Éric Minh Cuong graduated from the Ecole de l’image des Gobelins school of visual communication and arts in Paris in 2004, and worked in animation at the start of his career. Dance came to him through hip-hop and contemporary dance which he discovered in 1997, with Nacera Belaza among others, then butoh which he learnt with Carlotta Ikeda and Gyohei Zaitsu. In 2011, he decided to mix animation and dance by putting on his first performance, Kaiju /, which combines dancers and augmented reality. Since then he has continued this work around choreographed pieces, films or performances, whether with his company Shonen (the short film Kid birds for camera, 2014), as an associate artist with the Ballet of Marseille (School of Moon, 2016, mixing dancers and robots) or with young choreographers like Silvia Costa or Alessandro Sciarroni (Aurora, 2015).

By having dancers’ bodies meet new technologies, Éric Minh Cuong Castaing wants to explore new perceptions of bodies, augmented or transformed. He questions our vision of reality faced with the virtual, the organic gesture faced with artificial movement.

The choreographer takes an interest in all body types to understand their resonance with technological tools. He therefore stages children with humanoid robots in his performance School of Moon (2016), or physically disabled people interacting with dancers thanks to virtual reality in L’âge d’or (The Golden Age) (2016). His last creation Phoenix (2018) combines dancers with drones, and artists on stage with artists in Gaza through a system of live videos.

From the outset of his career as a choreographer in 2011, Éric Minh Cuong Castaing has injected international experiences into his work in France. He did a research residency at the Circuit-Est in Montréal, Canada, in 2015, has undertaken cultural actions and conferences in Düsseldorf in Germany in 2018 all while attracting attention at the Oklahoma Dance Film Festival in the United States.

Phoenix, the performance he created in 2018, stems from a journey to Beirut in Lebanon where Éric Minh Cuong Castaing ponders bodies of the Middle East. To do so, he worked with artists of the Gaza strip like Mumen Khalifa or the Myuz GB Crew. This performance — composed of dancers on stage, videos and drones— has been shown in several countries and notably in the Belgian festival Charleroi Danse or at the Dublin Dance Festival in Ireland.