Text and Production: Dinh Q. Lê and Moira Roth

The Artist: Dinh Q. Lê

Kieu: Thuy Tran

Narrator: Ellen Sebastian Chang

Technical Production: Julia Page and Corinne Sklar

Documentation: Claudia Leger (video) and Dianne Jones (digital photography)

The play, which uses still photo and film projections, is an exchange between three characters. It has only been produced once so far, at the SF Camerawork gallery, November 4, 2003. There is an edited 15-minute video of this production by Claudia Leger.

In the front of the audience, sitting and standing as they talk to one another in English and Vietnamese, are the Artist (played by Dinh Q. Lê) and ) and Kieu (Thuy Tran).

Kieu—based on the heroine of the famous early 19th century Vietnamese poetic novel, Nguyen Du’s The Tale of Kiêu—is a figure often viewed by Vietnamese as standing for their country and its history.

Toward the beginning of the play, the Artist and Kieu read short selections from this text (Kieu reads in English and the Artist in Vietnamese). In the audience sits the Narrator (Ellen Sebastian Chang), who explains periodically to the audience about Vietnamese history and the Kieu novel.

During much of the play, the two figures are engulfed in large projections of Lê’s 2002-2003 photo-weavings and the raw Photo Shop images from which these were made— plus his 2000 huge installation of photos and texts, Mot Coi Di Vi [“spending one’s life trying to find one’s way home”]. A recording of the popular Vietnamese song, “Mot Coi Di Vi,” is a recurring motif. At one point, a clip from Coppola’s Apocalypse Now is played in which three female performers (including Playboy Bunny) arrive on a helicopter to perform before the troops.

The play draws on the fact that Lê has begun to focus increasingly on how to represent the Vietnamese voice in the “tug of war” for the memory of the Vietnam War, how to represent the Vietnamese people having, so to speak, the last word.

Hence in Shootout ( a subsection of the “From Vietnam to Hollywood” photo-weavings series, which Lê exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2003), he consciously began to work with six “characters”:

1-2. Two Vietnamese: Hao, a friend of Lê’s and “Kieu,” represented by a 1960’s studio photo of a woman Lê had found in a Saigon secondhand store

3-4. Two figures from the famous 1968 Eddie Adams photograph of the Saigon execution of a Viet Cong suspect by the Saigon head of police

5-6. Two figures, Willard and Playboy Bunny, from the movie, Apocalypse Now

At the end of the performance, the Artist and Kieu take masses of silk ribbons (which Lê had brought back from Vietnam for this purpose) and weave them together. They then exit with Thuy Tran (Kieu) singing the song, “Mot Coi Di Vi.”