Red

With Red, Eszter Salamon continues her work of re-hallucinating traces of the past through the body, the voice and memory. Inspired by the figure of Valeska Gert, the performance opens a space for dialogue that is both fictional and poetic between the two artists, across time.

aleska Gert (1892-1978) is one of those artists whom history has methodically consigned to silence. An unclassifiable figure of the Berlin avant-garde, she developed from the 1920s a radical, grotesque and dissident form of performance art, before the Nazi regime crushed her career and forced her into exile. In New York in 1939, then in Berlin in 1949, she opened two cabarets in quick succession, the Beggar Bar and the Hexenküche: spaces of artistic utopia from which pacifist poems, anti-fascist songs, cries against the atomic bomb and collective annihilation emerged.

For Eszter Salamon, this erasure is no accident: it bears witness to Valeska Gert's freedom, her force of disobedience and her power to unsettle. Since 2016, the choreographer has devoted a long-term research project to her, expressed through several works: the sound installation Love Letters to Valeska Gert (Salzburg, 2016), the performance MONUMENT 0.5: The Valeska Gert Monument (2017), the films Reappearance (2022) and Sommerspiele (2023), and the performative installation Study for the Valeska Gert Pavilion (Lyon Biennale, 2022). Neither reenactment nor nostalgic homage, Red continues this dialogue with Valeska Gert through a frontal and offensive proposal, faithful to the radicalism of the German performer. Working from fragments of a fragmented memory, Eszter Salamon presents a committed performance in which voice, electric guitar, poems of today and of yesterday, movement and, above all, painting as both material and artistic gesture mingle without hierarchy.

And red spreads over everything. Colour of blood, of vitality, of revolt: Eszter Salamon turns the stage into a monochrome.