Hoang reflects on one of these stumbling blocks, when one past Big West festival tried to re-stage Karaoke Caravan. While the fauxPho collective no longer exists, Karaoke Caravan had always been at the back of their minds over the last 10 years however, they encountered a number of obstacles, which put the project on the backburner. The project was a way to engage various communities in a multilingual platform using a popular home-based entertainment like karaoke.
One of their earliest collaborations was a fauxPho collective enterprise called “ Karaoke Caravan” where Dave was MC and together with another friend, Scott Brook, set-up a mobile karaoke suite at the back of a 3-tonne truck travelling to the Footscray Mall, local high schools and also a Big West Festival at the time. Both of them have been lauded for their creative works and both have a complementary sense of humour and understanding and respect of each other’s work practices. As the community artist in the project, Dave’s background is in writing and community performance projects. Hoang’s background is in multimedia, his work spans across photography, video, projections and installations and he created the karaoke videos that resulted from the project. Not all friends are great artistic collaborators, but Hoang and Dave have found the right chemistry for working together. So did lots of other people – young and old. While I didn’t feel brave enough to sing in public that night, my friends and partner did take to the stage. The karaoke singing was interspersed with a jiving Viet cover band and a hip hop break dancing group that moved like they had unbreakable plasticine bodies. A stage area together with a dance floor had been constructed, and audience members were invited throughout the night to go up and sing karaoke to the seven videos which featured the communities that frequented the Little Saigon Shopping Centre. While an outdoor karaoke event isn’t a novelty, what I liked was the transformation of the Little Saigon Shopping Centre car park, from an unattractive block filled with metal boxes reeking of gas and petrol fumes to walking, talking, dancing and interactive human bodies. My friends, partner and I were lucky to catch the gig. The purpose of my visit is to chat with Dave and Hoang about karaoke, music videos and community cultural development processes – the composite elements that formed Footscray by Night, a one night event held as part of Big West Festival last year. The warehouse is minimal, grungy, and a little run-down, belying the rich history of the now disbanded fauxPho collective that hosted numerous events ranging from visual arts exhibitions to piano recitals to Vietnamese poetry readings and Western-style spoken word events since 2001. It’s not long after Footscray By Night that I catch Hoang Tran Nguyen and David Cuong Nguyen at fauxPho artspace, where Hoang rents a studio space in a 1 st floor warehouse which he shares with other artists.
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