Interview: Chung Nguyen

Back in April of this year, choreographer and performance artist Chung Nguyen and I met over a video call to catch up on our lives in Saigon and Brooklyn during the pandemic, talk about dance, and the difficulty of talking about dance. At that time, Nguyen had just participated in the Southeast Asian Choreographers Network, organized by Kelola Foundation and Asian Cultural Council. This August, Chung and I met again to discuss how life as a performing artist in Saigon has changed over the past few months, dreaming through screens, and finding inspiration through internal practices.

Photo credit: Lam Hieu Thuan

Julia Santoli (Spectra Situs): How is your family in Hanoi?

Chung Nguyen: My family is from a city outside of Hanoi actually, Hai Duong City. So it is a bit better there. Hanoi at the moment is under lockdown restrictions, the same as in Saigon.

Spectra: What have you been up to in the past month?

Nguyen: I have just completed a 4 month program. It’s called the Certificate Program for Critical Practice in Contemporary Performance through LaSalle College of the Arts Initiative in collaboration with Dance Nucleus (Singapore). I find myself motivated to explore something again-- finally! 

There were 8 mentors. What they shared was their knowledge, a stream of information. I was carried by that stream. Before the program I asked myself the questions why I feel disconnected between myself and the objects used in my past performance. But doing the program I felt that this was not really a question to ask-- no one can answer that question. So it was maybe more about a disconnection within myself-- not the object or outer world. There was one module led by [Belgium-based choreographer] Arco Renz, who has been working a lot in Southeast Asian performing contexts. He talked about dance culture in the performing arts. But he also talked a lot about perception, things not existing on their own-- I have been really fascinated with understanding the mind, body, consciousness. What he shared was provocative. I shared this information with [my boyfriend] Dan. He recommended that I take a look at Dzogchen Tibetan Buddhist philosophy. 

I feel some connection between Dzogchen Buddhist teaching, about the nature of the mind, and the philosophy of perception. Dzogchen is focused on the study of the natural existence of the mind, of consciousness. So I’ve been studying this. I feel happy practicing meditation, like shamatha [Sanskrit: “peacefully abiding] and vipassana [Sanskrit: “insight”]. So shamatha is a meditation practice which focuses on calming the mind. Vipassana is more focussed on examining the mind. I mean, I have been practicing these meditation practices, reading some texts from Dzogchen. For me this is something new and I have been getting deeper into. I am still a beginner!

Also, Dan shared with me about lucid dreaming. I was jealous! So I just researched what lucid dreaming actually is… about dreams and consciousness. When you know that you are dreaming, that the dream is not real. I had a thought because I haven’t seen my boyfriend for almost 2 years-- ‘Oh, what if we can see each other in lucid dreams?’-- Because every day we talk on screens which are only two-dimensional and not emotional at all. I thought in dreams it might be more emotional, we might find something deeper. 

So I researched more, and then I realized it would be really hard to do something like this. It takes time to train. We need instruction and serious training. But i’m still interested in exploring dreams because I feel like exploring dreams is kind of like exploring reality in a way, to understand the mind or the consciousness. I think Dzogchen [Dream Yoga], it also talks about the waking reality as being a dreamlike experience, and the dream consciousness as an experience without physical constraint. So waking reality and dream consciousness are actually similar. I’m interested in consciousness, and what we experience in waking reality, and in dreams-- maybe it's all a dream life! Maybe in the dream world there is more freedom-- you can fly, you can change objects... if you can train your mind. [laughs] So I've been researching dream yoga, it’s a Tibetan practice. I’m not a practitioner-- it's something really advanced-- but I'm inspired by it. Dream yoga is preparing yourself before death: you understand that all phenomena are emptiness, even death. So it is preparing for death, understanding the mind-- getting enlightened. 

I also looked at the concept of lucid dreaming from the perspective of Western modern psychology. I am reading a book called Dreaming Yourself Awake by Alan Wallace. The book talks about the connection between lucid dreaming and Tibetan dream yoga. I think it is quite interesting. Actually dream yoga originally occurred thousands of years ago. And lucid dreaming, from the perspective of modern psychology, has only been explored very recently.

Spectra: Some of our research has been overlapping. I’ve been reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and researching dreams as a way to heal. Exploring these ideas of subtle bodies as inspiration for music, rather than delving into the mechanics of dreaming. So your exploration in training your mind toward the mechanics of dreaming is really intriguing. It also brings up conflicting ideas about dreams and desires. In Western psychology, dreams hold so much of your subconscious, your id, your desires. Through the lens of meditation, it is about escaping desire and reaching the ultimate reality through this rigorous training and mapping. 

Over the years, I’ve worked at the Rubin Museum as a teaching artist and have learned a little bit about Mandalas and how they are used as visual tools for training visualisations. Have you thought about using visual aids?

Nguyen: I’m not yet a master of dreaming! It’s a process of my research. I learned from different resources and from experience. No one has been teaching me, but I have been experimenting with making doodles out of dream content. For example during night sleep I get a dream, and if I’m aware I can wake up to take notes of the dream content, or I can make a doodle while recalling the dream content. The doodle is made of spontaneous lines-- I don’t want to illustrate through characters. I try to recall the content and my hand is making lines. I can show you if you’d like to see...

Cover image: Collective Consciousness / Collective Dreams © Chung Nguyen

Nguyen: So this is the workbook I have just completed for the program. It’s called Collective Consciousness / Collective Dreams.

Dream Recalled July 7 2021 © Chung Nguyen

Nguyen: So for example this is one of the dream body [shows]

So this is just dream content. I’m aware that in the dream it's just the mind-- all the characters, anything that happens, it’s just appearances of my own mind. So I tried to exclude all the personal pronouns-- such as I, she, he, etc. When you read the dream content, you don’t know what is happening. But I feel like in a dream it doesn’t make sense to say “Oh, I saw you in a dream” because it’s not real.

Spectra: The I and the you and the me are all the same-- they’re all you, the dreamer.

Nguyen: Yes. So I try to look at dreams as more emptiness, appearances of the mind. I note down the time.

Spectra: This one says 3:26 AM. You’re in a half dream-half awake state when you make these.

Nguyen: Yes! My aim is to learn to be conscious through practice, not only in my waking states but in my dream state. It’s quite difficult. You interrupt your sleep. I think it's easy when you wake up and make a doodle while recalling the dream to yourself.

So that was the first try. The second one, I’m preparing some equipment, like resting the sketchbook on my body and holding the pencil while falling asleep. I was trying to capture, make lines as I fell asleep. The first experiment was to make a doodle after having a dream. But now I am trying to capture the real-time-dreaming process. But it’s difficult! I’m still figuring it out. The moment when I’m conscious about my determination to complete this task, I fall asleep and don’t remember what I meant to do. It's about training. But if I’m falling asleep and realize that I need to move my pencil-- I wake up at this moment [laughs]. What we see now is one doodle, but it's an accumulation of three different dream contents. So it creates a dialogue between them. 

I want to try to see if I can make vocal sounds during my sleep. I’ve been using an app called Pillow, which tracks your sleep, so it analyzes when you have REM, light, or deep sleep. I don’t know how it knows when I sleep! I try to test it during the daytime, while I am awake. It was quite accurate, and calculated that I was not sleeping. [laughs]

So yeah, this app is recording the sounds. Before I had to wake up and note down things, which made it difficult to fall back asleep. So I found this app because I can speak out the key part of the dream content, and listen back the next day. So, what if I make vocal sounds? I am still figuring it out.

Spectra: Are you trying to make vocal sounds WHILE sleeping, or recording afterwards?

Nguyen: Maybe both, I don’t know yet. For example if I wake up from my dream, I am not fully awake but not fully asleep, so I’d like to try out what this feels and sounds like. Or even in the dream, if I am conscious of dreaming and I try to scream-- what happens? I am just using my imagination, I don’t know yet.

Spectra: Looking at your drawings they look like they could be a score for movement or for vocal melodies, following the movement of the lines. Have you thought about using them in this way?

Nguyen: I feel it's difficult for me to start with movement during my sleep. Making a doodle is the easiest method at this moment. But it's interesting, I haven’t thought about it in this way. I don’t think movement would be right though.

Spectra: Speaking with you, this new exploration can be seen as an extension of your dance practice. The practice of being a dancer is so much about training your body to create new habits. And that’s the way you are talking about these experiments: as you’re training your mind, or your “subtle body” to create these habits. To track your dreams and move through these dreams through the projection of your mind. Post-conscious dance! [laughs]

You also spoke about how your relationship to your props was generated from your own internal awareness. So this new practice seems to be a way of tuning into your own inner processes and the deepest core of your mind. It’s a performance in your bedroom while you’re lying down and in an altered state. It’s the opposite of exhibitionism. It’s the most internal and intimate form of performance.

Nguyen: I guess a lot of artists have done work with collective sleeping. But I don’t know, I feel like also, currently in Ho Chi Minh City, I hear news about people dying and dying because of COVID. And during the exploration of dream states or sleep states, there’s a state that’s called deep sleep or dreamless sleep. So it’s similar to the experience of death. Because in that state you don’t experience anything, you are just blank. You wake up and your body has changed to a different state. So I’m thinking about sleep as a sense of rest, a celebration, and a sense of death as well. I was thinking that maybe I’d like to make a performance in which I sleep in a coffin. Because it’s a sense of death. Every day, there is so much news of death. I need to acknowledge that. But It is not just suffering, because it is rest.

Spectra: Well it’s also a celebration in the Buddhist sense in that it's an escape-- if you’ve lived right! [laughs] That you’ll escape through death into a state of emptiness, true existence.

Nguyen: I’ve been thinking about this idea because next year I will make a work-in-progress for Grey Space, part of the M1 Contact Contemporary Dance Festival in Singapore. I will think carefully about this idea of sleeping in a coffin. I imagine it would be nice to have a coffin on a stage, and lay in a coffin, and maybe with technology there is a camera inside and people watching. Maybe it's a reference to how right now, everything is online, online performances and stuff, we just look at the screen-- it’s like a dream, virtual reality. It’s dreamlike.

In Dzogchen Buddhist teaching, I feel it's really amazing how something is beyond labels. We just label things. And, ultimately, all phenomena are emptiness. Things don’t exist in their own sense. So it’s like interconnectedness. My questions are: When does the coffin exist as a coffin? Is it a coffin only when there’s a dead body inside? If there’s a living body inside, how would it be called? Is it a coffin or a resting place?

Spectra: And without the rituals-- or maybe just a different kind of ritual. The past months I’ve been thinking about my grandmother’s funeral a lot, and the white cloth we wear around our forehead [in Vietnamese Buddhist funerals]. All the rituals: the movements, the chanting, the clothes, the duration of hours, of days-- really cements that this is a death, and a passing on into another state of being. Maybe ritual is dance that makes something real.

Nguyen: It’s really a contemporary dance festival. So I was wondering if it is possible... if it makes sense for me to do this sort of performance. Because what I imagine is not like a dance piece, but it is a performance. I couldn’t do a dance performance! I changed the way I work. Making a dance is not my practice at the moment.

Spectra: Last time we were talking so much about a specific performance, I didn’t ask you-- How did you get into dance and movement initially? As a kid, were you always dancing?

Nguyen: I remember when I was a little kid, my parents sent me to a friend of theirs while they were working. My mom always said that when she came to pick me up at the end of the day after work, I didn’t want to go back home because the people there played music and I loved to dance. Nowadays I see kids dancing all the time!... Actually TikTok is very strange. 

Spectra: Do you remember the music or instruments?

Nguyen: No. It’s mysterious! And when I was in Grade 5, I was in a singing group. So I was singing more than dancing. My teacher saw I had potential in dance, so she tried to lead me in that direction. It was a traditional dance.

Spectra: What is traditional dance like for young men? 

Nguyen: I guess as a kid, in the singing group it was only me as a male, and all the others were girls. So you did stuff like this [circular movements with fingers, wrists, and arms] very softly. But my teacher supported me. I’m not sure what people thought about me. At that moment, doing dance like that or being soft was not common for boys. I’m not sure if  they knew the word “gay” but maybe they thought there was something a bit “woman” about me. I don’t know why. I kind of survived-- being in that environment, doing dancing and singing, being very soft. 

Spectra: In Vietnamese language, there are very specific ways to address someone based on their age in relationship to yours, as well as their gender. Language is tied up with politeness in a particular way, and politeness is often equated with respect. So terms of address are considered extremely important, culturally. Are there gender neutral pronouns? Like not em, not anh, not chị? Not ông or bà?

Nguyen: Well usually, if you address someone, the gender of the person is very obvious. Yeah… I’m thinking about that…. So for instance it maybe depends on the age. 

Spectra: If people are gender non-binary, how do they navigate this?

Nguyen: For me, I don’t identify myself as non-binary, and also I don’t feel like I want people to address me as anh. But it’s difficult to tell people not to call me anh or em… so it’s best to just call me Chung. There is also mày - tao! Anyone, if they are friends, can call each other mày - tao and it doesn’t specify gender.

Spectra: One last question. Do you know of any groups that are doing good relief work in Saigon? COVID relief organizations or non-profits we could suggest donating to. 

Nguyen: There is a dance company called Arabesque Dance Company. At the moment they’ve been buying food to support local dancers who face difficulty. They have a Facebook, but there is no official published page. 

Spectra: Thank you Chung. It’s amazing to see you so inspired.

Nguyen: It’s a journey, and I feel something new is happening! It is the right moment. I have just found something that I wanted to share.