Anne Nguyen

Autarcie

source: compagnieparterre

For her sixth production, Anne Nguyen, winner of the 2013 SACD New Choreography Talent prize, continues her deconstruction of hip-hop body languages. Autarcie (….) is a game of strategy, alternating between forward-facing dance moves and free digression, in which two hip-hop dance specialties, breakdance and popping, are brought into contact. For 50 minutes, four dancers, using very different performance spaces and techniques, engage in a frantic ritual. The front of stage is the rallying point where the four powerful individualities come together and devise a warrior dance directed at the audience. They are drawn towards the empty space beyond this common point of harmony, and each dancer thrusts herself into that space, in pursuit of territory, alliances and hierarchy. The inner workings of this restless “tribe” with all the power struggles that ensue, thus unfold on stage, to the pulsating, unbridled rhythms of the percussive organic beat. Anne Nguyen transforms movement by setting geometrical constraints, using desynchronisation and experimenting with physical contact. In her work, the relationship to the observer and the “other” is fundamental; it determines the way that movement is built in space.

The costumes of Autarcie (….) are designed by Courrèges. One of their classic piece was recreated and reworked especially for the four dancers.

“Autarcie (….) captured many a heart this night. The four amazing dancers, Sonia Bel Hadj Brahim, Magali Duclos, Linda Hayford and Valentine Nagata-Ramos, deliver an astonishing performance. In a series of hauntingly beautiful robotic movements, this production quickly achieves a trance-like state, with inventive , groovy, provocative results. The choreography, metered to the nearest split-second, rich, implacable and irresistible, explores a mechanical ritual upset by a need for control and freedom, set to the exquisite music of Sébastien Lété.”
Journal du Blanc-Mesnil – Laëtitia Soula (November 28th, 2013)
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source: lavillette

Pour sa sixième création, Autarcie (….), Anne Nguyen enferme quatre danseuses sur un plateau pour le plaisir de les voir confronter leurs spécialités hip-hop : le b-boying et le popping.
AUTARCIE (….)
Imaginé comme un jeu de stratégie, Autarcie (….) donne libre cours aux aspirations guerrières des quatre danseuses. Sur un rythme effréné de percussions organiques, les tribus s’organisent et les enjeux de pouvoir se mettent en place. Laissant toujours la place au hasard, l’exigeante Anne Nguyen encourage la prise de risque au cours de cette quête de territoire, d’alliances et de hiérarchie.
Dans cette nouvelle création à la fois technique et fluide, on retrouve Valentine Nagata-Ramos, b-girl de talent, programmée au festival Kalypso pour l’Escale Villette.

ANNE NGUYEN
Lauréate du prix nouveau talent chorégraphie SACD 2013, Anne Nguyen est danseuse, chorégraphe et breakeuse de hip hop. Interprète pour de nombreux groupes de break à Montréal et à Paris, elle remporte deux fameux battles : The Notorious IBE 2004 et The Battle of the Year 2005. Elle monte sa propre compagnie la Compagnie Par Terre en 2005, et invente le looping pop, un nouveau style chorégraphique qui mélange danse de couple et danse mécanique appelée « popping ». En 2014, La Villette l’accueillait en résidence pour préparer sa pièce Bal.exe présentée au festival Hautes Tensions.
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source: compagnieparterrefr

Pour sa 6ème création, Anne Nguyen, lauréate du Prix Nouveau Talent Chorégraphie SACD 2013, poursuit son travail de déstructuration des gestuelles hip-hop. Autarcie (….) est un jeu de stratégie, entre danse frontale et digressions libres, où se confrontent deux spécialités de la danse hip-hop : le break et le popping. Pendant 50 minutes, quatre danseuses aux espaces de danse et aux techniques très différentes se livrent à un rituel effréné. Le devant de la scène est le point de ralliement où ces quatre individualités fortes s’unissent pour construire, à l’adresse du public, une danse guerrière. L’espace vide situé au-delà de cette zone d’entente les attire, et chacune s’y propulse en quête de territoire, d’alliances et de hiérarchie. C’est le fonctionnement interne de cette “tribu” agitée, avec ses enjeux de pouvoir, qui se déploie sur scène au rythme pulsant ou débridé de percussions organiques. Anne Nguyen transforme le mouvement par les contraintes géométriques, la désynchronisation et un travail sur le contact. Dans son travail, le rapport à l’observateur et à l’autre est primordial, et détermine la mise en espace de la danse.

Les costumes d’Autarcie (….) sont une création originale par la maison Courrèges. Un des classiques Courrèges a été revisité spécialement pour habiller les quatre danseuses.
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source: compagnieparterre

Anne Nguyen—who has been awarded the 2013 Nouveau Talent Chorégraphie SACD prize—founded the par Terre Dance Company in 2005. As a specialist in breakdance*, she is familiar with the world of hip-hop battles*, and aims to tap into the technical excellence peculiar to each hip-hop dance speciality. Each of her productions is based on an exploration of the dance form and its intended purpose. Influenced by her scientific background, Anne deconstructs the various hip-hop moves and opens up new areas of expression by setting geometrical constraints. She transforms the centrifugal force of breakdance into linear patterns and creates tessellated legworks on the floor in pairs. She transposes the front-view forms of popping* into side-view frames or into forms for duos. In an extension of her practice of martial arts, Anne takes a special interest in action-reaction principles and in contact possibilities between hip-hop dancers. For Anne, the way movement is built in space is determined by the roles one chooses to give to the observer and to the partner. She is interested in the essence of movement: on stage, the dancers are inhabited by their own rhythmic systems and express themselves within a set of constraints, of which music, often composed especially for each production, is only one component. Her choreographic pieces display a complex, precise architecture and alternate between controlled spaces prompting personal interpretations and spaces left to chance, or calling for improvisation, which can be fraught with risks. Based on the combination of a technical, high-performance dance form with highly graphic, pure, destructured choreographic compositions, Anne’s productions convey a feeling of abstraction and challenge the place of the human being in the contemporary world.

Repertory and productions

Anne Nguyen is currently working with about twenty hip-hop dancers (breakdancers and poppers) on her different touring productions, and she herself performs in several of them. Anne Nguyen’s first production, the solo Square Root (2007) relates the geometry found in breakdance movements to the contemporary urban environment. It combines mathematical dance compositions with some of Anne’s poems. The solo won second prize in the Masdanza contemporary choreography competition in 2009. Anne Nguyen also choreographed Keep it Funky ! (2007), a celebratory piece devised for six lockers*, and Spirit of the Underground (2008), a performance for five dancers and one actress, on the themes of contact and dreams. Her duet Yonder Woman (2010), an “experiment for two superhero women”, analyses the notion of performance through a game-play based on linear progress and relationship behaviours. Her 2012 production PROMENADE OBLIGATOIRE is a one-hour walk for eight poppers, who undertake an uninterrupted crossing along the timeline, in an exploration of the different possible states of “being together”. In Anne’s 2013 production for female quartet Autarcie (….), she explores the inner workings of a restless “tribe”, with all the power struggles that ensue. In her latest 2014 production bal.exe, a “mechanical ball set to chamber music” for eight poppers and five classical musicians, robotic dancers engage into a new “mechanical” dance style performed in pairs, called “looping pop”. Anne Nguyen’s next production Kata will premiere in 2017 at Théâtre National de Chaillot. Subtitled “practical applications of form for eight breakdancers”, Kata will embody her vision of breakdance as a contemporary martial art. In conjunction with her choreographies, in 2016, Anne Nguyen projects to stage and depict the dancers of the par Terre Dance Company in Dance of the city warriors, a performance installation which will evoke a conceptual image of hip-hop dance.

Keen on collaborating and cross-referencing within artistic milieux, Anne Nguyen staged the piece Lettres à Zerty in February 2015 as part of the diptych for young audiences Au pied de la lettre, a commission received by Anne Nguyen and Michel Schweizer from CDC Le Gymnase and CDC Le Cuvier. She created in 2014 the piece i as part of the trilogy for six dancers and three choreographers La preuve par l’autre commissioned by the Malka Dance Company. She has also worked as choreographic consultant to Australian choreographer Nick Power, in Sydney, for his 2014 Cypher.

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.”