New Earth Theatre in association with the Museum of the Home presents Sonic Phở – The Audio Dining Experience, a chef’s demonstration followed by a supper club in a traditional Vietnamese restaurant.
Whilst eating, guests will listen to an accompanying audio story with poetry created by Anna Nguyen and award-winning sound designer Nicola T. Chang.
Sonic Phở has been developed to reveal stories about the Vietnamese diaspora and create an intimate audio experience that shares Vietnamese food and culture with the wider community, as a part of the Mayor’s London Borough of Culture 2022 programme We Are Lewisham.
Anna Nguyen said today, “I’ve grown up in a world of rice, noodles and roast dinners all rolled into one, making me a hybrid of cultures; this informs a lot of my work. It drives me to find the serious, the intimate and the antidotal of these two worlds. As a neurodivergent artist, my work is multisensory. It delights me to discover theatre that is found in the unexpected: around a dinner table, in a laundromat or on street corners. For this reason, I am drawn to making work that is moulded into everyday life, both intimate and collective. My fascination with my Vietnamese heritage led me to working in depth with Vietnamese and global majority communities. Here, I discovered my love for working with non-theatre-based people and thriving on empowering the less prominent of society.”
Thảo returns home every week to visit her mother. One routine evening, her mother invites her round for her famous home cooked Chicken Phở, the best in Southeast London – her words, not Thảo’s.
Mother is obsessed with feeding. However, Thảo has a different kind of hunger. As she sits down at the table, questions and longing rise from her hot steaming bowl.
A story of redemption, restoration and generational healing that will ripple out across cultures and time. Connect to the food of our motherland and understand more about the person behind the bowl who cooked it for us.
Sonic Phở runs Saturday 11 June 2022 in Deptford and Saturday 18 June 2022 in Hackney. More information can be found here.
