A Talk with Director Tony Le-Nguyen: "The improvisation and humanity in the art of cinema, drama and public art"

Date: Wednesday, 31/07/2019, từ 6:30PM – 8:30PM
Language: Vietnamese with translation into English

Entrance ticket :

- Ticketbox.vn: 120,000vnd (80,000vnd for students and Salon Saigon members)

- At the door: 150,000vnd (100,000 students and Salon Saigon members)

 Salon Saigon is pleased to present a talk about ‘The improvisation and humanity in the art of cinema, drama and public art’ with Vietnamese-Australian director Tony Le-Nguyen. For more than 20 years in the field of art, he has participated in many roles such as actor, writer, director and producer. He is also the author of some popular plays in Australia. Receiving an Australian government scholarship to study community cultural development around the world, Tony Le-Nguyen has been invited to teach in many countries such as America, Canada, Italy, Hong Kong...

Le-Nguyen began teaching drama at Blackbox, Hanoi from December, 2013 and directed his first Vietnamese 30 minutes drama "Mơ Chua" (Sour Apricots) in 2015. In June 2019, he co-founded Center for Improvisational Comedy Vietnam with the purpose of training and promoting various types improv comedy, creating a platform for improv enthusiasts where they can explore their passion. Curently, he is regularly traveling between Australia and Vietnam to teach film-making and drama to young people in the North-Central-South regions of Vietnam and to work as Head of Drama at Erato School of Music & Performing Arts and establish Méo DaNang Creative Centre with the purpose of supporting and teaching skills for disable people.

His cinematic and theatrical works focus on human issues and are composed in a variety of improvisational ways, typically shown in contemporary drama that he wrote and directed. Demonstrating an incomplete structure, his works evoke and elicit the actor's creativity and imagination, and bring the audience into a vague state that is mixed of conflicting feelings and thoughts. In these works, the compositions that produce improper functions, significations are inversed, shapes are dissociated, meanings are shattered have contributed to forming the relationship between audience and author by objectifying emotions and investigating the duality that develops through different interpretations.

About Tony Le-Nguyen

Tony Le-Nguyen was born in 1968 in Mekong Delta. He relocated in Australia and begun his career as a film actor in 1985. Over the past 20 years, Le-Nguyen has worked as an actor, writer, director and producer. He is currently the Executive Producer for Le-Nguyen Productions in Melbourne, Australia.

He is best known for his role as Tiger in Geoffrey Wright’s 1992 feature film Romper Stomper. He has also appeared in other television productions including: Stingers, SeaChange, Raw FM, G.P., Fast Forward, All Together Now, Embassy, Secrets, The Damnation of Harvey McHugh, Paradise Beach and Australia’s most wanted.

Between 1986 and 1987, Le-Nguyen toured with Mary Coustas in Handspan Theatre’s production A Change of Face written by Andrea Lemon and directed by Carmelina di Guglielmo. He worked on the Victorian Opera 1990 production of Madama Butterfly and performed in Theatreworks’ 1992 production of Titus, directed by David Pledger and Robert Draffin.

In May 1994, he founded Australian Vietnamese Youth Media with the support of Huu Tran and the theatre coordinator at the Footscray Community Arts Centre. The company received its first funding from the Queens Trust in 1995 to produce Chay Vong Vong, a play he wrote and directed with the Vietnamese Community in Footscray, Melbourne. The following year, this organisation received funding from the Australia Council for the Arts and the Sidney Myer Foundation to re-stage Chay Vong Vong as a fully professional production at the Napier Street Theatre, in South Melbourne. In 1998 he was commissioned by Urban Theatre Projects to write and direct “Chay Vong Vong” with the Vietnamese Community in Sydney, Australia

In 1996, he co-directed Worlds Apart with Gary McKechnie, a half-hour Television drama about generation conflict within a Vietnamese Australian family. Worlds Apart was first screened on SBS Television in December 1997.

He was awarded the Community Cultural Development Fellowship by the Australia Council for the Arts in 2000.

Le-Nguyen began teaching drama at Blackbox, Hanoi from December, 2013 and directed his first Vietnamese 30 minutes drama "Mơ Chua" (Sour Apricots) in 2015. In June 2019, he co-founded Center for Improvisational Comedy Vietnam with the purpose of training and promoting various types improv comedy, creating a platform for improv enthusiasts where they can explore their passion. Curently, he is regularly traveling between Australia and Vietnam to teach film-making and drama to young people in the North-Central-South regions of Vietnam and to work as Head of Drama at Erato School of Music & Performing Arts and establish Méo DaNang Creative Centre with the purpose of supporting and teaching skills for disable people.

For more information about the artist and his works: https://www.youtube.com/user/LeNguyenProductions