Caroline Guiela Nguyen on Lacrima, Invisible Workers and Weaving Stories

Words: Anna Mahtani | Images: Jean-Louis Fernandez

Caroline Guiela Nguyen calls from backstage at a theatre in Rome. It is nearing the end of her latest production, Valentina, and her voice is tired but vibrant. Her six year old is babbling behind the scenes, folding origami while we speak. In her play LACRIMA, the French director spins a postcolonial tale of tailoring and teardrops within the world of haute couture. When a Parisian fashion house is commissioned to create a wedding dress for a British princess, the stage is transformed into a workshop. Spanning eight months, the story follows the interwoven lives of the garment workers behind the dress, across Paris, Alençon, Abdul, and Mumbai. In this white-robed room with a screen at its centre and workbenches lining the walls, the play lifts the veil on the true cost of fashion. 

LACRIMA is currently running at BAM in Brooklyn, New York having been performed around the world in Montreal, Milan, Singapore, London, Spain, France, and Japan.  “Every audience is different,” Guiela Nguyen explains. In Québéc, audiences were particularly emotional during the performance, whereas in Japan spectators would stay after the curtain fell to discuss the themes of secrecy and domestic violence. During a poignant scene, one of the seamstresses explains that when most people see the wedding veil – a delicate three-metre long garment – they see beauty; when the workers see it, they see teardrops and blood. She knows what this dress cost. LACRIMA, in latin, means tears.

For Guiela Nguyen, the realisation that clothes were made by real people came early. “My first clothes were made by my mother,” she recalls. Perhaps it’s why she was drawn to Japanese artist Rieko Koga’s massive white fabric frames embroidered with scrawling black words. One of the threaded sentences has stayed lodged in her brain ever since she first discovered it stitched into Koga’s pieces: “I’ve always remembered the clothes my mother made me, those clothes were there to protect me from fear.” 

“My mother made me an outfit that I think about often, it was a disguise, a crepe paper costume of queen Marie Antoinette.” Despite being Vietnamese-Indian, Guiela Nguyen’s mother has a passion for royalty, and carefully assembled this costume for the Villecroze Carnaval, the small French village where they lived.

Costume designer Benjamin Moreau – who Guiela Nguyen met at drama school – took inspiration from Dior and Alexander McQueen’s designs to create the central wedding dress. Onstage, screens allow audiences to zoom in on the fabric and watch the garment’s creation. As a leitmotif, wedding dresses provide ample cultural touchpoints. Guiela Nguyen points to the global impact of Princess Diana’s wedding, or Kate Middleton’s gown. “Wedding dresses let me step into a fairytale space, while evoking real memories.”

“A princess in England desires a dress, and India is the land that’s pillaged for it.” Guiela Nguyen argues that dismissing the human cost of southern labour perpetuates colonial dynamics. Instead, she chose to focus on the garment workers themselves: working class men and women toiling away in workshops, destroying their eyesight to create the perfect embellishments. While researching the play, Guiela Nguyen was shocked to discover that lacemakers were often deafened by their loud machinery, and had to regularly check that their colleagues were breathing properly. “These people are hidden – they’re rendered completely invisible.”

“During a poignant scene, one of the seamstresses explains that when most people see the wedding veil – a delicate three-metre long garment – they see beauty; when the workers see it, they see teardrops and blood. She knows what this dress cost. Lacrima, in latin, means tears.”

​​The first character that came to her was the elderly lace maker. Before writing LACRIMA, Guiela Nguyen assisted a lawyer who provided legal aid to victims of domestic violence. There she realised many older women are forgotten in domestic abuse campaigns and face barriers to receiving help, despite being amongst the most vulnerable. 

“Tragedy is what moves me, what bowls me over and pushes me to write,” Guiela Nguyen acknowledges. “I’m not afraid of tears. Emotions have always drenched my shows, and while they’re often referred to as melodramas, they're actually written as tragedies.”

A production of Phédre by Patrice Chéreau in 2003 first moved Guiela Nguyen to tears. Ever since, she’s been hooked. “In a way, theatre saved me,” she remarks, “other than my daughter, writing is the most important thing in my life.”

As artistic director for the Théâtre National de Strasbourg, Guiela Nguyen is striving to change preconceptions about the stage. Currently, she is the only woman leading one of France's six national theatres. 

“These past ten years, things are moving,” she insists. “We’re not there yet, but it's important to recognise the hard work that’s been done, not only for gender equity, but also for theatremakers from different social backgrounds and ethnicities.” She praises the work of Stanislas Nordey’s 1er Acte, which empowers theatremakers who have experienced discrimination. While studying at the Théâtre National de Strasbourg drama school, Guiela Nguyen was surrounded by other aspiring young female directors. “In terms of representation for women there were very very few. And that’s without even considering racialised directors.”

It was during her time at drama school that she founded her company, Les Hommes Approximatifs, which translates to ‘The Approximative Men’, or ‘The Almost Men’. “I liked the name’s troubling side, like they’re missing something. It leaves space for people to fill in the gaps.” It is also a reference to Tristan Tzara’s 1929 surrealist poetry collection, L’Homme approximatif.

Now, as an acclaimed film and theatre director who is currently working on her first art installation, Guiela Nguyen’s identity shapes her oeuvre. Her mother was Vietnamese-Indian, and her father was a Jewish Frenchman in Algeria: “My mother came from many places, so I’ve always needed to confront myself to other realities, other geographies, other politics.”

Her first major play, Saigon, was created with Vietnamese and French actors; LACRIMA was developed with Tamil actors among others; and her latest, Valentina, was devised with Romanian actors, French performers, and traveller communities. Valentina centers on a young girl who must translate a life-changing medical letter for her Romanian mother. Like everything Guiela Nguyen creates, it is tender, timely, and tragic. “I wanted to create stories that felt real. It would be absurd nowadays to tell stories set in an exclusively white world.”

On her end of the line in Italy, her newest production  is almost over, and she pauses the call to check on a teary-eyed actress. When she returns, her voice warms as she remembers an audience member coming up to her and remarking that LACRIMA felt just like an embroidery. Another night, someone gifted her a copy of Marjane Satrapi’s Embroideries. She cherishes it. “I’ve always been fascinated by the art of embroidery, its graceful presentation and its messy underside,” Guiela Nguyen says. Much like the garment workers, the underside of embroidery is rarely celebrated. “LACRIMA is written like an embroidery, knotted and chaotic, its many stories ending in tangled threads inexplicably tied together. For people to actually see that, it knocks me over every time.”

LACRIMA is written and directed by Caroline Guiela Nguyen and is running Oct 22, 24 & 25 at 7:30pm and Oct 26 at 3:00pm at Harvey Theater at the BAM Strong, 651 Fulton St. Brooklyn, NY.

Tickets start at $30 and can be purchased here.