BEHIND THE SHOW
Lune Production and Vietnam's New-Circus Movement
Meet Lune Production, the company behind the À Ố Show — and the wider "new circus" movement using bamboo, dance and folk music to stage Vietnam's story.
See À Ố Show dates on GetYourGuide ↗A company built around one idea
Lune Production is the Ho Chi Minh City–based company that created and still stages the À Ố Show. Its founding idea, as write-ups of the production consistently describe it, was to take Vietnamese rural life and folk tradition and stage it using the vocabulary of contemporary circus — aerial rigging, tumbling, hand-balancing and object manipulation — rather than the narrated, classical formats more familiar in Vietnamese theatre. That combination is often summed up as a "bamboo circus": circus technique performed almost entirely with bamboo and rattan props instead of the metal apparatus or elaborate costuming typical of Western circus. The result reads as distinctly Vietnamese rather than a copy of an existing international format, which is part of why the show has found audiences well beyond Vietnam.
The team behind the story
À Ố Show is credited to a small creative team rather than a single choreographer: coverage of the production names Tuấn Lê as director, Nguyễn Nhất Lý as music director, and Tấn Lộc among its choreographers, with the show first staged in Ho Chi Minh City around 2013. Vietnamese-language reporting on the production describes years of groundwork before that — researching rural southern Vietnamese daily life, folk music and movement — which is likely why the show's gestures, from winnowing to rowing to carrying and building, read as observed rather than invented. That research base is also what separates the À Ố Show from a generic acrobatic revue: every prop and motion draws on a real, recognisable rural vocabulary.
Sibling productions, not sequels
Lune Production has staged more than one show using this same bamboo-circus approach, generally performed at the company's own venue in Hội An rather than the Saigon Opera House. Teh Dar draws on the culture of Vietnam's Central Highlands ethnic-minority communities, loosely structured around a cycle of birth, death and rebirth. The Mist turns to Southern Vietnamese farming life, told more through dance than acrobatics. Both are worth knowing about if you're building a longer Vietnam itinerary that includes Hội An, but they're separate productions, at a separate venue, from the À Ố Show you'd see in Ho Chi Minh City — don't expect to catch either one at the Saigon Opera House.
Part of a broader Vietnamese cultural-arts export
The À Ố Show sits inside a broader trend of Vietnamese producers repackaging traditional culture — folk music, water puppetry, ethnic-minority performance — into contemporary, internationally touring productions aimed as much at global audiences as local ones. It isn't the only example, but it's one of the most visible: the show has toured internationally since the mid-2010s and become something of a reference point other Vietnamese productions get measured against. For visitors, that context matters because it explains why the show feels like a polished international touring production rather than a one-off tourist performance — structurally, that's closer to what it actually is.
Theatre first, acrobatics second
What distinguishes "new circus" — the loose international movement the À Ố Show belongs to — from traditional circus is sequencing: rather than a series of standalone acts introduced by a ringmaster, new-circus productions build one continuous narrative, with acrobatics, music and design all serving a single story and visual world throughout. The À Ố Show is a clean example of this: every scene uses the same bamboo material, the same live band, and the same village-to-city arc, so the acrobatics never feel like a separate "circus segment" bolted onto a cultural show. It's staged, and paced, like theatre that happens to be extremely physical.
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