Red

With Red, Eszter Salamon continues her work of re-hallucinating traces of the past through the body, voice, and memory.

Red

With Red, Eszter Salamon continues her work of re-hallucinating traces of the past through the body, voice, and memory. Inspired by the figure of Valeska Gert, the performance opens a space for dialogue, both fictional and poetic, between the two artists, transcending time. Valeska Gert (1892-1978) is one of those artists whom history has methodically relegated to silence. An unclassifiable figure of the Berlin avant-garde, she invented a radical, grotesque, dissident performative art in the 1920s, before the Nazi regime crushed her career and forced her into exile. In New York in 1939, then in Berlin in 1949, she successively opened two cabarets – the Beggar Bar and the Hexenküche – spaces of artistic utopia from which pacifist poems, anti-fascist songs, and cries against the atomic bomb and collective annihilation sprang forth. For Eszter Salamon, this erasure is no accident: it testifies to Valeska Gert's freedom, her power of disobedience, her capacity to disturb. Since 2016, the choreographer has dedicated long-term research to her, explored 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 also the performative installation Study for the Valeska Gert Pavilion (Lyon Biennale, 2022). Neither a reenactment nor a nostalgic homage, Red continues this dialogue with Valeska Gert through a frontal and offensive proposition, faithful to the radicality of the German performer. From fragments of a fragmented memory, Eszter Salamon offers an engaged performance where voice, electric guitar, poems of today and yesterday, movements, and especially painting as material and artistic gesture, mingle without hierarchy. And red, covering everything. The colour of blood, vitality, revolt: Eszter Salamon transforms the stage into a monochrome. A feminist manifesto