eszter-salamon.com

Melodrama” is a solo “documentary performance” in which Eszter Salamon re-enacts interviews she made in 2006 and 2012 with a woman living in a small village in Southern Hungary and who happens to share her name. Reading her homonym, Salamon embodies the 62 year-old woman’s life-story and by memory revisits her gestures and intonations onstage, thus offering the possibility for the spectators to experience the course of a lifetime within the performance’s duration. The result is a meditation not only on the possibility of getting inside another person’s skin, but the extent to which personal hopes and desires exceed the determinations of class, age, geography and religion.

“You are the first one I tell all this to. I’ve never told this story to anyone before. That first time you came to talk to me, I thought you had really strange taste. Then, when you wrote me that you wanted to make another interview with me, I asked my children and they told me I should do it – I was so happy after the first one.

And now you are going to play me ? You mean, say just what I told you on stage? All of it ? But you are much younger then me. And who is going to be interested in my story? But could you please, change the names of my husbands? I wouldn’t want to embarass them or get them into trouble. Imagine if you play the piece in Budapest.”
Eszter Salamon

Eszter Salamon is a Hungarian choreographer, dancer and performer. She is the author of solos “What A Body You Have, Honey” (2001) and “Giszelle” (2001) in collaboration with Xavier Le Roy, “Reproduction” (2004), a piece for eight dancers, “Magyar Tàncok” (2005) with Hungarian folk dancers and musicians, “Nvsbl” (2006), a film-choreography in collaboration with Bojana Cveji? “AND THEN” (2007) and together with Arantxa Martinez, the concert-performance “Without You I Am Nothing” (2007) starring Lukas Minkus and Ramon Pozo, “Dance#1/Driftworks” (2008), in collaboration with Christine De Smedt, “Voice Over” (2009), a piece commissioned and interpreted by Cristina Rizzo, “Dance for Nothing” (2010) and with P. Böhm, B. Cveji?, C. Dambrain, S. Garot and Terre Thaemlitz “TALES OF THE BODILESS” (2011). Her work has been widely presented in Europe and Asia. As a dancer, she collaborated with Sidonie Rochon, Mathilde Monnier and François Verret. Her work in music theatre includes assistance to the opera “Theater der Wiederholungen” (2003) by Bernhard Lang staged by Xavier Le Roy at Steirischer Herbst Festival, Graz and staging the music of Karim Haddad in the frame of the project “Seven attempted escapes from Silence” (2005) at Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Berlin. In 2008, she participates in 6Month1Location, an artistic research project based on self-organisation and self-education at the CCN, Montpellier. In 2009, together with the same group of artists, she co-curates and takes part in the festival In-Presentable09, Madrid. In 2009, Eszter Salamon develops with Christine De Smedt “Transformers”, a research project for a group choreography through workshops and artist residencies in Brussels, Madrid, PAF-St. Erme, Mexico City, Vienna, Tokyo and Stockholm. Following up “Transformers”, Salamon and De Smedt presented during ImpulsTanz 2011 in Vienna their duet piece “Dance#2”. “Melodrama” was first presented in the frame of Berlin Documentary Forum 2 at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in June 2012.