he hasn't cried in 40 years.

a man sits, staring into oblivion
touched only by the passing wind--
residual currents of distant helicopters
or the memory of his former unit partner--
before he too
atomized into the infinite abyss
that now lays before him.

there is no horizon
no meeting of gods and man
because here divinity is bartered for
in the currency of cells
and we only gamble when we know we will win.
we don't get to melt our belted sword into the golden key
on d-day
only cadaveric planes in the graveyard for remotes with hope
that someday that mild droning will either erupt
or disappear with the breaking of dawn.

dawn breaks
orion occluded
and so we wait








until night falls
and the hunter can resume catching his prey.


a boy sits, praying,
staring at his prize
he touches positive to positive
negative to negative
currents of charge
and shifts left to right to left to right
he flies                                              his plastic dragonfly carrier into a wall
he wants to grow up
to be just like dad
and all comes tumbling after.

Practice as Research

Sometimes we perform tasks.

Other times, we do what feels good. Just so.

The Year of the Dragon

On behalf of Project Agent Orange, Welcome to the New Year, 2012!

Thank you for your continued support!

In the past 10 months, since the founding of the collective, we have made great strides in our goals to increase awareness about the legacy of Agent Orange, make connections in the nonprofit and social sectors, and use movement to communicate how war is inherited through generations.

However, many exciting milestones lie ahead for us in this coming year!

1. Project Agent Orange will host our first evening length Performance at Dixon Place on May 31, June 1, and June 2.

2. We will also exhibit our work at Movement Research, a prominent laboratory for the creation of new work in New York that has cultivated new movement since the 60s.

3. This week, I had the great honor of sitting down with Charles Bailey, Director of the Agent Orange Program in Vietnam for the Aspen Institute, formerly of the Ford Foundation, to discuss the ways in which Project Agent Orange could help support the overall binational goals of environmental clean up, advocacy and awareness, and humanitarian support for those affected by Agent Orange in Vietnam and the U.S. Together, with the help of his extern Julia Karpati of Swarthmore College, we are drafting plans for a Hands-On Summit to motivate individuals to turn sympathy into empathy into action. While the conference at UC Berkeley followed the model of an academic lecture and panel discussion, we hope to invigorate a new community of young leaders through participatory workshops that engage not only the minds, but the bodies and hearts of those with a commitment to social change. Stay tuned for more! We will likely pilot a program that culminates in Project Agent Orange's show at Dixon Place.

4. I have also been applying for several different grants that will allow me to bring the work of Project Agent Orange (and hopefully some members of the collective) to Vietnam to use movement-based community devised theater techniques to create a performance with individuals who are affected by Agent Orange. The goal would be to perform this piece, that was developed by the performers themselves, across small rural towns and larger cities alike in order to shift the stigma associated with disability in Vietnam to a perspective that is instead constructed around the ideas of agency, individuality, and potential.

Thus, as we move into this next phase of Project Agent Orange, that is focused not only on the development of aesthetically innovative work but also the commitment to engaging with the social sphere, we hope you will continue to support us on our journey that has only just begun!

Helicopters: sound and movement binaries

On Wednesday, the dancers and I had the great pleasure of working with musician collaborators Alex Hills and Trevor Williams to begin to explore how the soundscape of Project Agent Orange could exist symbiotically with the movement. I was interested in exploring how sound and movement could each maintain their sense of autonomy while also converging at points and diverging at others. I wanted the sound and movement to communicate: each with their own cadence, yet each with an ear to the ground, listening for the other’s next move.

How could each individual element breathe more life into the other?

In rehearsal, we focused on the “Helicopter” phrase, as the movement phrase was well settled in our bodies, and we had never found a fitting soundscape to accompany it. In revisiting the phrase, the dancers and I considered the difference created in the quality of movement when we transitioned between “piercing” and “rebounding.” Rather than constantly carrying tension in our bodies, how could the feeling of impending terror be achieved by the passage between full force and response? How could we communicate both the calm before the storm and the tempest itself?

When I originally created the Helicopter phrase, I was interested in the paradox that helicopters represented. I articulated these as diametrically opposed ideas though in reality they were probably more interwoven than the binary suggests. How did helicopters represent:

• Life and Death: the vehicle that flew in and airlifted injured soldiers and Vietnamese refugees alike vs. the metallic skeleton of a machine that sprayed herbicides and defoliants
• Salvation and Destruction
• Hope and Despair

How could the sound offer texture to this exploration while not merely illustrating the movement cadences?

In order to communicate these ideas, and establish the atmosphere of this rehearsal, I read a bit of the novel, The Unwanted, by Kien Nguyen, who describes his memory of the last helicopters to ever land in Vietnam. (Thanks Anthony Bui, for suggesting the book).

In response to the excerpt, Morgana articulated how quickly the image of the helicopter could shift from positive to negative; how the time between safety and fear was liminal, brief, startling. As such, we began to put these ideas into movement. The following is a short video of the beginning of that exploration.

for those who came before:

I am so grateful to have had the opportunity this weekend to meet Ben Quick, in person, after having exchanged many emails, phone calls, and notes about one another's work. I could tell that we understood each other on an aesthetic level, and I was happy to share the creative space with an artist who is working towards a similar end.

I also had the opportunity to share dinner with Heather Bowsher, Merle Ratner of the Vietnam Agent Orange Relief and Responsibility Campaign, Ngo Thanh Nhan macroactivist for Vietnam, and several other inspiring individuals who have paved the way when it comes to activism and legislation related to Agent Orange. These were the movers and the shakers of the decade. I was extremely humbled by the extent of work that had already been accomplished (much of which before I was born!) and I am excited by the potential of my involvement in the development of this work in my own avenue of change: movement and performance.

As such, I engaged in a brief discussion with Heather about the problematics and politics involved with engaging individuals with disabilities in a staged performance. She shared with me her hesitation about the sometimes exploitative nature of exhibiting disabled bodies on stage. Though we did not have the chance to delve much deeper into this topic, I am motivated to continue to explore how individuals can exist on stage as individuals rather than bodies as referents to some other message or agenda. Though we will continue to read visual labels onto the bodies we see, as we have become an increasingly visually-dependent culture and our heuristics for understanding the world can only do so much to articulate the nuances of our experience, I am interested in creating an experience that summons the idea of Agent Orange, while still remaining true to my knowledge and experience of the topic.

I think the key to doing this is to return to elemental and sensorial concepts void of imposed external narrative:

weight

light

energy exchange

fear

futility

gaze

memory

paradox

inheritance

touch

thirst

loss

With this return to elements, we are continuing to explore basic sensorial experience again: touch, taste, smell, sight. I asked my dancers this week to review the material and structure we had created, but to try and experience each moment newly, in the present.

We explored:

Space

finding the negative space

filling the holes in energy

seeking out energy and attaching yourself to it

Energy exchange--

Moving from external sources of energy to illuminate internal sources

imagining rays of light as heat and energy entering the body and propelling the work

Pacing

indulging in a moment, experiencing only a moment of a phrase and

"throwing the rest away"

Contagion

how pacing of others around us affect our work

how we the contrast in tempos between dancers causes a change in energy

exchange

FUNDRAISING SUCCESS!

THANK YOU!

Dear Backers,

Thanks to your generous contributions we have raised a total of $6,222 during our one-month online campaign!!! I am humbled by the amazing number of people who have come out to support this important work--there were a total of 121 online backers, 7 donors who sent in checks, and many more who showed their support by sharing our project through various online media platforms.

With the money raised, we have secured a spot at Dixon Place, and will perform on May 31, June 1, and June 2 at 9:30 pm in New York City. Make sure to start looking for airfare specials now as we would love to share this work with all of our valued donors in person!

In the meantime, there are many ways to stay connected with Project Agent Orange!

• Continue reading our Blog to stay up to date on recent news and progress!
• Join our Facebook page
• Follow us on Twitter! @ProjectAgentO
• It is not too late to donate! We are setting up a fund with a fiscal sponsor so that your future donations (or those of your friends who missed the deadline by mere minutes!) are tax-deductible!

AND, don't forget that many of you have valued rewards on the way!
We will be in touch with video updates, information about reserving your VIP tickets to the Spring show, and Works In Progress Showings. For those of you based in NYC, we will have our first Works In Progress showing on Wednesday, Dec 14th, 8pm at Chez Bushwick, 304 Boerum St, Brooklyn, NY. Hope to see you there!

Lastly, I cannot begin to express my sincerest gratitude for all of your support thus far. What once was a simple idea thought up on an L train into Manhattan, has now become an international project gaining publicity and support from collaborators in the non-profit sector, various artists, and policy makers. The work has just begun! Thank you for helping making Project Agent Orange a reality, and for believing in the ability of art to catalyze significant social change.

Much love and admiration,

Natalia Duong

Back to work!

Last night we had our first rehearsal since August

and while it felt like a lifetime since our last time together

stepping into Chez Bushwick felt just like home.

Many of us experienced large-scale life changes in our time apart--

some small but poignant, others grand and cataclysmic--

but we were happy to be sharing in the creative space once more.

The first half of rehearsal was dedicated to an exchange of ideas:

Where were people at in terms of thinking about the project?

What was the impact of having so many supporters on our Kickstarter campaign?

Which other administrative, personal, and bureaucratic relationships had been established?

The second half of rehearsal focused on sensorial experiences and energy exchange.

Since it had been so long since we had moved in the space together, I encouraged the dancers to elementarily explore the shared environment and the collective energy again. We focused on familiar modalities: sight and touch, and found new ones; smell and taste. We also explored notions of energy created by friction between body parts, between bodies and external surfaces, and internal qi. From this point we began to see how energy could be passed between dancers so that the exchange was actually tangible and somatically understood.

With this heightened awareness and attention to sensorial experiences of energy, we revisited some old phrase work and began to undermine the structure of the choreography that had already been created. Dancers like to call this "playtime," and rightfully so, as the exploratory process of learning to move newly in a previously learned pattern became our challenge.

I am energized and excited about the work to come!

Stay tuned and spread the word, Project Agent Orange is taking off!