The Leavers

Multimedia Performance
Writer: Trong Gia Nguyen

The Leavers is a performance work incorporating theater, movement, installation art, and video projection, weaving personal archives, modern newsreels, Ted Talks, bodybuilding competitions, monument building, extremist protests, and old Renault car ads into a fractured narrative that moves from the Vietnamese diaspora to a universal reckoning with displacement and "re-colonization." Its source material is video footage shot over a decade ago when artist Trong Gia Nguyen and David Raymond traveled cross-country to interview the fourteen members of Nguyen's family who left together on the last day of the Vietnam War and never spoke of it again. Refusing the platitudes of political correctness and the tropes of intersectionality, the work treats history as something fluid and fallible — where ignorance and faulty memory rewrite the past even as it collides with the present.

Status: Written and workshopped. Seeking presenting institution or producer.