, can it
repossess agency and break free of the apparitional interstices of the
post-war psyche?
- Text by Sarah Cho
Two Little Kids (reprise) took place as part of the exhibition Red Study curated by Yezoi Hwang, featuring work by Hwang as well as Kentaro Takahashi, Sangha Khym, and Kideok Park.