Anne Nguyen

Anne Nguyen’s shows have been presented at many prestigious festivals, such as Holland Festival in Amsterdam, Tanz im August Festival in Berlin, Crossing The Line Festival in New-York, OzAsia Festival in Adélaïde, Festival d’Avignon IN and OFF, URB Festival in Helsinki, Huê Festival in Vietnam, COLOURS International Dance Festival in Stuttgart, Biennale de danse du Val-de-Marne, Festival de danse de Cannes, Groove’N’Move Festival in Geneva, Festival de la Cité Lausanne, Schrittmacher Festival in Heerlen, Tanz Bremen Festival, Potsdamer Tanztage in Potsdam, Underconstruction Festival in Wuppertal, TANZtheater INTERNATIONAL Festival in Hanover, Kidanse Festival by L’Echangeur CDCN, Odyssées en Yvelines Festival by Théâtre de Sartrouville et des Yvelines – CDN, or Dies de Dansa Festival in Barcelona.

The par Terre / Anne Nguyen Dance Company has been presented at prestigious French venues, including La Villette, Chaillot – Théâtre national de la Danse, Opéra de Limoges, Opéra de Massy, Opéra de Saint-Étienne, numerous National Scenes, Conventioned scenes of national interest, National Choreographic Development Centres, National Choreographic Centres and National Drama Centres, as well as at many international venues, including Gibney Dance in New-York, Salders Wells Theatre in London, le TQW in Vienna, Akademie der Künste in Berlin, PACT Zollverein in Essen, Tanztheater Wuppertal, Mercat de les flors in Barcelona, Dansens Hus in Stockholm, NorrlandsOperan in Umeå, Dansehallerne in Copenhagen, Charleroi Danse, KVS in Brussells, Theater Rotterdam, Frascati in Amsterdam, Kortrijk Theater, Amare in The Hague, tanzhaus nrw in Düsseldorf, Theater im Pfalzbau in Ludwigshafen, HELLERAU in Dresden, National Center for Dance Bucharest, Theater Azarian in Sofia, Trafó in Budapest, Zagreb Dance Center, Yangon National Theater, Kuala Lumpur Performing Art Center, Ben Thanh Theatre in Hô Chi Minh, Centre Culturel Français in Kinshasa, or Brasil’s Bank Cultural Center in Brasilia.

“DANCING FOR THE EARTH”

Since 2005, Anne Nguyen has dedicated herself to sublimating urban social dances and their rebellious nature and to exploring their vital function. She combines a raw, virtuoso gestural vocabulary with a geometrical, pure, destructured choreographic expression that exalts the power of abstraction. Echoing the hip-hop dancer’s explosive movements, her pieces depict the human being’s passionate struggle with a hostile contemporary environment. Incarnated by virtuoso dancers with magnetic personalities, her choreographies depict dance as a universal and salutary art that embodies the resistance of the living in the face of ever-shifting values.

Square Root, Yonder Woman, PROMENADE OBLIGATOIRE, bal.exe, Autarcie (….), Kata, À mon bel amour, Underdogs, Heracles on his head, Matière(s) première(s)… The titles Anne Nguyen gives to her pieces reveal her many influences: from mathematics to the martial arts, myths to utopian concepts. She concentrates on gesture as a symbol, the body as a means of assertion, movement as a primary need, the stage as a special place for sharing. On the bare stage, she builds choreographic architectures loaded with meaning where powerful, liberating dancing becomes a magical ritual designed to make us reinvest in the present moment. Anne Nguyen’s choreographic pieces combine constraint and freedom, poetry and mathematics, technicality and improvisation, sensuality and explosiveness.

Author of numerous poems and articles on dance, Anne Nguyen uses text to turn dance into the support for a wider reflection upon our society. Her shows Goku’s Trial andHip-Hop Nakupenda offer fictional or biographical stories centered on dance. Her short films Épicentre and UNDERDOG CITY contextualize dance in the urban environment by adding to it a subjective narrative layer.

“HAVING A STYLE IS KNOWING HOW TO HOLD A POSITION.”

Through her different works, whether purely choreographic or mixing dance with text or video, Anne Nguyen draws on the problematics that suffuse the world of dance and art to explore the relationship between institutions and individuals, the tensions between creative freedom and academism, the mechanisms of cultural transmission, freedom of expression. She draws from the observation of gestures, danced as well as ordinary, individual as well as collective, to turn urban social dances and popular cultures into a support for a reflection on tradition, on social markers, on diversity, on cultural appropriation and on the tensions between multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism.

Coming from the world of breakdance battles, Anne Nguyen considers urban social dances to be essential practices for spiritual survival and social cohesion. Many of her productions, such as Underdogs or Heracles on his head, highlight urban social dances of Afro-American origin – amongst them breakdance – known as hip-hop dances, which French lower-class youth identified with in the 1980s as a result of the globalization of U.S. culture. Her research into the origins of urban dances and the vital functions of dance in society convinced her to focus on also highlighting African urban social dances, known as afro dances, which are widely practiced by youth but barely visible within the institution, such as in Matière(s) première(s) or [Superstrat[. She examines the porosity between those different universes by bringing together on stage hip-hop dances and afro dances, such as in Behind the Line or her upcoming production Witch Hunting.

ANNE NGUYEN: ARTISTIC JOURNEY

At a very young age, Anne practiced competitive gymnastics, then started learning a number of martial arts, including Viet Vo Dao, Capoeira and Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Fascinated by science, she intended to go into the field of physics, but finally abandoned that path when she discovered the world of breakdance and battling, its values reflecting her desire to break free.

She first put forth her desire to set the mind free through the body in written form with her collection of poems, the Manual of the City Warrior, published in Graff It! Magazine from 2004 to 2009, a magazine for which she was chief editor of the dance section between 2006 and 2009. Choreographer Faustin Linyekula, for whom she danced at the time, urged her to choreograph a solo structured around these poems: Square Root thus came into being in 2005. In 2009, this solo would win the second prize in the Masdanza contemporary choreography competition. Anne Nguyen performed her solo around the world for many years, while continuing to nurture her passion for breakdancing in battles and cyphers, at a time when hip-hop dance was booming in France. She danced with legendary crews such as RedMask in Montreal and Phase T, Def Dogz and Créteil Style in France. She took part in hundreds of battles, with her crews and mostly solo, winning IBE 2004, BOTY 2005, and being on the jury for BOTY 2006 and Red Bull BC One 2007. The movie documentary, Planet B-Boy (2007) reflects a period when Anne was busy with numerous battles while developing her own dance company and pursuing her career as a performer for contemporary dance companies, such as Salia ni Seydou, and hip-hop dance companies, such as the famous Black Blanc Beur.

In 2007, a lockers crew invited her to create Keep it Funky!, which marked the beginning of a cycle of works in which Anne set out to sublimate the essence of the different hip-hop dance styles. With PROMENADE OBLIGATOIRE in 2012 and bal.exe in 2014, she sculpted the popping gesture into precise, elegant, minimalist structures, and invented looping pop, a robotic dance style performed in pairs. Anne has continued to perform in her own works: after Square Root, she choreographed the duet Yonder Woman in 2010, then the quartet Autarcie (….) in 2013, in both of which she performed alongside key female figures in hip-hop dance. For Avignon IN Festival in 2019, she co-authored and performed the duet Axis Mundi besides puppeteer Élise Vigneron. In 2017, Anne paid tribute to her discipline of predilection with Kata, which enhanced the martial spirit of breakdance. À mon bel amour, created in 2019, offered a perspective on diversity by staging hip-hop dances alongside ballet, vogue, krumping and contemporary dance.

Amongst her shows currently on tour, the trio Underdogs, touring since 2021, explores the etymology of popping, the political symbols and the social markers of the urban collective unconscious. Quartet Heracles on his head, touring since 2022, is a danced investigation of the principles of competition, hierarchy, and meritocracy that puts into perspective the adoption of breakdancing as an Olympic discipline. The piece for six dancers Matière(s) première(s), touring since 2023, highlights the mechanisms fostering resource extractivism through an initiatory trip into the universe of African urban and traditional dances. Behind the Line, her 2024 show produced by Le Carreau du Temple and co-authored with Malik Djoudi and Joris Avodo, stages four young Beninese dancers from association Irilojù, les “Enfants des Collines”, alongside two krumpers and two African urban and traditional dancers, on the theme of limits and frontiers crossing in light of Olympic values.

In January 2025, Anne Nguyen will create [Superstrat[, a solo for an African urban and traditional dancer exploring the relationship between the ancestral roots of dance and music and the heritage of the Afro-American diaspora. In October 2025, she will create Witch Hunting, which will stage six dancers, men and women, from different urban dance styles – krumping, hip-hop and African urban dances – to explore the dynamics of scapegoating and the mechanisms by which groups are formed, dissolve and transform.

Anne Nguyen also creates theatre-dance pieces where text offers an additional dimension to dance. The duet Goku’s Trial, created in 2020, is performed inside classrooms and stages the trial a B-Boy summoned before justice for having done a dance step protected by intellectual property law. Hip-Hop Nakupenda, touring since 2021, is a biographic solo for Congolese dancer and choreographer Yves Mwamba who tells, sings, and dances his story, a story intricately bound up with that of hip-hop dance in Africa and of his native country, DCR.

Convinced that dance is a positive good for society, Anne Nguyen creates installations that put the public in motion. In 2016 she created Dance of the city warriors, a path of interactive installations offering the audience a digital and physical immersion into the world of urban dances. In 2021 she created SKILLZ, a fun, free-access online video game designed to educate the public about the diversity of urban dances. In 2024 she created the SPIN installation as part of immersive exhibition DANSER by Cité des sciences et de l’industrie, presented from 2024 to 2026 for kids and for all audiences.

Thought her short films, Anne Nguyen emphasizes the symbolics underlying body expression by parallelling dance, architecture and textual elements. Her first short film Épicentre, broadcasted around the world since 2021, invites the onlooker to question the concept of cultural appropriation through dance, the symbolism of the body and the stereotypes associated with bodies. It won the Performance Award at Urban Films Festival 2022 and the 3rd place Audience Award at TANZAHOI International Dance Film Festival 2022. Her 2024 short film UNDERDOG CITY explores the symbol of the Statue of Liberty, revisiting a portion of the show Underdogs alongside inhabitants of the city of Ivry-sur-Seine, as part of an artist-in-residence program in partnership with la briqueterie CDCN du Val-de-Marne.

Many of Anne Nguyen’s choreographies are set to original music scores that she co-creates in close collaboration with musician-composers, like Sébastien Lété, Benjamin Magnin or more recently Grégoire Letouvet and Pierre Demange. She has collaborated with conductor and artistic director of opera Company Opera Fuoco, David Stern, on Bach en scat in 2019, and will create the Monteverdi opera Ulysses is Back! with him in 2026/27. She has also collaborated with Orchestre Régional de Normandie, then with CSMDP, for the creation of bal.exe in 2014.

Regularly called upon for her expertise on urban dances and cultural issues, Anne Nguyen has participated in numerous debates and symposiums. She holds discussions with the public, gives conferences and moderates conversations that put into perspective dance, culture, and society. From 2012 to 2018, she has been teaching an artistic workshop on hip-hop dance at Sciences Po Paris University. She works alongside teachers in the context of cultural programs or in relationship with Universities or Boards of Education. She was president of the jury for “Choreographic dance” at IXes Jeux de la Francophonie in Kinshasa in 2023.

Anne Nguyen is a patron of association Irilojù in Benin, which is engaged in the educational, artistic and cultural development of children and adolescents from a traditional Idaatcha village, les “Enfants des Collines”. Four of those children and adolescents are performing in her 2024 show Behind the Line, produced by le Carreau du Temple.