Created on the occasion of the Huong Pagoda and Huong Son scenic complex receiving the Special National Relic ranking certificate, and celebrating a decade of Dream Studio being entrusted with Buddhist art programs, Huong Pagoda: Then and Now was developed as a large-scale real-life scenic performance project combined with the certificate receiving ceremony. Not only serving the event, the project also aimed to create a cultural tourism product for the locality, contributing to expanding the tourism exploitation time of Huong Pagoda year-round, instead of just focusing on the three months of the Spring festival.
Unlike real-life scenic models built on fixed stages, the project chose Yen stream itself and the natural landscape of Huong Pagoda as the performance space, featuring hundreds of local community performers. With an experiential length of up to 1.5km, the entire program was created amidst the water surface, rocky mountains, dense forests, and spiritual relics, where nature no longer played the role of a backdrop but became a part of the sacred Buddhist art expression language.
This was also one of the projects that posed the most special technical challenges for Dream Studio at a time when the performance industry in Vietnam still faced many limitations. The stage and grandstand system on the stream surface with a total area of over 1500 square meters was deployed directly along with the lighting system, signal cables, and projection stretching throughout the natural space. In complex terrain conditions, completely dependent on the weather and natural flows, all technical solutions had to be researched specifically for the project to ensure stability, safety, and synchronous operation capability.
One of the special marks of the program was the participation of over 400 local people along with 112 boats on Yen stream. Instead of entirely using professional actors, Dream Studio chose to make the indigenous community themselves a part of the work. Another defining highlight was the image of Buddha projected onto the green tree covered mountainside with an area of up to 300 square meters through a system of the 4 highest capacity projectors in Vietnam at that time. It was these pioneering technical elements that brought the program an authenticity and indigenous spirit that no staging format could replicate. .
The combination of modern performance technology and the original landscape of Huong Pagoda created a new approach in storytelling about spiritual culture and heritage. From a cultural event, Huong Pagoda: Then and Now became a testament to the ability to transform artistic ideas into sustainable values, contributing to the cultural industry, tourism, and the development of Vietnam's creative foundation.
