Anh Vo: Babylift

Written, Choreographed, and Performed by Anh Vo.

Part of the Leslie-Lohman Museum Queer Theatre & Performance Residency.

*A solo show for no audience*

A fragmented and collaged multimedia solo work, BABYLIFT combines the terror and pleasure of erotic hauntings. Named after a 1975 mass evacuation of children from South Vietnam to the United States, resulting in a plane crash that killed 78 of those children, BABYLIFT confronts the afterlives of the Vietnam War (a.k.a. the Resistance War Against Imperialist America). Striving to queer linear masculinist history, Vo weaves archival material together with memories of the Civil Rights Movement, freedom fantasies of the 1960s, contemporary pop culture, and current leftist activism. These layers of narrative create an uncanny, abstract, yet emotionally-charged space that serves as both a memorial for the unmourned / unremembered and a reckoning for our collective complicity.

BABYLIFT was originally commissioned and workshopped at the Fresh Tracks program at New York Live Arts. It was further developed through residencies at Jonah Bokaer Arts Foundation, University Settlement (Performance Project Fellowship), Brooklyn Arts Exchange (Space Grants), New Dance Alliance (LiftOff), and Bridge Street Theater.

Featuring: Anh Vo
Scenic Designer: Kyle b. co
Lighting Designer: George Kan
Sound Design: Isaac Silber
Production Stage Manager: Delaney McDonough

Watch the recording of Babylift at Target Margin Theater, New York, NY.

Anh Vo is a Vietnamese choreographer, dancer, theorist, and activist and recipiant of The Leslie-Lohman Museum Queer Theatre & Performance Residency Fellowship. They create dances and produce texts about pornography and queer relations, about being and form, about identity and abstraction, about history and its colonial reality. Currently based in Brooklyn, they earn their degrees in Performance Studies from Brown University (BA) and New York University (MA). As a choreographer, they've created three evening-length performances, which are presented by Target Margin Theater, Brown University, and Production Workshop. Their artistic process has received support from Brooklyn Arts Council, Foundation of Contemporary Arts, Women and Performance, New York Live Arts (Fresh Tracks), Leslie-Lohman Museum, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Jonah Bokaer Arts Foundation, Tisch/Danspace, and the Performance Project Fellowship at University Settlement. As a writer, they are the Co-Editor at Critical Correspondence, a frequent contributor to Anomaly, and a blogger at Cultplastic