Eszter Salamon

With striking visual force and formal precision, Hungarian choreographer Eszter Salamon blends dance, video, sound, and text into stage works that are as intelligent as they are sensuous. In addition to choreographies for major dance companies and her own ensemble pieces, Salamon has created video works for exhibitions and museum performances, e.g. in 2017 at the MK&G during the Summer Festival. In her latest solo work, RED, which celebrates its world premiere in Hamburg and will subsequently tour to Geneva and Paris, among other cities, Salamon continues her engagement with the life and legacy of avant-garde artist Valeska Gert. The silent movie star fled the Weimar Republic into exile in New York City, where the interdisciplinary artist—famous for her grotesque dance style and avant-garde theatrical approach—opened the Beggar's Bar cabaret before returning to Germany in 1947 to perform at the Berlin cabaret Hexenküche and later appear in films by Federico Fellini, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Volker Schlöndorff. Drawing on Gert's anti-fascist poetry, grotesque movement vocabulary, and vivid use of color, Salamon crafts a performative manifesto of feminist art history in which punk aesthetics and the grotesque converge with choreography, poetry, painting, and music.