James Vu Anh Pham

The Australian-Vietnamese James Vu Anh Pham grew up in Perth, Australia and studied at the New Zealand School of Dance, majoring in contemporary dance. From 2012 he worked intensively with the Australian dance company Chunky Move under the then leadership of Anouk van Dijk. In 2014 he was honoured with the Helpmann Award ‘Best Male Dancer in a Dance or Physical Theatre Work’ and the ‘Outstanding Performance by a Male Dancer’ Australian Dance Award. In 2016, James Vu Anh Pham came to Belgium to collaborate with choreographers such as Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet for the performances Babel(words) and Babel 7.16, which was a guest at the Festival d'Avignon. He has collaborated many times with Cherkaoui including as a guest at the Opera Ballet Vlaanderen for Exhibition (2016), for the operas Les Indes Galantes (Munich, 2016) and Satyagraha (Basel, 2017) and the dance performance Icon (Göteborg, 2016). Between 2019 and 2022 he toured with the Akram Khan Company in the production Outwitting the Devil, which was also performed in Avignon and for which he received the award for Outstanding Male Modern Performance at the National Dance Awards UK. From 2021-2022, James Vu Anh Pham joined the company of Opera Ballet Vlaanderen and danced again in Avignon, this time with the performance Futur proche by Jan Martens. He has also appeared in Platel’s C(h)oeurs 2022 and Cherkaoui's Noetic. As a choreographer, he will create a new work for the company of Theater Münster in 2023. He has been teaching countertechnique workshops worldwide since 2014.

Repertoire at OBV

• Exhibition (Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui)*
• Noetic (Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui)
• C(h)oeurs 2022 (Alain Platel)*
• Futur proche (Jan Martens)*
• Satyagraha (Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui)*

*originated the role