Reframing tradition: Le Quy Duong’s festival theatre

In Vietnam, Le Quy Duong has been dubbed the “king of festivals,” producing and directing performance spectacles across Vietnam for major government organised events, where festivals are big business, facilitating trade and highlighting economic strengths of each Vietnamese province. In Australia, Le Quy Duong is better known as the writer of Meat Party, one of Australia’s seminal Asian-Australian plays and part of his War Trilogy, a tribute to those suffering in the Vietnam war (1962-1975). This paper investigates Le Quy Duong’s transition from writing and directing in Australian theatre (1994-2004) to influencing Vietnamese festivals, through utilising concepts of “place-making,” with particular reference to the use of traditional Vietnamese performance forms. As specific examples of Le Quy Duong’s creations, this paper analyses Journey to Create the Motherland (2010), from the 2010 Hue Festival as well as the opening ceremony of the second Vietnam Rice Festival, held in Soc Trang in 2011. Janys Hayes is a Lecturer in Performance and Theatre in the Faculty of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong. She has been a member of the Working Group on Popular Entertainments for the International Federation of Theatre Research (IFTR) since 2009.