A chaotic mess along with blind minstrels.

Many fun interactive games at Xam Xe Duyen 1 - Photo: Organizing Committee

Many people are hesitant to listen to Xẩm (a type of Vietnamese folk music), perhaps because it's a form of folk music from a bygone era, and they worry they don't fully understand the musical rules to appreciate it completely.

But at the Xẩm performance of "Xẩm Xe Duyên ," the initial awkwardness only lasted for the first few minutes, and then everyone became engrossed in the performance.

First, it's because of a unique idea. It's about connecting Xẩm – a 700-year-old art form – with a new concept recently introduced to Vietnam: Pride Month, a month to celebrate gender diversity, or more broadly, to celebrate the multifaceted nature of love.

We often think that "sexual liberation" is something new we learned from the West, but few realize that the spirit of liberation has long been present in Vietnamese folk music (xẩm).

One female audience member even pointed out that young Vietnamese singers now face fierce backlash on TikTok just for daring to touch on the topic of sexuality, while our ancestors dared to compose songs that were a hundred times bolder.

Xẩm (Vietnamese folk singing): FIRST LOVE - Tô Minh Cường

Opening the performance with a famous love ballad titled "First Love Meets First Love," "Brother Xam" Ngo Van Hao explained the origin of the familiar folk theme: "Today, first love meets first love / Just like Kim Trong meeting Kieu during the Qingming Festival."

The idea is that both personality and feelings are a matter of chance encounters; feelings don't necessarily have to be romantic love, there are countless kinds of feelings in the world. Isn't that a testament to how modern our ancestors were compared to modern times, a time when the distinction between "personality" and "feeling" is very clear, otherwise it would be considered... "ambiguous" or "illegible"?

And as the blind minstrels sang, the audience was met with more and more gasps of surprise and amazement.

It turns out that what people today categorize as soulless terms like "trap boy" and "trap girl"—referring to people who enjoy playing with other people's feelings—were told in xẩm (a type of Vietnamese folk singing) from ancient times, and were far more charming, both vulgar and full of emotion, highly satirical yet subtly nuanced.

As in the poem "Wild Pineapple Without Thorns," with fertility imagery scattered throughout, such as "plain rice cakes," "sticky rice cakes," "green bananas," "pineapple thorns longer than spikes," etc.

Ultimately, the worship of reproductive organs has always been at the core of an agricultural culture.

Even the four pleasures of Vietnamese life include sex. So what's there to be ashamed of when talking about sex?

But that's not all; when they perform "Anh hàn nồi" (The Man Welding the Pot), a rarely performed xẩm song, perhaps because of its boundless cheerfulness and spontaneity, the audience is even more impressed by the humor of the elders.

The song is about a guy who repairs pots and pans, and from the seemingly ordinary image of those pots and pans, we realize that this guy is actually a womanizer, sleeping with just anyone. How audacious!

The Tet Xam singing show with the theme "Chieu Hoa Ke Cho" (Flower Screen of Ke Cho Market) was organized by the Vietnam Center for Promotion and Dissemination of Intangible Cultural Heritage in early 2024 - Photo: TIEU TUNG

At that day's blind date performance , some people had registered in advance, some just happened to be there, some had heard blind date music many times before, and some were hearing it for the first time. But at the end of the day, when the blind date singers said, "It's time to go home," everyone lingered, begging the singers to sing a few more lines.

Even the elderly, who usually prefer to go home early, lingered a little longer, "expressing their feelings through poetry" by having the blind street singer sing for them: "Today is Sunday and it's raining / I'm so engrossed in listening to the street singers that I don't want to go home yet."

Xẩm Xe Duyên is a program by the Chèo 48H group - I Chèo Return to My Homeland, which just celebrated its 10th anniversary. Perhaps because they are young, because they are Gen Z, they can easily talk about the "wacky" and unconventional aspects of this traditional art form.

For a long time, we have tended to place it on the altar with reverence, forgetting that it is a folk art form, and being folk, it is spontaneous, playful, and may completely contradict orthodox discourses on speech and conduct.

Even audience members who never write poetry can write poems that day (or ask ChatGPT to write them for them) for the folk singers to perform.

The song "Wild Pineapple Without Thorns" contains the line "shaking and jostling, jostling and jostling" - a line that encapsulates the spirit of matchmaking, a spirit that our ancestors already possessed, even without any sexual revolutions from the West.

Source: https://tuoitre.vn/xoc-xa-xoc-xech-cung-xam-2024063009453183.htm