Under the skin

The Donohues' take on Vietnam

by Johnette Rodriguez

When the wrenching earthquake of a war has subsided, when the gunfire has stopped and the troops have gone home, the devastating after-shocks of war linger for generations. Gaping holes are left in families as well as buildings; lives as much as bodies have been shattered and left in pieces. Nowhere is that devastation more evident than in the faces of children, and at no time in this country's history was that fact so ignored as with the biracial orphans of Vietnam, 30,000 of them left behind in 1975 and finally allowed entry to the United States in 1987.

Maura and Eirene Donohue, growing up in Barrington in the '70s and '80s, knew very little about these children. Little, that is, until they were old enough to garner questions about themselves and their Irish-Vietnamese heritage.

"People always assumed that I didn't know my father," explained Maura Donohue, now a choreographer and dancer living in New York City. "I kept realizing that I was an exception to the rule. That made me stop and look at the other side of that experience -- what my life could have been like if my parents hadn't been the people that they are."

Maura and Eirene's parents met when her father was a naval officer in Vietnam. They moved to the States when Maura was three months old, finding a house in Barrington that was close to the naval base in Newport. They raised six kids there, Maura the oldest and Eirene the youngest, with two sisters and two brothers in between. Now a Providence resident and a recent Brown grad, Eirene read her prize-winning essay, "How to tell a true college story," as one of the two commencement speeches last year. She continues to pursue a career in writing.

Maura has followed a different muse: she was a member of Festival Ballet from 1980 to 1986, worked with Cumberland Company from 1987 to 1990, and choreographed several productions while at Barrington High School. Since her graduation from Smith, she has toured the country performing Peking Opera wu dan (woman warrior) roles; traveled to Europe and Asia in Andrei Serban/Elizabeth Swados's experimental operas; and has seen her own work staged from Seattle to Cincinnati. She established the dance theater ensemble called Maura Nguyen Donohue/In Mixed Company in 1995.

This weekend (April 6 and 7) at the Carriage House Theatre, Maura, Eirene and the members of In Mixed Company will perform a piece choreographed by Maura (with some text by Eirene) titled SKINning the SurFACE. The work is a collage of live music, slides, video, spoken words, and athletic movement that combines contemporary dance and traditional Asian forms, such as karate-based moves (Maura's currently working on her black belt) and the theatrical version of kung fu used in Peking Opera presentations. Drawing on text from Vietnamerica: The War Comes Home by Thomas A. Bass, Poems from a Prison Diary by Ho Chi Minh, and free-association writing by company members, SKINning the SurFACE poses universal questions about "father," "skin," and "home."

"If you're an Amerasian child, abandoned by both countries, what do you think of, when you think of `home'," Maura reflected. "What would it be like if that was denied in some way? `Skin?' The crime of being biracial was imprinted on the surface of your skin. Black skin, blue eyes, blond hair -- those were cause enough to deny you and your mother or your family schooling, housing."

" `Father' was the sort of rule for Amerasians, that you didn't know your dad," she continued. "What does a father mean to people? What does it mean to not have one?"

Maura and Eirene have just returned from a six-week trip to Vietnam, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and Dance Theater Workshop. It was Maura's fourth visit since she first returned to meet her mother's family in 1997; it was Eirene's second, since her whole family made a trip to Vietnam last summer. For Maura, these journeys have informed her dances. For Eirene, they confirmed her abiding connection to Vietnam and her Vietnamese family; she plans to return next year for an extended stay to write and to learn Vietnamese.

While in Vietnam, the Donohue sisters visited state-run dance schools, the national ballet, and a few independent artists and musicians. They became familiar with the ins and outs of government support of the arts and government control of them, with cultural officers making sure that the artists present Vietnam in the proper light and that their work fits in with certain values. Maura also set a dance piece on a Saigon-based ballet company.

Her recent visit to Vietnam gave fuel to a new piece Maura is developing, called Both, because she began to feel her biracial background as a summation, not a division.

"I feel that I have moments when I'm in Vietnam when I'm both cultures, just as I do here," Maura recounted. "I'm looking at the idea of being half from the other side, seeing "both" as the other side of half. It's not either/or. I'm not always in conflict."

Maura and Eirene have previously collaborated on a duet called Grin and Bear It; Eirene performed last year in Righteous Babes, set to the music of Ani DiFranco; and Eirene jumps into SKINning the SurFACE presentations whenever she can. They hope that audiences will come away from SKINning with a greater understanding of a specific historic situation to which most Americans had very little exposure.

"In a more general sense, it deals with a lot of father, mother, family relationships," noted Eirene. "Like a lot of Maura's work, it questions how your identity is formed and is often pulled between different parts of you."

"For me, the piece was created as if I caught myself in the mirror for a moment and thought, `What if?,' " Maura emphasized. "It's meant for you to walk away and think about it for a while. To contemplate another experience and your own. To think of the complexity of certain historical episodes. To think about this one from a different perspective. We've had an overload of stories from American GIs, but there are so many other stories from that time period that are worth looking at as well."

Maura and Eirene Donohue's is one of them.