Dance

Eszter Salamon

Name: Eszter Salamon - Voices & Witches
Start: 2022-05-20
End: 2022-05-21
Location: Centre Pompidou

Voices & Witches

20 - 21 May 2022

Related to Berlin, nos années 20

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While reconsidering the notions of memory and archive, Eszter Salamon leads spectators on an empirical adventure that swings between reconstitution, commentary and fiction.

Driven by the desire to intensify the links between the past and our current period, this performance invites us to encounter a different historicity from that of canonical art history. Here the work of the imagination fills in the lacunae created by the absence of historical documents, producing a new realm of meaning and intimacy.

She restores a place, neglected at the time, to artist Valeska Gert who developed her work partly as a form of resistance to the dominant aesthetic and ideological frameworks of the 1920s and 1930s, driven by German Romanticism and nationalism – including their prescriptions for female beauty.

Extending the evening of Saturday 21 May, the show is followed by a projection of Eszter Salamon's latest films, and a discussion around the questions concerning the intermediality of the dominant heterosexual male gaze.

Concept and performance: Eszter Salamon

Production and organisation: Botschaft GbR/ Alexandra Wellensiek, Studio ES/ Elodie Perrin, Institute of Speculative Narration and Embodiment

Supported by the National Performance Network - Stepping Out, fund of the federal German government's committee for culture and media as part of the Neustart Kultur programme to support dance
Subsidised by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe, Department of Cultural Affairs Île-de-France 

Thanks to: Grazyna Kulczyk, founder of the Muzeum Susch and Joanna Lesnierowska, curator of Acziun Susch, for their invitation during a research residency in 2020,which led to the first presentation of Voices & Witches. Special thanks to Boglàrka Börcsök for her collaboration in researching and developing Monuments dedicated to Valeska Gert, presented by Eszter Salamon since 2015. 

Voices & Witches derives its inspiration from the work of Valeska Gert, particularly Modedame (1917), Kupplerin (1920), Pause (1920), Salome (1921), Orgasmus (1922), Zärtlicher Walzer (1924), Koloratursängerin (1928), Versammlung (1931), Schlummerlied (1950s), and her autobiographical book Ich bin eine Hexe. Kaleidoskop meines Lebens (1968) translated into French as Je suis une sorcière - Kaléidoscope d'une vie dansée (I am a Witch – Kaleidoscope of a Life in Dance) co-published by éditions Complexe and Centre National de la Danse.