Monument 0: Haunted by wars (1913-2013)

The dances that haunt Eszter Salamon's latest show don't come from a history book. Because the history of those dances can be found in no book, is practiced in no class, is discussed by no one. It is therefore hard to know precisely where those popular or tribal forms come from, those dances that the choreographer dredges up from the depths of our collective memory. They exist—like those zones of conflict they refer to, without ever naming them. Dance and war, two terms that could seem antithetical and yet have one thing in common: they couldn't be any further from academicism. All we know is that those dances where “incorporated” and transformed by Eszter Salamon's six dancers, in order to avoid any form of contemplation. They are an unavoidable reminder of the West's ongoing attempt at dematerialising history, of its vast colonial project of normalisation and commodification of identity. MONUMENT 0 would therefore be a sort of anti-commemoration, of anti-normalisation. This could be one key to understanding the first part in a series that aims to put the history of the 20th century and that of dance side by side to “create new symbolic spaces” and “fictions from which new interrogations” about the dance of the world can spring.

Conception Eszter Salamon 
Dramaturgy Eszter Salamon, Ana Vujanović 
Lights Sylvie Garot 
Sound Wilfried Haberey 
Costumes Vava Dudu

With Boglárka Börcsök, Ligia Lewis, João Martins, Yvon Nana-Kouala, Luis Rodriguez, Corey Scott-Gilbert

Production Botschaft Gbr, Studio E.S 
Coproduction HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), Internationales Sommerfestival Kampnagel (Hamburg), Les Spectacles Vivants Centre Pompidou (Paris), PACT Zollverein / Départs (Essen), Tanzquartier (Vienne), Centre chorégraphique national de Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon
Hosted-studioCentre chorégraphique national Ballet de Lorraine 
With the support of Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication - DRAC Île-de-France, Nationales Performance Netz (NPN) Koproduktionsförderung Tanz, Goethe Institut
The Festival d'Avignon receives support of the BNP Paribas Foundation for the representations of Monument 0 : Hanté par la guerre