Nguyễn Thanh Thủy – Ph.D. defense, concert and exhibition

Nguyễn Thanh Thủy plays the đàn tranh during ‘Tacit or Loud’ at IAC 2014

As part of her Ph.D. defense, Nguyễn Thanh Thủy will give a concert performance including three new compositions for đàn tranh and electronics by Richard Karpen (USA), Lương Huệ Trinh (VN) and Kent Olofsson (SE). Beyond that she also presents an exhibition with two installations – Inside/Outside (2012) and Vodou vibrations sounds of memories of fields and burdens living in translations and broken bows balancing on plateaus while speaking to one self and scratching the surface of the raft while drifting away (2014), as well as a documentary film entitled The Culture Soldiers.

Nguyễn Thanh Thủy’s Ph.D. project in artistic research is concerned with the function of gesture in traditional Vietnamese music. Building on gender analysis of musical performance in TV shows, and further on autoethnographic inquiry throughout the artistic projects, the artistic output articulates a critical understanding of these practices. The aims of the project are to investigate the social function and meaning of musical gesture in traditional Vietnamese music, and to develop artistic responses that articulate an individual voice. The research questions that emerge from these conceptual and artistic aims are

    1. What gender conventions can gesture analysis of musical performance unveil?

    2. In what ways can music created through the choreographic structuring of movement reveal and question
        gender conventions in musical performance?

    3. How can my performance, in intercultural and interdisciplinary artistic collaborations, challenge current
        gender norms and instigate change in practices of traditional Vietnamese music?

The method and design of this Ph.D. project builds on qualitative analysis of gesture in musical performance, with particular emphasis on employing a gender perspective in this analysis. In the artistic work, analysis of gesture has constituted a point of departure for the creation of a series of intermedia works that seek to develop methods that combine the practices of choreography and musical composition. Intercultural collaboration has provided particular challenges and possibilities in the development of each of these works.

For more information about her project, please visit the Research Catalogue.