Art and the Nation-State: Cải Lương and the Performance of Vietnamese Identity

The 2010 Second Annual National Graduate Student Conference in Performance Studies hosted by University of California, Los Angeles was titled “Anxieties of Overexposure; Enlargements, Catagions and the Dark.”  Panels covered the transnational theatre experience through praxis from the traditional to the modern.

One of our spotlighted scholars was Khai Thu Nguyen, a James R. Gray lecturer and postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at University of California, Berkeley.  Her paper seeks to understand the transformative power of popular theatre in repressive regimes.  Nguyen’s research is centered on the changing conceptualizations of South Vietnamese and Vietnamese identity in relation to a musical theater form known as cải lương. Cải lương developed through a synthesis of Vietnamese, Chinese, and French narrative and performance traditions. The genre’s strong affective appeal to the audience has made it play key roles in the performance of local and national Vietnamese identity.

In the following interview, Nguyen reflects on her research into the history, performance and politics of cải lương. 

Fitzgerald: Why were you drawn to this research?

Nguyen: I was drawn to this research during my fieldwork in Ho Chi Minh City in 2006-2007 when many artists I met would talk to me about cải lương as one of the performance forms they most cherished and felt most worthy of research.  I recognized a great passion in these artists, directors, performers, and audience members for the cải lương form, a “renovated” opera that they felt was integral to the identity of Southern Vietnam.  I myself fell in love with cải lương when I watched it on the stage in Vietnam—I remember being amazed at its intricate formal details, its mixture of both distanciation and highly affective identification with the audience, and the amazing versatility, training, and talent of performers.  It surprised me that I had remembered cải lương from my childhood in Vietnam as an overly sentimental and low form of art.  Indeed, these pervasive associations about cải lương made the word synonymous for “melodramatic” in contemporary Vietnam.  Common perceptions of cải lương were interestingly mixed—a large number of people saw the form as innately close to them; at the same time it was often critiqued as an overly sentimental, low-quality form of entertainment.  The impassioned emotions about cải lương —from ardent appreciation to castigation—intrigued me a great deal.  I began to think about what contrasting ideas towards art and nation were imbued in these varying attitudes towards cải lương, particularly noting Northern and “official” discourses about the melodramatic quality of cải lương in contrast to the impassioned attachment of Southern and Vietnamese audiences towards the form.  How did cải lương participate in the demarcations of local and national identity, in the designation of southern and northern identity?  These questions became part of my dissertation project, now book project, on the political functions of melodrama in nation building in twentieth century Vietnam.

Fitzgerald: What is the literal translation of cải lương?

Nguyen: Cải lương, meaning “reform” or “renovation” is a movement oriented towards the “new” that embodied a modern consciousness arising out of the diverse literary and cultural forms present in Southern Vietnam at the turn of the twentieth century, including newly translated Western works of literature, classical theater hát bội, Vietnamese and Western chamber music, and the increasingly dominant Romanized Vietnamese script quốc ngữ.

Fitzgerald:  The embrace of cải lương indicates an impulse to break from the past.  Could you discuss the difference between the traditional hát bội, and the more modern cải lương?

Nguyen: Born in Southern Vietnam around 1918, cải lương is a syncretic form of melodrama that incorporated French, Vietnamese, and Chinese narrative sources, classical theater hát bội, Vietnamese chamber music nhạc tài tử, innovated gestural singing ca ra bộ, Western chamber music, and dramaturgical structures and performance forms from Western spoken drama. One of its paths of development was through a modernization and simplification of the classical theater hát bội, existing in its primary forms during the Ly and Tran dynasties in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and developed by Lý Nguyên Cát, a performer of the Chinese opera genre zaju who was captured by Trần Hưng Đạo in 1285. Hát bội was a form of entertainment for kings and mandarins through the nineteenth century.  It covered wartime narratives and affirmed virtues of bravery and loyalty to the king.  At the turn of the twentieth century, as education in French and quốc ngữ became dominant, fewer audience members could understand the Chinese-based language chữ nôm in hát bội songs and dialogue. By 1945, hát bội was losing its popular audience to cải lương, which followed the trails of such innovators as Năm Châu, a performer, director, and playwright who developed an acting theory he called “real and beautiful” (thật và đẹp).  Such a theory used stylizations and conventions from hát bội while aspiring towards the “real” of realist acting from Western spoken drama and film. Cải lương sought to portray more “modern” topics in contemporary society.  In addition to plays based on Chinese legends and other hát bội classics, cải lương plays were also based on translations of French plays such as Moliere’s The Miser and Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. Tuồng xã hội (plays with social themes) in the 1930-40s addressed topics relevant to women such as arranged marriages, feminine virtue, the cult of the mother in law, the strength of patriarchal power, infidelity, premarital sex, and contesting conceptions of traditional Confucian and “modern” femininity. Cải lương also became known for its signature and central refrain vọng cổ (or lament for the past), a refrain that is flexible towards improvisation and interpretation by performers, and used particularly to articulate the emotional life of the character in climactic moments in the play. The vọng cổ refrain was one of the most memorable aspects of cải lương for audiences.

Fitzgerald: After the end of the Vietnam/American war, the Vietnamese Communist Party saw the reorganization of the form as a strategy to infuse their politics into the aesthetic of cải lương. How do the melodramatic underpinnings of cải lương affect the corporeality of the South Vietnamese?

Nguyen: In northern ideologues’ critiques against cải lương after reunification, cải lương served as a metonymy for Southern culture and the Southern terrain, where the supposed excess of form in cải lương (it’s supposed “maudlin” expressivity, emphasis on performance over content, seduction of the audience, and “bourgeois” morality) becomes mapped onto excesses of Southern culture in need of reform.  This mapping of the excesses of cải lương onto the body of the Southerner facilitated the major reforms to the South after reunification, which included the shutting down of the diverse presses, regulations against “yellow” music before 1975, the sending of one million people in the former Republic of Vietnam to “reeducation” camps, the movement of a million people to “new economic zones,” reforms contributing to a mass exodus of refugees from Vietnam.

Fitzgerald:  If cải lương was at the center of contestations about the appropriateness of Southern culture during the state’s major reorganization of the South after reunification, how were these tensions experienced by those who left Vietnam? How does cải lương play within the transnational Vietnamese community?

Nguyen: My current postdoctoral research focuses on this question and the transformation of affective forms across the Vietnamese diaspora. Cải lương has a unique status among the transnational Vietnamese community, many of whom came from Southern Vietnam. To some, transformations in cải lương under state censorship (such as mandated political content) after the reunification of North and South in 1975 led to the loss of cải lương’s emotional hold over the audience, and the form’s demise. Cải lương was criticized harshly by Northern ideologues after the reunification of North and South Vietnam as, I argue, a way of using cải lương to label the Southern terrain and Southern identity as morally and formally excessive and therefore in need of reform. My current research asks how the restaging of classical cải lương helps Vietnamese Americans remember Vietnam and reclaim their rights to represent the art-form and re-imagine Vietnamese identity.  I am concerned with how the transnational performance of cải lương imagines (or not) a transnational Vietnamese community connected by shared loss, melancholia, and even potential renewal. 

Fitzgerald: So in a sense art has its way of superseding the dictates of the nation-state. In what sense would you describe cải lương as subversive?

Nguyen: Historically, cải lương has been subversive in a number of ways.  Writers such as Vương Hồng Sển, Ba Vân, and Huỳnh Ngọc Trang credit cải lương with contributing to building modern Vietnamese identity at the turn of the twentieth century during French colonialism.  According to Vương Hồng Sển, cải lương’s subversiveness came from its ability to double as a form of pure entertainment, allowing it to escape censorship by the French colonial government while imagining syncretic visions of Vietnamese modern identity. 

Furthermore, cải lương’s hybridity of form was a threatening feature that, to the Vietnamese Communist Party, traced back to a colonial history with China, France, and the United States.  While ideologues of the Vietnamese Communist Party after the reunification of North and South Vietnam harshly criticized cải lương’s hybridity (lai) and lack of clear genre delineation as indexes of colonial contamination, this very fluidity of form— cải lương’s tendency to absorb and integrate different genre and performance forms—allows it a means of performing national identity beyond official narratives of cultural and national “authenticity.” 

Fitzgerald: Thus, cải lương’s hybridity and affective identification with the audience have made it a politicized theatrical performance. Could you discuss the changes in cải lương after the Vietnamese/American war?

Nguyen: Trương Bình Tòng documents the efforts after the Vietnamese/American war of regulating and making uniform regional forms of cải lương into a national form deplete of hybrid qualities.  Anthropologist Philip Taylor also writes that cải lương was purged of foreign stories, melodies, musical genres, costumes and choreography.  Many cải lương plays after 1975 gained strict ideological content and were used to valorize the achievements of the Vietnamese Communist Party. The Party recreated a political brand of cải lương that weaved its affective components into a proper narrative arc promoting socialism.  

Fitzgerald:  It is interesting to understand North Vietnamese ideologues’ critique of the sentimental aspect of cải lương after the end of the Vietnam/American war in connection with Brecht’s critique of nonrealistic theatre.

Nguyen: Vietnamese critics such as Hòa Lục Bình argue that cải lương’s highly affective and sentimental qualities have a sedative effect that detracts from the political consciousness of spectators.   Indeed, one of the ways that cải lương was heavily attacked after reunification was through critics’ focus on it as a mere form of cheap entertainment, excess consumption, and moral degeneration.  The attack against cải lương used its sentimental qualities to critique the alleged moral degradation and supposed apolitical quality of spectators; it was also a way of marking the South with moral and political transgression.

Fitzgerald: What other performative aspects of the plays are found to be objectionable in the state’s critique of cải lương after reunification?

Nguyen: Even through the First and Second Indochina Wars, members of the Vietnamese Communist Party struggled with how to deal with cải lương.  In the 1950s, party members wavered between an outright banning of cải lương, particularly its sentimental refrain vọng cổ, and developing a system to use the form’s affective powers to build revolutionary fervor.  Since artistic production had to conform to the party’s regulations of socialist realism, which only allowed sadness and pessimism that ultimately led to the right kind of political consciousness, the supposed “maudlin” qualities of cải lương that threatened to fill the audience with pessimism without building revolutionary ideology, was highly objectionable.

Fitzgerald: Finally, where do you see agency in cải lương?

Nguyen: I see agency in the ties of cải lương to its people, in their attachment to the form and their associations between it and their identities as a Southerner, as a Vietnamese.  With the state’s constraints against cải lương’s “maudlin” characteristics, these emotions of sadness and attachment in cải lương become imbued with power.  What may be “culinary” or digestive to Brecht in the personal and affective transforms into a highly political operation of feeling and identification.  The combined hybridity and affective power of cải lương makes this form of melodrama surprisingly politically charged, challenging the state’s strict guidelines about affective production and cultural authenticity. In its formal hybridity and affective identification with the audience, cải lương has the potential to generate a multiplicity of meanings beyond one system of emotional production or political ideology.

Khai-Thu Nguyen received her PhD in the Program in Performance Studies at University of California, Berkeley in May 2010 and is James R. Gray Lecturer and Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation, entitled “Sensing Vietnam: Melodramas of Nation from Colonialism to Renovation,” focused on the function of melodrama in constructing political subject-hood and national identity in colonial, socialist, and post-socialist Vietnam. It was based on fieldwork in Vietnam in 2006-2007 funded by the Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Research Abroad and the UC Pacific-Rim Research Program Fellowships. Nguyen’s post-doctoral work investigates the transformations of the political efficacy and meanings of melodrama across the Vietnamese diaspora.  Her work has been published in Portrayals of Americans on the World Stage, ed. Kevin Wetmore, and are forthcoming in Asian Theatre Journal; Amerasia; and Neoliberalism and Global Theatres: Performance Permutations, eds. Patricia Ybarra and Lara Nielsen. She has also directed Another Midsummer Night’s Dream, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s comedy in Vietnam, and Journey and Destination, a physical theater work based on original stories by members of NEWS, a performance troupe in Ho Chi Minh City that she co-founded.

Tony Fitzgerald is a PhD student and Teaching Assistant in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his Master’s degree in Theatre from California State University, Los Angeles in 2005. His area of doctoral research is gay black performance.