Biography

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Biography

Banner photo by Marty Buhler, headshots by ChingI Bigelow — Banner photo by **Marty Buhler**, headshots by **ChingI Bigelow**

Dat Nguyen is a dance and visual artist who was based in Salt Lake City, Utah until recently returning to his native Vietnam. He received his BFA degree in Dance at Sam Houston State University and is finishing his MFA degree in Modern Dance at the University of Utah. Throughout his dancing career, he has worked and collaborated with notable choreographers, such as Christian von Howard, Maurice Causey, Gerard Theoret, Lesley Telford, Daniel Clifton, Eric Handman, and Maya Gurantz. In 2013, he became a founding member of Nicolay Dance Works, a contemporary modern dance company directed by Dana Nicolay in Texas. In 2019, before coming back to his country, he was a founding member of Queer Spectra Arts Festival in Salt Lake City.

As a choreographer, Dat often employs collage as narrative vehicle in order to heighten the somatic experience of his complexed identity. He also turns to different visual media/technologies, notably photography and videography, to investigate their often-intangible relationship with movement. He founded MotionVivid™ in 2014 to further his research and expand his artistic practice to local communities that he engages. In 2018, he received a residency from the Sugar Space Foundation and Salt Lake County Zoo, Arts, and Park program to stage an evening length work. His theatrical works and collaborations have been presented at multiple venues and festivals across the U.S., including Versatility Dance Festival (CO), the Jack Crystal Theatre, The Tank theatre (NY), SMUSH Gallery (NJ), Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Metro Music Hall, Rocky Mountain Choreography Festival, Marriott Center for Dance, Salt Dance Fest, The Great Salt Lake Fringe Festival (UT), Bailando International Dance Festival, Jim & Nancy Gaertner Performing Arts Center (TX), Highways Performance Space & Gallery (CA), and Dibden Center for The Arts (VT).

Critic Les Roka from The Utah Review describes his work as “commanding even those audience members who think they are progressive and enlightened sufficiently to realize that many artists might prefer playing it safe in Utah’s peculiar culture of sanctioned perfectionism.”

Artist Statement

Art needs to be bold! It needs to be loud, personal, political, yet it also needs to be subtle, sociable, and multidimensional. Art is created in the midst of tension – the tension of wanting to say something but not finding the expression for it. Therefore, art always struggles between clarity and confusion, certainty and ambiguity, literary and abstraction. Whether art’s purpose is to provoke or portray, it needs to open doors to many landscapes that we, alone as individual or together as humanity, can occupy and reflect on ourselves and our journeys.

And yet, for art to be anything or everything of the above, it needs to be coerced into existence, for to define what art means is to deny the limitless possibilities of what it could be, and that is violence. Art cultivates its own freedom and existence. It traverses between perceiving and being perceived. It negotiates between intention and reception. It breaks down boundaries, but not to build new ones. Our need for art and its spirituality is as innate as our need to survive, and our experiences with art are often profound and transcendental, which is why one should never chase after its essence, for transcendence is an encounter and never a goal! Regardless of our enduring quest to elucidate the bedazzling riddle that is art, it is going to remain the wild untamed mystery.

For every gamble with death, I was held in spectacle. Then in every deep dream, I escape to life.

Living in a world inundated with spectacles, my mind runs at the speed of lightning. It is exposed to thousands of sensations and micro-sensations at once. This overstimulation translates itself onto my body - one that is socially/politically bound by its shape, stage, sexuality, and color. Within this prison of corporeality, my soul yearns for its own freedom - a craving that catalyzes my creating. Yet, I may never know if what I do equates to art making. All that I ache for is to find ways to speak my truth to which I myself have denied my own access - anything that works, for the longing that I seek. Today, it may be dance. Tomorrow, it could be screaming.

The art says “Let me be your spectacle!”, to which I reply “Only if you let me see who’s hiding beneath my skin.”