Isaac Silber

Sound Designer

Two Little Kids

Performance by Anh Vo and
Ethan Philbrick at the American Academy of Arts and Letters

June 2023

Two Little Kids is named after a short story written in the late 1930s by Vietnamese poet Thach Lam. The story depicts a dull small town withering away within the historical backdrop of the French colonial occupation. The story has no progression; people wander in and out of the picture, appear and disappear with no dramatic consequences, zombie around under utter despair and hopelessness. Extrapolating this condition of bare-life into post-war contemporary Vietnam, in which I believe most people do not live but only know how to survive, “Two Little Kids” uses dance as a medium to make felt the monotonous oppressiveness that is the weather of war. To me, war does not haunt as an event of the past. Rather, in a relentless ongoing-ness, war permeates the air as the weather, exerting an atmospheric pressure whose totality is impossible to bear.

Two Little Kids is presented as part of The Kitchen's Dance and Process, co-organized by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Dance and Process stages an interrogation of methods of choreographic and dance practice, whereby artists challenge default structures in their own work and the field at large. For this iteration of Dance and Process, The Kitchen partners with the American Academy of Arts and Letters who hosts the program during the Spring of 2023. While in residence at the Academy beginning in February, a cohort of artists Martita Abril, Jonathan González, and Anh Vo engaged in a group process of sharing work in progress and receiving feedback facilitated by Moriah Evans and Yve Laris Cohen, culminating in public performances of new works June 3–4, 2023. Initiated first in 1990 under the name Working in The Kitchen, Dance and Process is The Kitchen’s longest running series.

This project was supported by a grant from the Jerome Foundation.

I contributed sound system installation, and live sound design/scoring using feedback from a constellation of microphones, mixing boards, analog and digital effects processing units.