Midsummer's day

Yesterday I did my first interview using an interpreter. Cuong Khuong helped me to interview the Vietnamese music researcher Bui Trong Hien. I was a bit worried at first but it worked very well! Khuong is my age and have studied musicology in Hanoi and Saigon (if I am not mistaken). He is also a performer and specialises in Hat Xam. Even though he recently mostly have been singing popular music in Saigon to pay the bills, while studying Tai tu. We talked to Hien about the growing interest for ca tru and his involvement in the application process for the UNESCO intangible cultural heritage. It feels good to be on the way with the interviews and I hope this will trigger my writing process as not much has happened there for a while. In the evening Khuong invited me to go and see the national cheo theatre perform at the Kim Ma theatre. It was really nice to see my flute teacher Doanh again and Thanh Ngoan, Pia's teacher, who organised the performance. The performance was a nice mixture of scenes from famous plays, solo arias and instrumentals, a reconstructed ca tru influenced hat cua dinh performance, and everything was topped off with a stage version of chau van. The spirits (hahaha) were high through out the performance with the audience, as well as the musicians, yelling and laughing. During the chau van performance a lot of kids run up to the stage with small bills for which they got a cookie in return. This soon escalated as more and more kids saw this as an excellent opportunity to get sweets and one of the performers almost had to spend more time handing out sweets than taking care of the "medium". In the finishing stage of the performance, when the actor was being "obsessed" by one of the minority spirits and run around throwing sweets at the audience, the kis went crazy and even managed to trip the actor so she fell over. This was immediately illustrated by a cymbal strike by the drummer. The actor managed to get up, the kid she tripped on run of to his mum, and everything ended happily. Definitely an entertaining performance!