Performance “The Importance of Being Earnest”

Fri 28 Oct 2011, 8 pm
Sat 29 Oct 2011, 4 pm
The Youth World Theatre, 125 Cong Quynh, District 1, HCM City

Dragonfly Theatre, with the support of the Saigon Players, is proud to present Oscar Wilde’s masterpiece and one of the most hilarious comedies of all times. The Importance of Being Earnest is the first professional English language theatre in Vietnam to bring together Vietnamese and Western actors.

The Importance of Being Earnest is the first professional English language theatre in Vietnam to bring together Vietnamese and Western actors. It stars Lan Phuong, one of the most prestigious actresses in the Vietnamese film and television industry, in one of the lead female roles. Collaborating with this Vietnamese icon, the show’s male leads are Aaron Toronto, the most famous western actor/director in the Vietnamese arts realm, and Brian Riedlinger, artistic director of the International Choir HCMC, who performed in the shows “Annie Get Your Gun”, and “A Christmas Carol”.

Ticket prices
VIP: 500,000 VND
Front: 400,000 VND
Back: 300,000 VND
Balcony: 200,000 VND

Special student price on production of Vietnamese student ID: 100,000 VND for balcony seats.

Tickets available at: tickets@dragonflyvietnam.com

Mekong Merchant, 23 Thao Dien, An Phu, District 2
Sheridan’s Irish Bar, 17/13 Le Thanh Ton, District 1

If you are affiliated with a school and wish to book seats please contact the director at director@dragonflyvietnam.com

Exhibition and Grand Finale of “Hope Box Happening”

Exhibition: 26 Oct – 10 Nov 2011
Grand Finale and Finissage: Sat 05 Nov, 6 pm
MAI GALLERY, 113 Hang Bong street, Hanoi, Vietnam
Art Talk Café, 12 Quan Su Str.

You are invited to our special Grand Finale of the event on November 5th 2011. At 18:00 in the Art Talk Café, artists from the Hope Box Angels network from Hanoi, Amsterdam and New York create a spectacular Grand Finale. At 19:00 Mai Gallery presents a special ‘Finissage’ featuring the latest HBX works of art made during art-actions in and around Hanoi between October 25 and November 6. The whole exhibition will be closed on November 10.

Hope Box (HBX) a worldwide program, collecting creative minds from all over the world combining fine arts, graffiti, music and other art-forms in various multidisciplinary projects.

Since 1991 hundreds of artists from 36 countries have joined the project with the intention to communicate and to exchange ideas so new visions can arise in wonderful collective works of art. The network of the participating artists is called Hope Box Angels.

Since the year 1993 Hope Box has successfully initiated art-projects in Vietnam and numerous talented and divergent Vietnamese artists have been participating in the Hope Box projects. The Mai Gallery has been hosting several successful interactive exhibitions presenting artists from Vietnam and beyond since 1995.

For futher informations, please contact:
MAI GALLERY
Add: 113 Hang Bong street, Hanoi, Vietnam
Tel: (84-4)39380568
Mobile: ( 84 ) 91 351 4843

Screening of “Liberté”

Sat 29 Oct 2011, 3 pm
IDECAF, 28 Le Thanh Ton, Distr 1, HCMC

You are invited to the film screening of “Liberté” stared by Marc Lavoine, Marie-Josée Croze, James Thierrée.

Synopsis: In World War II, Théodore, veterinary and mayor of village , together with Lundi, primary teacher, made friends with Tzigan people living near them. Pressure of polices under Vichy regime and Gestapo force increases and risks exist everywhere, everytime…

Language: French film with Vietnamese subtitles.

Ticket price: 15 000 VND.
Tickets are available at IDECAF.

Painting Exhibition “Pause”

Opening: Tue 01 Nov, 6 – 8 pm
Exhibition: 01 – 11 Nov 2011
Himiko Cafe, 324Bis, Dien Bien Phu, Ward 11, District 10, HCMC

PAUSE is the exhibition title for 9 new artworks of Nguyen Son. These 9 artworks is the beginning of Nguyen Son’s “Immigration”, an artwork project which was started in Europe since June 2011. 9 finished artworks including photos and paintings with equal sizes are different in term of expression language but connected by Nguyen Son’s feelings as a diary from journey days.

The uniqueness of PAUSE exhibition is that the artist simultaneously shows two different spaces with equal size. 45x70cm digital photos captured images of street artists and daily life activities in a reporting manner at every place where Nguyen Son had passed by, in which colors at certain parts were purposely changed from original photos. Next to the photos are paintings (which have the same size) that describe subtle spaces of the mind, with blur spots that stand out. The absurds in reality (that are shown in photos) and the realistic through fictionalization (in the paintings) are what Nguyen Son aims toward: making blurs the boundary of the mind.

Overall, PAUSE of Nguyen Son presents a view angle from a Vietnamese artist about the distant Europe.
Author’s words

“Prague, Roma, Paris, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Antwerpen…

I – On street of strangers.

The street artists with their art are the signs to help me go without any communication between thousands of melodic rhythm of life.

Yes, it is true that this world has many boring stories!
Yes, it is true that human hearts are divided with countless conflicts!
Yes, it is true that my burning passion can be defeated by common sense reasoning!
But it is alright! Night could be long like the white night that I had been through, then still day immediately followed after. Yet I still found my path in daily life with performances of street artists.

Were they really acting? No – I think: that was their lives that were presented by themselves. There is no difference between them and those angels who guard the sacred garden that appears right in our mortal world. They showed me that somebody’s life could be either large or small depending on that same person’s intuition. For me, I always want to make blurs the boundary of my life.”

Halloween at Factory

Sat 29 Oct 2011, 8 pm
Factory Bar, 11A Bao Khanh Lane

You are invited to a Halloween night at Factory with contemporary music by Đào Anh Khánh (Hà Nội), Marc Gatani (Newyork),Brett Zweiman (New York), Simon Redington (London) and Michelle Stewart (USA).

Đào Anh Khánh reveals: “6 years ago in New York, the two experimental artists Gatani and Brett Zweimancach and me, Dao Anh Khanh from Vietnam were so engaged in impromptu, energetic performances for months. It was the best days of my life.

And now we are united in Factory in Hanoi to relive the moments with Brett playing electronic music, computer, guitar… Marc plays his percussion… and me and my vocal to the dreamy music land which you will have to discover it yourself.”

Art Exhibition “Nowhere”

Opening: Fri 28 Oct, 6 pm
Exhibition: 29 Oct – 20 Nov 2011, 9.30 am – 6 pm
Japan Foundation Center for Cultural Exchange in Vietnam, 27 Quang Trung Str, Hanoi

“NOWHERE” by three emerging artists: Motoyuki Shitamichi, Mamoru Okuno from Japan, and Hanoi artist Tuan Mami.

This exhibition is the first attempt of 3 artists, after finding congenial spirits in each other in Tokyo, to create new artworks through their observations and researches in Hanoi. Shitamichi and Mamoru stayed for a month in Hanoi for this project.

Mamoru has been blogging about the development of the show here:

For more information about the exhibition, see Hanoi Grapevine’s previous post.

Exhibition “It’s All the Same Everywhere”

Opening: Tue 01 Nov, 5.30 pm
Exhibition: 02 – 05 Nov 2011
Vietnam Fine Arts Museum, 66 Nguyen Thai Hoc St., Hanoi

You are invited to the solo exhibition “It’s all the same everywhere”  of artist Hoang Duy Vang. According to Natalia Kraevskaia “The title of the exhibition refers to the artist’s concern about the reality surrounding him.  For Hoang Duy Vang ‘the same’ doesn’t mean staying same in the stream of time, it’s about the universal comprehensive and everlasting process of change, transformation and metamorphosis in our life”.

Read more about critique by Natalia Kraevskaia about the exhibition below:

“Hoang Duy Vang’s new series of work is very different. His bright colored canvases remind us of the chaotic world of Jackson Pollocks’ energetic paintings which had been called “action paintings” or “gesture paintings.” Like the great American master, Vang puts an emphasis on the dynamics created by the festival of lines, strong brush strokes and vivid chromatic spectrum. Abandoning the traditional concept of the composition and of central motif, the young artist plays with chaotic lines and unfinished shapes in order to convey the fluidity and changeability of reality and to transfer his most personal feelings directly to the canvas. The viewer gets the impression that the visual layers in Vang’s paintings overlap as he or she tries to find the recognizable shapes. Sometimes one can succeed in this laborious search and recognize in the superimposed forms the outlines of a person’s face. Examples include “Wedding Day” or “Heaven in the Street;” there are human silhouettes in “Family,” “Kiss” or “Adam and Eve,” and even animal horns in “Human Beings and Animals” and “Buffalo Fighting Festival.” Meanwhile we shouldn’t forget about the relative meaning of the titles in Hoang’s works: the artist articulates his own suggestions and evocation, but the spontaneous artistic mess, high level of abstraction and turbulence of the forms give room to our own interpretation.

Both the abstract landscapes and expressionistic scenes in this series feature the dramatic movement of life and reflect the artist’s improvised forceful gesture. The element of dynamism, frantic spontaneity and extremely strong application of paint in Abstract Expressionism was explained by the critic Harold Rosenberg, who invented the term “action painting” in 1952, in this quote: “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” For Hoang Duy Vang both aspects are important: on the one hand he is an impulsive “actor” who shares his emotions with others, on the other – he says that the relation of artist to society, of artist to public, of artist and artwork are also at the center of his reflections.

These two approaches overlap one another and result in an impressive number of paintings where the artist simultaneously aspires to display his subjective experience employing dynamic gestural marks and elicits emotional reactions from the public using contrasting radiant colors. The paintings in the exhibition are not only connected to each other by their visual vocabulary, they also speak to the exhibited art objects/sculptures which share the similar vivid coloration and, through their obvious yet formal symbolism (like the work “Me”, 2011) define the personality of the artist himself. ”

Exhibition “Moment”

Opening: Sat 29 Oct, 5 pm
Exhibition: 29 Oct – 29 Nov 2011
Artlink Gallery, Floor 11, 3D Center Building, Duy Tan, Cau Giay Dist, Hanoi

With a hope to be reunited with some friends from university, the six graduated artists from University of Industrial Arts: Vu Viet Hung, Nguyen Ba Kien, Hoang Thi Bich Lien, Nguyen Chi Long, Nguyen Tran Minh and Ho Nam have organized the exhibition “The Moment” comprising of 38 paintings which are various captures of the moment, different level of feelings and reflect all the ups and downs of life.

While Vu Viet Hung’s lacquer paintings have traditional Asian style, in contrast, Nguyen Ba Kien’s painting has something simple in his choice of colour and drawing style.

Ho Nam focuses more on flowers, trees and everything nature has to offer. Nguyen Tran Minh tries to capture the best of the moment.

Nguyen Chi Long’s paintings make people think about all the infinite. And Hoang Thi Bich Lien’s paintings has a gentle, too fragile and girly touch.

Piano Recital of Trang Trinh

Thu 03 Nov 2011, 8 pm
L’Espace, 24 Trang Tien, Hanoi

You are invited to the piano solo performance of Trang Trinh at L’Espace. Graduated from the prestigious London Royal Academy of Music, Trang Trinh has received many awards including the 1st Price of Paganini Festival which brings her great chances to perform under the guidance of Edward Gardner.

Trang was selected to attend many masterclasses with famous pianists and professors such as Leslie Howard, Jean-Bernard Pommier, Alexander Satz, Simon Mulligan, Rolf Hind, Martin Helmchen, Endre Hegedus.

She has received many awards including Francis Simmer Prize, Gretta GM Parkinson Prize, Lilian Davis Prize. In 2006, she is the 1st winner of Festival Paganini, and she is known to the London audience with Dance of the Dead of Franz Liszt led by conductor Edward Gardner.

She has performed in many Festivals all over the world such as Beethoven Unwrapped (London 2008) and Crescendo (Hungary 2010 – performing Prelude Feux d’artifice of Debussy and the performance was broadcasted in Hungarian Television).

In 2010, Trang Trinh completed her Master degree with distinction and since then, she has performed in Europe including Vienne, Dublin, Belfast, Enns, London. In 2011, she will perform in Madrid, Cantebury, and other cities in England with program similar to The Piano’s Journal in Hanoi Opera House.

Ticket price: 100 000 VND
Special price for members of L’Espace and students: 50 000 VND
Tickets are available at L’Espace from 03 Oct 2011.

Screening of” Bi n’aie pas Peur”

Fri 04 Nov 2011, 8 pm
L’Espace, 24 Trang Tien, Hanoi

You are invited to a Vietnamese film screening titled “Bi, Don’t be Afraid” of director Phan Dang Di, stared by Kieu Trinh, Thanh Minh, Ha Phong and Tran Tien at L’Espace. The film has received many awards in international film festivals.

Film synopsis: In an old house in Hanoi, Bi, a 6-year-old child lives with his parents, his aunt and their cook. His favorite playgrounds are an ice factory and the wild grass along the river. After being absent for years, his grandfather, seriously ill, reappears and settles at their house. While Bi gets closer to his grandfather, his father tries to avoid any contact with his family. Every night, he gets drunk and goes and see his masseuse, for whom he feels a quiet strong desire. Bi’s mother turns a blind eye on it. The aunt, still single, meets a 16-year-old young boy in the bus. Her attraction to him moves her deeply.

Awards:

- “Best Cinematography” Award và Best First Feature award at the 21st Stockholm International Film Festival;
- SACD ACID/CCAS award of the International Critics Week at the 63rd Cannes Film Festival;
- Special Mention Award at Vancouver International Film Festival 2010 and London Film Festival in 2010.

Languages: Vietnamese film with French subtitles

Ticket price: 20 000 VND
Special price for members of L’Espace and students: 10 000 VND
Tickets are available at L’Espace.

Toyota Classics Concert 2011

Thu 03 Nov 2011, 8 pm
HCMC Opera House, No. 7 Lam Son Square, D.1, HCMC

Toyota Motor Vietnam (TMV) would like to announce that Toyota Classics 2011 – the 14th Toyota Classics held in Vietnam by Toyota Motor Corporation and Toyota Motor Vietnam in cooperation with Vietnam Performing Arts Centre (Dept of Performing Arts – Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism of Vietnam) – is going to take place only one night at Hochiminh City Theatre on November 3rd, 2011.

This year, the Northeast German Philharmonic Orchestra makes a welcome return to Toyota Classics to perform exciting new arrangements under the conduction of talented and masterly conductor Thomas Dorsch, with the unique touch of Pamela Nicholson and Vasko Vassilev. Especially, with the participation of Vietnamese young talented soprano Pham Thi Duyen Huyen, Toyota Classics 2011 delivers an enviable musical heritage, blending Tradition with Contemporary, meeting East and West.

So far, Toyota Classics concerts were held successfully, becoming one of the most expected music events of the year. Toyota Classics presents Toyota’s efforts not only to make contribution to culture development of Vietnam but also to create an opportunity for local musical students and teachers to learn experiences in performance of world-famous orchestras. All ticket proceeds are used for “Toyota Scholarship for Vietnamese Young Music Talents”.

The ticket will be sold from 15/10/2011 at the Ticket Office of the Hochiminh City Theatre (7 Lam Son Square, Ben Nghe Ward, District 1, Hochiminh City).

Ticket prices: Class A (800,000/ticket), Class B (600,000/ ticket), Class C (300,000/ ticket).

Hotline for contact:  0169 9296 988 or (08) 382 999 76

For more information, please contact:
Mr. Tran Quoc Hung
General Manager
Corporate Affairs & Product Planning and Pricing Division
Toyota Motor Vietnam
Tel: (84-4) 35536885.
Fax: (84-4) 35536841- 42
Email: prhungtq@toyotavn.com.vn

Ms. Le Thi Huong Diu
PR Manager
Public Relations Department
Toyota Motor Vietnam
Tel: (84-4) 35536878 – 98 (Ext: 152)
Fax: (84-4) 35536841- 42
Email: kldiulh@toyotavn.com.vn

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