The in-between, ambiguous, vague, and barely visible are Eszter Salamon’s chief interests. Technically, her choreographic investigations cannot be reduced to a common denominator. Whether experimenting with her own life story (“Magyar Tàncok”), dissolving the life stories of others in seemingly unconnected video and theatre snippets (“AND THEN”) or putting the connection between movement and perception to a radical test (“Nvsbl”), the form of presentation always derives from the artistic objective.
Eszter Salamon represents a broadly defined concept of dance and choreography, which, to her, are not formal principles, but forms of working and perception. She defines dance as the organisation and production of knowledge, the denial of explicit, the fragmentation of time and space – and at the same time, a critical contemplation of the process of artistic production. To do this, she borrows generously from pop and entertainment culture, but only to fill originally affirmative, conventional procedures with subversive potential.
In the same way that experimental musician Terre Thaemlitz makes romantic, narrative melodies collapse into electronic cacophonies for her latest production, “Dance#1/Driftworks”, Eszter Salamon’s work positions itself right where the apparently familiar unfolds its political explosive power through a shift in perspectives.
Eszter Salamon represents a broadly defined concept of dance and choreography, which, to her, are not formal principles, but forms of working and perception. She defines dance as the organisation and production of knowledge, the denial of explicit, the fragmentation of time and space – and at the same time, a critical contemplation of the process of artistic production. To do this, she borrows generously from pop and entertainment culture, but only to fill originally affirmative, conventional procedures with subversive potential.
In the same way that experimental musician Terre Thaemlitz makes romantic, narrative melodies collapse into electronic cacophonies for her latest production, “Dance#1/Driftworks”, Eszter Salamon’s work positions itself right where the apparently familiar unfolds its political explosive power through a shift in perspectives.
Frank Weigand
