Eszter Salamon

A performer, dancer, and choreographer, Eszter Salamon started studying traditional Hungarian dance at a very young age, before turning to ballet, then to contemporary dance, a comprehensive and demanding experience she first put at the service of Sidonie Rochon, Mathilde Monnier, or François Verret. She began her career as a choreographer in 2001 with the solos What a Body You Have, Honey and Giszelle with Xavier Le Roy, which immediately put her unique personality on the map. Since then, she's acted as an emancipator, multiplying projects and forms—musical plays, choreographic films, conferences, museum plays, autobiographical plays, etc.—that question the way dance creates stories. Convinced that dancing isn't only about bodies and their organisation within space and time, she's built her own system, using different media: the absence of bodies, texts, images, words, music, stories.Her goal? To create new ways to understand choreographic language, and to widen the field of what imagination can do. In 2014, Eszter Salamon began a series of plays exploring both the concept of monument and the practice of a rewriting of history. Since 2015, and for the next three years, she has been a partner of the Centre national de la danse.

Portrait of Eszter Salamon © portrait Alain Roux, photo Ursula Kaufmann