Anne Nguyen's par Terre Dance Company is renowned in France and internationally. Appointed Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres,
Anne Nguyen was named associate artist to Chaillot - Théâtre national de la Danse from 2015 to 2018. She is listed in Who’s Who France.
Anne Nguyen's shows have been staged in numerous theatres and at prestigious festivals, such as Holland Festival in Amsterdam, Crossing The Line Festival in New-York, Tanz im August Festival in Berlin, URB Festival in Helsinki, the Huê Festival in Vietnam and the Dies de Dansa Festival in Barcelona.
Between 2005 and 2017,
Anne Nguyen dedicated herself to sublimating hip-hop dance and its rebellious culture and injecting it with a certain amount of mystery, by combining a raw, virtuoso gestural vocabulary with a graphical, pure, destructured choreographic expression. Echoing the hip-hop dancer's explosive movements, the ten pieces devised during this period are revelatory of the human being and his/her passionate struggle with a hostile contemporary environment.
In 2018,
Anne Nguyen turned the page of a new cycle of works in which she establishes the role of the artist as the mirror and guardian of society's soul. In this cycle, she depicts dance as a universal and salutary art, incarnated by virtuoso dancers with magnetic personalities. She engages charismatic dancers who employ brutal, explosive dance moves, not only from the hip-hop scene, but also from other horizons. In her very own timeless, highly graphical and contemporary brand of choreography, she takes the audience on a journey into worlds shaped by contrasts, dismantling the symbolism in order to free the gaze. Frenzied and impetuous, the dance moves embody the resistance of living things and beauty in the face of ever-evolving values.
“It could be described as a sort of b-boying performance in the style of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. Or rather a kind of breakdance integrating the concepts of William Forsythe. Choreographer Anne Nguyen is used to these kinds of comments about her work. She understands the comparison as she is keen to deconstruct hip-hop vocabulary in order to reconstruct it, like a puzzle, to build her complex choreographies to increasing acclaim.”
Libération – Eve Beauvallet (5 May 2015)
“No-one in hip-hop has reinvented the art of the dance move in the way that she has. Anne Nguyen is to breakdance or popping what the research of Merce Cunningham or Lucinda Childs is to contemporary dance: an extremely lucid look at choreographic composition and movement, the overall effect resulting in an abstraction that overflows with musicality, dynamism and joy.”
Artistik Rezo – Thomas Hahn (5 May 2015)
“Since 2005, Anne Nguyen follows her pared down yet imperious artistic line, carving straight and sharp without deviating from her aspirations, even less from the fundamentals of her discipline. With a scientific background, she puts hip-hop movement through the mill to extract spectacular equations, uncluttered yet always surprising. A love of constraints and a passion to sublimate them: typical Nguyen.”
Le Monde Magazine – Rosita Boisseau (13 April 2012)
Extract of a foreword from the choreographer
“For a hip-hop dancer, dancing has something of a ritual about it. The par Terre Dance Company takes its name from the almost sacred relationship to mother Earth, where the Earth has the role of a deity: “par Toutatis!” (a Gallic exclamation invoking the name of a Celtic god) becomes “par Terre”. The expression “par Terre” also reflects our highly scientific attachment to the laws of Nature, starting from the premise that the laws of physics governing the movement of the human body are peculiar to planet Earth and our environment. For me, dancing consists in placing one’s body in resonance with the laws of nature in order to draw closer to the beauty of mother Earth. To choreograph is to feel the precision of the body’s movements to then place them in a wider context of space and time. Today, we are surrounded by hardness, squareness, immenseness. Faced with an inert environment, the mechanisation of our lifestyle, the sedentarisation of our bodies, how does the body react? Through hip-hop dancing, the contemporary body endeavours to appropriate the constraints of its urban environment to be more readily free of them. Through our shoes, through the concrete, at the same time incorporating the right angles of the capital letter T for Terre, or E for Earth, that compose our Earth, hip-hop dancing is a dance in the present, a spontaneous resistance movement on the part of the living. Hip-hop dancers are city warriors. Hip-hop dancing injects new meaning into dance and its expression.”
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Anne Nguyen
