Australian singer set to impress with Vietnamese traditional songs

Australian singer Eleanor Clapham, or Hoang Lan, is the first foreigner to master the ancient art of tuong and cheo. She has returned to Vietnam to release her debut album “‘The Awakening” this June.
In 2006 Eleanor Clapham, 23, attracted a wave of attention when she performed a one-woman show broadcast across Vietnam that showcased her mastery of ancient Vietnamese song, dance and acting. In this midst of her sudden success, Eleanor completely disappeared from the music scene, leaving people wondering where she had gone.
Four years later she has returned to Vietnam to release her debut album “The Awakening.” On June 26, 2010 she will perform at the Hanoi Opera House, demonstrating an exciting mixture of ancient and modern sounds, costumes, music and dance.
She describes her album as “what I always set out to create, a perfect fusion of contemporary pop music and ancient Asian traditions,” but just who is Clapham and what’s the story behind her unique journey?
Clapham spend a lot of her early years feeling as if she was constantly at a crossroads. She knew she wanted to be a performer, but didn’t know how to compete with performers she considered more talented.
In 2005, while she was completing her Bachelor of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong, Clapham found herself confused about the future when she was dropped from her opera class and told that she didn’t have what it takes to be an opera singer. She began seeking direction for her creative career and found it in the most unlikely of places.
A Vietnamese Australian by the name of Ta Duy Binh came to her university to demonstrate the art of Tuong in Vietnam. Clapham was blown away by the stylized, delicate and beautiful nature of the dance and the singing. She knew that if she could learn this, she would have a skill that would set her apart from the crowd.
When she approached Ta Duy Binh with the idea that she would go to Vietnam and learn the art of Tuong, he told her that it would be very difficult for her because she would have to learn Vietnamese. She could learn the dance, but there was no way she would be able to learn the songs as it was very complicated and extremely difficult, even for a Vietnamese person.
Ta Duy Binh admits that he never expected her to follow through, but he gave her the contacts she needed. To everyone’s surprise, she did go to Vietnam and began to pursue her goal. She arrived with very little Vietnamese skills and lived with a family of Vietnamese artists, Mrs. Tuyet and Mr. Duc, who did not speak any English.
Tuyet became a mother figure for Clapham and later became her teacher. Clapham began daily lessons in the art of Tuong with several teachers, none of whom spoke any English. Her lessons involved stylised dance, song, acting and weapons movement, different from anything she had ever done before and all in Vietnamese.
In order to overcome the language barrier, Clapham filmed her teachers and then spent hours alone each night learning it exactly. She faced hours of grueling training in extremely complicated movement and singing.
Clapham was determined, but she faced some very tough moments.
"Even though my Vietnamese has progressed a lot in the past, I found the communication gap to be a big problem, and so did the teacher. My teacher’s name is Kim Hue, she’s a stout little woman and very severe. She’s in fact quite famous in Vietnam, so I’m really lucky to have such a master for a teacher," Clapham explained.
"She taught me a series of basic movements and I found it extremely challenging. After I forgot the moves a couple of times my teacher became quiet unimpressed. That was the first day that I felt that the language barrier was restricting me, up until that point I had felt quite confident about my progress, but that lesson shattered me, and I asked myself, what am I doing here?" she recalled.
At the time, Clapham stated "After my last lesson with this teacher was such a travesty I spent hours trying to perfect the dance for our next lesson, every hand movement is so intricate I had to play the video back over and over until I thought I’d go crazy. Then during the next lesson my teacher asked me to demonstrate the moves she’d taught me. This time I was confident and knew the dance very well. After that my teacher treated me differently, I think now she believes I can do it. And I won’t let her down.".
Clapham studied harder than she had ever done in her life. She spent hours every day perfecting her lessons and her determination to master these art forms impressed her teachers.
After years of solid study, Clapham’s skill had improved and she started to receive attention from newspapers, radio, and television. As all of her efforts began to pay off she was propelled into fame in Vietnam. She performed a one-woman show at the Hanoi Opera House, broadcast nationwide and on cable television by Vietnamese in the USA, France, Germany, Thailand and Australia. After performing a famous characher, Thi Mau, on VTV4 she became known as “Thi Mau Toc Vang” meaning the blonde Thi Mau.
She was invited to perform for all sorts of events, including APEC in Hanoi, the New Years Festival television special, broadcast nationwide with Vietnam’s most famous comedian, Xuan Hinh. She went from walking down the crowded streets of Mai Dich Hanoi anonymously to everyone knowing exactly who she was and receiving sponsorship from companies such as TRG International, the Melia Hotel, the Australian Embassy, the Vietnamese Ministry of Culture and Information, the Army Newspaper, the Water Puppets Theatre, the Tuong Theatre and the Cheo Theatre.
Amongst all this success anyone would think that Clapham would be happy. But beneath the gleaming success, pressure was building and Clapham was on a verge of a nervous breakdown.
She remarked: "I had worked and worked and worked, and I never took time to rest, I was putting huge physical demands on my body and on my mind and I was getting all this attention and invitations to perform. But all of this sudden success was so daunting for me, it was unexpected and I didn’t know how to handle it. It’s hard to explain what was happening inside of me but all I can say is that I was so hard on myself and expected so much of myself that I eventually just broke down."
She looked like a success, but on the inside she was feeling like a failure. She went home to Australia and her teachers and peers could not understand her sudden disappearance. She felt so distraught and confused that she decided to give up all together. Clapham states that it “was the lowest part of my life. If anyone asked me why I’d left Vietnam I would just cry and say ‘I don’t know why’. I felt so lost, with no direction. I went from being in the spotlight in Vietnam to working in a restaurant in Sydney making coffee, and no one knew or cared what I’d achieved. It was like my life had no meaning."
Clapham worked and thought for a year, trying new endeavors, but nothing gave her any drive or joy. Finally Clapham decided to go back to University and pursue a new career. But before the new academic year began, a miracle happened.
She received an email from a director in Singapore, who had seen some articles about her on the Internet. He invited her to come to Singapore to perform, with flights and accommodation paid. At first I thought this was a scam, but when he send my the ticket I was blown away that after all this time something so out of the blue could occur. It was as if the world was telling me not to give up, that I had unfinished business, and it got me thinking about what I really wanted to do. After going to Singapore, I went back to Vietnam on my way home to Australia. I was walking down the streets of Hanoi and it occurred to me why I had left Vietnam and what I really wanted to do."
"I had been trying so hard to perfect an art form exactly the way the masters said it should be, but for what? What could I do with what I’d learned? I knew I didn’t want to abandon all that I’d learnt because that would be a tragic waste. But I didn’t want to go back to being so hard on myself trying to perfect an extremely difficult art form. So I had to find a way of using everything I’d learnt but to create something of my own. And it came to me, so obvious, what I’d always wanted to do, since I was a child, to be a songwriter. So I went back to Australia to begin my mission."
"I would sit for hours listening to recordings of lessons I had taken in Vietnam. I wanted to create music that made use and drew inspiration of everything I’d learnt in Vietnam at the same time coming right from place in my heart that was completely my own. I didn’t want to write world music, that was not my goal. I wanted to write the kind of music that I would want to listen to; pop music.
"I wrote each song coming straight from the heart, thus the album is in a way a heartfelt chronological recording of my journey so far. It’s got pain and got a sense of being lost and not knowing where to go it’s got waking up and realising who you want to be, it’s got love and joy and hope and fear. It’s me absolutely and purely me… in every note…."
On her journey Eleanor discovered a wonderful outlet to begin honing her performance skills and building a fan base; Eleanor now sings every week for Vietnamese audiences singing Vietnamese and English pop music at weddings and clubs.
After a year and a half of more hard work, Eleanor’s dream is finally becoming a reality. Eleanor returned to her second home; Vietnam, this time to record to music she had created. She worked in cooperation with some famous Vietnamese musicians, one of whom is Mrs. Tuyet’s daughter.
Eleanor said: "I want to use Vietnamese instruments in the recording and these musicians specialize in fusing traditional music with modern music, so I’m very lucky to have the honour to work with these people."
On June 26, 2010 she will perform again at the Hanoi Opera house. In what has been described as “one perfect night,” she will showcase 12 of her songs, performed with Chi Huong’s band, and she will demonstrate her mastery of drum movement, fan movements, flag and sword movements. All of these will be delivered with a powerful, mellifluous voice.
"Even though all of my music is written in English, I wrote Vietnamese verses for each of the songs for this concert so that I could really include everyone. I want everyone to go home and really understand what I was trying to say through my music. I truly believe, with all my heart, that we are all of us creators of magic. And we really can create anything we dream, the only thing standing in our way is hard work, dedication and a burning desire."