In Forme(s) de vie, choreographer Eric Minh Cuong Castaing brings together dancers and adults with disabilities.
In Forme(s) de vie / Form(s) of life, choreographer Eric Minh Cuong Castaing brings together dancers and adults with disabilities. In this way, he reveals the (adaptive) power of bodies that are all too often written off. On stage, dancers come together with performers who have lost their mobility. With the embodiment of prostheses by the dancers, this performance/installation questions the contemporary idea of an augmented body.
Which gestures would you keep if movement became a problem, an objective, a struggle that claimed all your attention? As an extension ofL’Âge d’Or, which was made with children with a motor neurone disease, Forme(s) de Vie offers a new way of dancing together. From the necessity of the human gesture. The performance-installation develops around a film on several screens and also involves the bodies of the visitors. Dancers compensate with their bodies for the motor shortcomings of others, such as an ex-dancer and an ex-boxer. The dancers are used as prostheses, as it were. That affects the awareness of their bodies and their relationship to each other. And to the present, in our individualistic, ultra competitive and techno scientific society.
From 2021 to 2024, ICK intensively collaborated with Artist Associate Eric Minh Cuong Castaing and his company SHONEN. To explore professional, amateur, and out-of-the-ordinary bodies in all their diversity, the Vietnamese/French visual artist and choreographer developed three research projects from which performances, installations, and films emerged.
The focus of his choreographic research is the ‘augmented body’: new technologies that interfere with our everyday lives to such an extent that they become an extension of our own body.
The three projects were developed in France and the Netherlands, as much as possible in collaboration with local care institutions and special needs schools. Each project had a specific workshop program. The knowledge we gained during the creative processes with vulnerable target groups was documented. Researchers from the MA Dance Therapy in Rotterdam created a model for better physical interaction between the target group and, for example, family members and caregivers.
The projects are categorised as follows:
Forme(s) de Vie. Performance and exhibition with dancers and adults with loss of mobility.
L’Age D’Or. Film and performance with dancers and children with physical disabilities.
Infante. Choreographic piece at the intersection of dance, concert and video art, with children between 7 and 12 years old.
Castaing attends and graduates college at the Gobelins l’école de l’image in Paris, where he studies visual arts. After his graduation, he spends several years working in animated film. Because of his interest in using technology and visual effects in different disciplines, Castaing becomes acquainted with hip-hop and contemporary dance, among other things. In 2007 he founds his own company, ‘Shonen’, and from this moment on he starts collaborating with other young creators of his generation.
