When I arrived at the Saigon dance studio one morning last week, 16 dancers were going through their paces to recorded piano music. They had probably all seen me before, with the exception of the Dutch lady who was in charge of the rehearsal, but the only one I recognized was Sung A Lung who had made his debut as an HBSO choreographer last year.

Dutch choreographer Joost Vrouenraets has arrived in HCMC to prepare for contemporary dance show Café Saigon on June 30 at the Saigon Opera House

This was later to become a session dedicated to the upcoming contemporary dance show Café Saigon, due to premier on June 30 at the Saigon Opera House. But for the moment the whole company was limbering up to its routine selection of piano pieces deemed especially suitable for ballet dancers anywhere in the world.

Watching these highly professional dancers, in essence the cream of the cream of Saigon’s ballet-dancing world, I was struck by how the human body is in its way perfect, and dance merely exhibits this perfection in ways created by the ingenuity of a choreographer, or a series of choreographers down the ages.

But the body also has its limitations. It is what it is, with two arms not three or four, five fingers, five toes and so on. These both offer possibilities and impose limitations.

But it’s the case that the greatest achievements in dance are easily recognized as such by most dancers. It’s also an international art. It’s true that in, for instance, Balinese dance it’s the upper half of the body that is used, with the lower half hardly used at all. But in that use of the upper half of the body, the limitations and possibilities imposed by the human form are the same in Bali as anywhere else.

It really was a lovely experience to sit watching these extremely accomplished dancers going through their motions, while outside the June sun blazed down on the gently moving trees. They seemed so affected by the music that they couldn’t help moving their bodies while watching, even when a different set of dancers was actually performing. At one point there were mostly sets of four dancers, then everyone was back dancing together as the pre-rehearsed sequence evolved.

Spinning across the studio one by one came next, not without some problems of loss of balance here and there. Shoulder shaking followed, then finger shaking, then a more serene movement. Suddenly it was 10 a.m., and the general practice was over for the morning.

It was then that the second Dutch choreographer and dancer, Joost Vrouenraets, appeared, together with one of HBSO’s two principal choreographers, Nguyen Phuc Hung. They had been looking, eventually successfully, for items to furnish a Saigon coffee-shop 60 years or more ago, what was to be the stage set for Café Saigon.

Vrouenraets (who has danced with Maurice Bejart’s company), and his colleague Maite Guerin, had come to Vietnam from the Netherlands where in Maastricht they run a contemporary dance group called Gotra. Together they were piecing together sequences that will eventually constitute Café Saigo.

And so it was that the 16 dancers were reduced to ten, the five couples who will constitute the cast of the new work. These ten now began to rehearse movements they had learnt already, under the leadership of Vrouenraets and Guerin. The era of the eventual piece will be mid-20th century, though only vaguely so.

Just before I left, the dancers, directed by Guerin, were going through a sequence danced to the count of eight, to the accompaniment of distinctly rhythmic and energetic music. “I want to open your minds,” Vrouenraets later told the dancers. “You have accomplished a lot already.”

Café Saigon will have its premiere at the Saigon Opera House on June 30. A performance previously announced for June 29 has been cancelled.

SGT