This chapter is a set of reflections on the process of making Inside/Outside, an installation built on a concept by Nguyễn Thanh Thủy (VN) and developed in collaboration between The Six Tones (VN/SWE), the choreographer Marie Fahlin (SWE) and sound artist Matt Wright (UK). We discuss the choreography of gender (Foster 1998) in the performance of traditional Vietnamese music and the role of the body in the play with gendered identity which is launched in performance of the piece.
Qualitative analysis was part of the working method and was carried out by all the participating artists. The study of Inside/Outside focusses on 3rd and 1st person perspectives, where the latter has been approached in two ways: in interview sessions with the three performers and in coding sessions where the coding and the annotations have all referred to the subjective meaning of the gesture. In 2015, the installation was enhanced by new headphone tracks in which the three performers express their individual experiences of performing the choreography in the piece and reflections on the ways in which they have been socialised into being musicians in their respective cultures. Here, the division between fictive and authentic identities is challenged through the activation of the voice of a narrator (Trinh, 2010). The chapter suggests, by reference to Gadamer’s concept of play, that the process of creating Inside/Outside constituted a situation in which the subjectivity of the individual artist is in a sense bracketed by the rules of the emerging artwork (Gadamer, 2008). Hence, when the artists engage with the body images at play in the choreography of gender in a specific culture, moving in-between different layers of collective and individual identity becomes possible through the rules of the game at play.
ISBN för värdpublikation: 9789462702318