Nguyễn Duy Thành is a Vietnamese director, choreographer, and performance artist. He began his practice in hip hop in 2002 and was a founding member of S.I.N.E, one of the pioneering hip hop crews in Vietnam. From this street based foundation, Nguyễn Duy Thành gradually moved toward contemporary performance, expanding movement from physical skill into a language of image, rhythm, memory, and state.
Since 2012, he has focused on developing contemporary projects and experimental performances across a wide range of contexts, from theatres and museums to beaches, urban spaces, natural landscapes, and international festivals. Nguyen Duy Thanh approaches the body as a tool for opening other spaces, where inner states, cultural memory, sound, light, objects, and architecture can meet.
Rather than working with movement as form alone, he is interested in how the body can become a threshold between what is visible and what is felt. His works often begin from a specific material, a space, a cultural image, a personal experience, or a state of attention, then develop into performances where the body, scenography, sound, and light share the same dramaturgical weight.
A recurring direction in Nguyễn Duy Thành’s practice is the encounter between Asian cultural materials and contemporary performance. He does not approach tradition as decoration or fixed heritage, but as a living source of structure, rhythm, and transformation. Through this process, cultural references enter the work through listening, translation, and embodied research.
His selected works include Body & Soul (2018), THÁN (2019), Bougainvillea (2020), The Room 1 & 2 (2022, 2023), MÃ (2024, 2025), and First Dates (2025). Alongside his own creations, Nguyễn Duy Thành has performed and collaborated in works by artists and choreographers including Heiner Goebbels, Arco Renz, Trần Ly Ly, and Bùi Ngọc Quân. In 2018, he joined Heiner Goebbels’s intermedia work Everything That Happened and Would Happen, which later toured to major international contexts including Manchester, New York, Bochum, Saint Petersburg, Budapest, Salzburg, Taipei, and Paris.
Nguyễn Duy Thành has also worked as a choreographer and performance artist for cultural, site responsive, and brand related projects, collaborating with partners such as Hermès, Patek Philippe, Chopard, Davines, MSB, Sun Life Vietnam, Elise, Six Senses Côn Đảo, Indochine House, and Đôi Dép.
Across different formats, Nguyễn Duy Thành’s practice remains rooted in the question of how the body can carry what is difficult to name. Each work becomes a way of opening a space, between memory and presence, tradition and the present, the individual body and the larger environment around it.