TWO LITTLE KIDS by Anh Vo
Two Little Kids takes its name from a short story written in the late 1930s by the Vietnamese poet Thạch Lam. The story depicts a small, monotonous town languishing against the backdrop of French colonial occupation. Almost nothing happens: people enter and leave the frame, appearing and disappearing without dramatic consequences, moving through an atmosphere of despair and exhaustion. By extrapolating this stark reality of life to postwar contemporary Vietnam, Two Little Kids brings to life the monotonous oppression that defines the climate of war. War persists not as an event of the past, but as an unceasing present, permeating daily life and exerting an atmospheric pressure whose full weight is impossible to bear.
Premiered in 2023 at the American Academy of Arts and Letters and The Kitchen in New York, the first version of Two Little Kids addressed this atmospheric pressure primarily through humidity and sound feedback. This solo revival in Lisbon focuses on the body, which can no longer contain that pressure. The body becomes radically permeable: urine flows incessantly, while words keep spilling from the mouth, to the point where speaking becomes another form of excretion. In this state of uncontrollable leakage, there is neither beginning nor end, only an intensity that continues.
Based in Brooklyn and Hanoi, Anh Vo (b. Vietnam, 1995) choreographs and writes, working within the expanded field of performance. Her practice mobilizes the naked body in its various forms to make explicit the intertwining of power relations and spectral forces that traverse the flesh. Her work emerges from convergences between experimental performance in Lower Manhattan, performance art in Hanoi, and Vietnamese folk rituals. Vo cites as key influences Miguel Gutierrez’s queer identity and uncompromising excess, Moriah Evans’s speculative engagement with the depths of interiority, Julie Tolentino’s durational poetics of intimacy, Juliana May’s improvisational mastery, Tehching Hsieh’s existential sense of time, and Ngoc Dai’s guttural soundscape of postwar Vietnam. She holds a BA in Performance Studies from Brown University and an MA from New York University. Vo is currently a visiting lecturer in Sculpture at the Cooper Union.
