Ea Sola takes journey through war

How far does a war echo down the generations?

Ea Sola is a choreographer-performance artist who grew up in Vietnam during the war, leaving the country in 1974. In 1989, she returned to study traditional Vietnamese dance and music — and has since put what she learned to use in edgy, multimedia stage works related to the Vietnam War.

"Drought and Rain, Vol. 2" is the latest of these, and it manages to be simultaneously striking, energetic and dry. (An earlier "Vol. 1" used elderly Vietnamese women who had once been dancers. "Vol. 2" gathers top-flight performers from the Vietnam National Opera Ballet of Hanoi.)

The show opens on an unsettling note, in utter silence, with an enormous pair of eyes, disembodied from any face, projected in sharp focus on a screen at the rear of the stage. The eyes look left, right, up, down, shifting with suspicion and wariness. And then, to a metronomic plink! of sound, dancers in silhouette walk uncertainly into view as the eyes fade away.

Lining the bottom of the backstage screen are family photographs that fail to catch the attention of the dancers, whose movements increasingly resemble private languages that bar them from understanding or interacting with one another. A few shreds of flute-solo and a flurry of whispers dot the continuing silence. As a whole, however, this prologue is so spare that there's almost nothing for the viewer to grab onto.

One thing there is, though: tension — fed by the nine dancers' mechanistic, sometimes spastic movement, and the menacing, drummed score by Nguyen Xuan Son.

Gradually the dancers connect with each other. The men display clean-lined animal confidence with dramatic airborne flourishes. The women serve more as a chorus: a jittery onstage presence, only erratically breaking out of unison.

The troupe's rigorous paces culminate in a moment when these dancers, born after the war, absorb images of war — and imitate them to disturbing effect. Ea Sola, in her program notes, says the piece aims to illuminate "what a young person thinks and feels about a war that he or she does not know."

Handling every aspect of the show — including lights, video, set and costumes — she gets her point across, with a severity that impresses but doesn't entirely engage.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com