First he became designer in animation movies: Graduated in 3D animation at the School of Image Les Gobelins, traditional animation drawing in LTMA Luxembourg and studied the morphology at the Beaux Arts in Paris. Designer of charac- ters and universe of animated series in Mc Guff, Methodfilms, Cube or Def2shoot, he created the short film La migration Bigoudenn * awarded Jury honors at Syggraph in Los Angeles, Canal + price E-magicians, and Electronica mention in vienna in 2004.
Discovering hip-hop in 1997, he danced in various hip hop cies and developed his career of graphic designer at the same time. He meets contemporary dance, through an interpreter of Saburo Teshigawara, or Win vandekeybus such as Juha Marsalo; and dance Buto by Gozei zatsu, Carlotta Ikeda.
On 2011, he was a guest dancer for the plastician-choregrapher Va Wolfl on NEUERTANZ, to the piece "Ich sah: Das Lamm auf dem Berg Zion, Offb. 14,1".
After a trip to Los Angeles where he discovered the phenomenon Krump, then humanitarian and educational projects in Senegal and vietnam, he created the company SHONEN in 2007.

Eric Minh Cuong Castaing Interviewed by Gilles Rondot, extract from the magazine of CCN de la Rochelle, February 2011

You speak about the hip hop body that in your opinion embodies the digestive system of audiovisual imaginary and is representative of the consumption appetite of present-day youth...Can you clarify what is your intimate relationship to hip hop dance , is it a generation effect or is there something stronger in body states and the gesture?`

I started dancing hip-hop in 1997 in Villepinte, but other practices have been decisive in my course, such as martial arts, contemporary dance, butoh dance ... My approach of dance, as well as a choreographer than as a dancer is made of the confrontation of all these practices, which moved within me, refusing to draw a clear line, a precise origin or influence. This overload of influences, I tell about it in Kaiju.
In a sort of indigestion of images that characterizes our world. One of the prisms through which I develop this idea is actually hip hop dance, but the work of the body in Kaiju, the research for a fantastic body, comes as much from images mimicry as misappropriation of hip hop dance codes. We work on that with Gaetan Brun-Picard, my assistant choreographer, who evolves in the same time in hip hop dance, in the Tanztheater and with Salomon, dancer coming from hip hop underground and who is precisely this digestive body.
There is in hip hop this idea that I find very beautiful which is to try not to move as the other one. Not move like the other one, but nevertheless finding ourselves in a dance space, discovering a common imaginary: the one from television, cinema, school ... This idea of moving to better find ourselves ... This guides my work, and especially Kaiju, which speaks about the image, images, and in order to do so, has always to find the resources of the space gap, the distancing...
How do you place yourself in relation to fine arts, are you trying to situate yourself in a crossing between fine arts and dance and why?
My first desire and then my first job were to work in film animation, as a characters’ draftsman and animate them. Then came 3D animation which I studied at the school Les Gobelins 7 years ago. Very quickly, I wanted to go throughout the code of cinema narration that moves me as a spectator but makes me feel disappointed when I create an image. Especially since I worked for the advertisement that produces touch- ing images, but touching to make consume. Thus, my choreographic process and my reflection on the ability to create emotion come first from my history, my practice of image - cinema, manga, and comics - before the theatrical space in which these questionings get finally fit into.
Probably because the theatrical space offers an ability of overlap that allows taking a look at these questions and not be absorbed by it. Probably also because the stage creates a space where the living audience meets us, also inconstant, and we want to control the perception of the spectator, leave him in a questioning, an unsolved ...
I do believe that it is in the question on the narrative that interferes the body’s need in my creation, its inconstancy, its inexpressible tension, its truth. What calls me out today is how things of the stage slide between themselves. How the spectator’s empathy can be guided to a gesture, a body, a light or a voice. How can we work on this take over, also confuse the issues and give rise to new combinations of ideas. Sometimes I search few things in dance. A simple presence, a look, seriousness ... I think I wonder about the idea of the spectacular. Chaining images in Kaiju would be precisely playing the game of these images (entertainment) that guide us without dead time, without possible pondering.

“Reporter of the intimate,” I like this formulation as new means of communication tend to make people and things extremely superficial, can you develop?

First, I wanted to seize poetically a notion of a “new hype technology”: extended reality. Extended reality, in everyday use, is filming with our phone or the touch pad, a place, a street, a monument and receive information about this over internet or GPS, which pin against the image filmed by the phone camera.
Now, if we film a person, what do we see on his body’s image? Google research data, his Facebook profile, tags? His memories, his desires, that would be printed on his body as tattoos? I do not know
if the communications tend to make people superficial, but they project outwards the body which makes our intimacy. Sometimes projections in Kaiju deal with this question: printing, overprinting, the words that identify and map the body or the image of the body ... This raises the question of what identifies us as on Internet, some pictures, links, some tags-words that synthesize us ...
The notion of reporter of the intimate expresses that, this association between intimacy and projection of this intimacy. It refers to our voyeurism as our exhibitionism.

Ultra communication and techno meetings: do you have a critical position in relation to that or do you just make an assessment? What is your point of view?

Hmm ... I think it’s rather a mess, it is disturbing as it could be, for instance, to stage our life on Face- book, through videos that we post, the comments and the “love it”.
It is integrated, it is a newspaper, and it is also very practical, very reassuring to be always “connected” to the others...I grew up with the first chats and the boom of the Internet replacing the evening news. Today, we learn to the minute that there is an attack, a famine, an umpteenth factory-prison at the very end of the world ..
But do we take more advantage; can we take more advantage in this stream of information? Because I feel that I also belong to this generation that is called “speed and enthusiastic “ in depoliticized advertising. So I have this feeling that we are in a phase of digestion to ...
It does not mean that we should wait that it will transform by itself: we participate in this phase of digestion and we act on our scale to offer other- ness, by questioning on stage opposite movements that run down our body. The theatrical space al- lows this, open an area of doubt, an unsolved.