ARCHIVES 2015 / Monument 0: Haunted by wars (1913-2013)

The dances that haunt Eszter Salamon's latest show don't come from a history book. Because the history of those dances can be found in no book, is practiced in no class, is discussed by no one. It is therefore hard to know precisely where those popular or tribal forms come from, those dances that the choreographer dredges up from the depths of our collective memory. They exist—like those zones of conflict they refer to, without ever naming them. Dance and war, two terms that could seem antithetical and yet have one thing in common: they couldn't be any further from academicism. All we know is that those dances where “incorporated” and transformed by Eszter Salamon's six dancers, in order to avoid any form of contemplation. They are an unavoidable reminder of the West's ongoing attempt at dematerialising history, of its vast colonial project of normalisation and commodification of identity. MONUMENT 0 would therefore be a sort of anti-commemoration, of anti-normalisation. This could be one key to understanding the first part in a series that aims to put the history of the 20th century and that of dance side by side to “create new symbolic spaces” and “fictions from which new interrogations” about the dance of the world can spring.

A performer, dancer, and choreographer, Eszter Salamon started studying traditional Hungarian dance at a very young age, before turning to ballet, then to contemporary dance, a comprehensive and demanding experience she first put at the service of Sidonie Rochon, Mathilde Monnier, or François Verret. She began her career as a choreographer in 2001 with the solos What a Body You Have, Honey and Giszelle with Xavier Le Roy, which immediately put her unique personality on the map. Since then, she's acted as an emancipator, multiplying projects and forms—musical plays, choreographic films, conferences, museum plays, autobiographical plays, etc.—that question the way dance creates stories. Convinced that dancing isn't only about bodies and their organisation within space and time, she's built her own system, using different media: the absence of bodies, texts, images, words, music, stories. Her goal? To create new ways to understand choreographic language, and to widen the field of what imagination can do. In 2014, Eszter Salamon began a series of plays exploring both the concept of monument and the practice of a rewriting of history. Since 2015, and for the next three years, she has been a partner of the Centre national de la danse.