Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2006 | 7:30 a.m.
What: "Together"
When: 8 p.m. Friday; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday
Where: UNLV's Judy Bayley Theatre
Tickets: $15; $5 for students, seniors and military.
Information: 895-2787.
Minh Tran was 13 years old and studying Vietnamese folk dance in Saigon when he was recruited to fight Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge.
His head shaved for battle, he soon learned his parents had different plans - freedom. They paid for him to be sent away with his brothers, then burned his baby photos and other evidence of his existence.
He spent six months on the run in Vietnam, sleeping on beaches and at bus stations, even when a mosquito net was the only thing that separated him from a working prostitute.
On a pitch-black night, Tran and his brothers were crammed onto a riverboat with other refugees, taken to sea, then left at the mercy of a current that would take the boat to land - any land. Pirates robbed the stranded refugees. When there was nothing left to take, some were raped.
The rest of us watched TV and witnessed the crowded refugee camps and plight of the Vietnamese "boat people" in search of a home. Tran was in the thick of it.
"I was frightened to death. I'm still frightened," says Tran, a 40-year-old modern-dance choreographer now living in Portland, Ore.
It's a story, he says, that always influences his art no matter how subtle or overt.
Sitting in the shade outside UNLV's Alta Ham Fine Arts Center, he laughed with watery eyes at the horrific absurdity of it all. He'd break from his tale to greet passing students with a hug or friendly chitchat.
The popular instructor, here on an eight-week residency, is part of UNLV's guest-artist program that brings in professional dancers and choreographers from various backgrounds.
"We try to bring to our students vibrant artists from the outside just to give them that edge," says Louis Kavouras, UNLV dance department chairman who performed with Tran in the early 1990s. "It's important to expose them. It's interesting when you notice what culture brings to traditional form. It's beautiful to see the difference and how the artists play into it."
For this, Tran is ideal. By the time he had left Vietnam, he had invested many years studying Peking Opera and was trained in ways that students in the United States could hardly fathom: thrown into a cold river to develop voice projection and required to stand on one leg on a pedestal for an hour to develop balance.
"For the first year, all I did was learn to walk," Tran says, smiling. "Walk like a bachelor, walk like a warrior, walk like a drunken clown, walk like a concubine, walk like a man - and woman." After intense observation, their paths would be determined. Tran would be a concubine: "Wouldn't you know it," he says with a laugh. "I was never strong enough to be a warrior."
But his discipline and skill enhance his choreographic intensity. Tran also trained in Thai, Javanese and Vietnamese dance, and he appreciates "the essence of timing" in Asian dance. He says Butoh, which originated in Japan after World War II, is painstakingly slow. "So slow that the guy moves across the stage in one hour. It's almost in one sense, painfully beautiful."
Tran's last piece with his company, Minh Tran & Company, was similarly slow, meditative and detailed.
For the UNLV students, he took the opposite approach with a dance titled "Furious Angels": highly technical steps performed at breakneck speed. The eight-minute piece, set to music from "The Matrix," is so fast that in one section the students go against the speed, going slow to give the perception that they're going so fast that the only way to capture the image is in slow motion.
At one point Tran asks students to walk so perfectly slowly across the stage so that the fringe on their costumes does not move.
This way, he says, the students learn to not take movement for granted, to shift weight and carve through space.
"His movement is really hard," says Heather Farrell, a 20-year-old dance major from Colorado, referring to "Furious Angels." "I love it though. It's very challenging. It's constant cardio. It has beautiful patterns."
The dance will be included in "Together," a program presented Friday and Saturday that also includes students and faculty from Korea National Sport University in Seoul. The concert, designed as a uniting of cultures, will include traditional Korean dance, ballet, jazz and contemporary dance by UNLV faculty, including a piece that Kavouras choreographed in 1990. Called "My Brother," it will combine three dancers from Las Vegas and three dancers from Korea in a trio of duets.
After performing "Together" here, UNLV students will head to Korea to perform it in Seoul.
Tran will eventually head home to Portland, where he and his brothers landed, finished school and were reunited with their parents.
Tran has choreographed dances about his past and even performed in Vietnam.
But, he says, "for refugees, the definition of home is such a vast experience. To call a place home - no, it's a journey."
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