GENDER & DIVERSITY: Workshop „Resistance, Gender and Voice in Intercultural Collaboration“ mit Nguyễn Thanh Thủy

The proposed workshop is structured in two parts. First, a presentation of the intercultural and interdisciplinary practice of the Vietnamese musician Nguyễn Thanh Thủy. Second, the participants are invited to co-create a short improvised performance together with her, to be presented at the end of the workshop.

In the last eight years, Nguyễn has been collaborating extensively with choreographers, composers and theatre directors, with the aim to expand the expressive scope of her performance. Her identity as a Vietnamese đàn tranh player has shifted towards an awareness of, and a conscious play with hybrid identities, expressed in a series of installations, music theatre pieces and choreographed performances. Nguyễn will present examples of her artistic work, drawn from her artistic doctoral project, built on a gender analysis of the choreographies that have characterized traditional music performance across the past decades. The presentation articulates an understanding of the forces at play in intercultural artistic exchange, which also entails a perspective on hybridity understood as “communicative practices, processes rather than static states” (Weiss, 2014, p. 511).

Nguyễn Thanh Thủy is a leading đàn tranh player/improviser in both traditional and experimental music. She was born into a theatre family and was raised with traditional Vietnamese music from an early age in Hà Nội. She has received many distinctions including the First Prize and the Outstanding Traditional Music Performer Prize in the National Competition of Zither Talents in 1998. Nguyễn Thanh Thủy has recorded several CD’s as soloist with orchestra and solo CDs which released by Phương Nam Film (VN); by dB Productions (SE); by Setola di Maiale (IT) and by Neuma Records & Publications (USA). The last ten years she has been collaborating extensively with choreographers, composers and theatre directors on many interdisciplinary projects. Between 2009—2011, she was involved as an artistic researcher in the international research project (Re)thinking Improvisation, a collaboration between the Vietnam National Academy of Music and the Malmö Academy of Music. Between 2012—2019 she carried out an artistic doctoral project at the Malmö Academy of Music concerned with gesture in traditional Vietnamese music. Between 2018—2020, she engaged in Musical Transformations, a senior research project looking at musical change, in transcultural and intercultural settings. She currently is an international postdoctoral research fellow at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, and at the Institute of Arts, Faculty of Education Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (202123).