In the solo performance “Love Tenderly”, the Norwegian-Vietnamese choreographer, artist and performer Tony Trinh Tran dissects the perspectives that are projected onto his body. Both his own and those of the outside world. His own life, growing up in Norway as a gay boy in a catholic family with Vietnamese heritage, is a story like many: A constant balancing act between the ideal of a world in which identity no longer plays a role and the reality of constantly having to fit in somewhere.

“Love Tenderly” is the translation of his father’s name. In the work unfolds a constantly transforming body before the eyes of the audience. All the desires, racisms and clichés that it carries come to light, along with the traumas accumulated over generations, with their emotional, psychological and social effects.

Gradually, the story of a powerful emancipation emerges, one that draws less on action and myth than on energies and form, enabling the audience to take a different look at themselves: Who am I, and if so, how many?