"My village" show
"The show is a mixture of acrobatics, juggling and music, with a series of scenes which illustrate the daily life of a traditional village."

Làng Tôi (My Village) - review

The New Vietnam Circus interprets the daily life of a traditional village through a mixture of acrobatics, juggling and music at the Grande Halle de La Villette in Paris

Làng Tôi: In an acrobatic tableaux, 14 artists and five musicians evoke the daily life of a peasant. Photograph: Nguyen Phuong

'New Circus', purportedly a French invention, is being copied all over the world, even in Vietnam, which has responded with Láng Tôi (My Village), a show that has toured widely since 2009 and is currently touring France and further afield, only returning home in December.

The New Vietnam Circus is the work of three men: Nhat Ly Nguyen, Lan Nguyen and Le Tuan Anh. The first two are brothers, born in France of Vietnamese parents. They spent their childhood both in France and in Vietnam, subsequently studying at the National Circus School in Hanoi.

After working as a clown and musician in many places, Nhat Ly Nguyen set up his own production company in Vietnam. His brother Lan worked with Cirque Plume and is now the art director of Arc en Cirque, the circus school at Chambéry in the French Alps. Anh is Vietnamese but has juggled his way all over the world. He now divides his life between Germany and Canada, where he has joined Cirque du Soleil.

The three of them joined forces to hatch My Village, borrowing 20 young artistes from the Vietnamese National Circus, a large troupe heavily influenced by three separate traditions: Chinese, French (during the colonial period) and Russian (since independence). This being new circus, there are no animals and no gratuitous virtuosity. The show is a mixture of acrobatics, juggling and music, with a series of scenes which illustrate the daily life of a traditional village.

They have had the bright idea of using bamboo cane, an ancestral material if ever there was one, as the show's guiding thread. With just a few bits of string and bicycle inner-tube the New Vietnam Circus artistes build and rebuild superb, moving structures: huts, nests, stilt houses, rafts, suspension bridges and lots more.

This is really the best part of the circus, as they move around their ephemeral building site in an endless balancing act. The supple Vietnamese performers fashion fragile installations, working busily on the ochre ground or leaping through the air. This gives rise to all sorts of acrobatic tricks and fantastic tableaux. In one scene a young contortionist swings from one branch to the next, neither entirely human nor wholly animal, rather a mixture of both.

There are many moments of graceful, inventive movement. A stunning musical juggling act brings together a percussionist with a sort of calabash and two men with poles. As if by magic the poles fly, striking the drum and producing sound.

But in its evocation of the everyday work of a rural Vietnamese community My Village does occasionally stray into picturesque folklore, as if past suffering could somehow be forgotten.

This article originally appeared in Le Monde

(http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2011/jul/26/lang-toi-vietnam-circus-review)

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