Eszter Salamon’s surface tension
Aren’t our bodies always mediated by multiple, confusing streams of images, memories, emotions and desires, by culture and technology, by all kinds of connections and social relationships? Human beings are indeed expressive at surface level, they gather language and identity by being in touch with the outside world.
Contemporary forms of expressionism and the body’s discursive materiality have been a field of exploration throughout Eszter Salamon’s work. She borrows images from pop culture, humorously appears in drag, or traces back the genealogy of her dancer’s body in Hungarian folk dances, as if they were an ingrown costume. Yet, Salamon is not just interested in signs, but in how they affect the body and its attitudes. In pieces like NVSBL (2006) or Dance #1/Driftworks (2008) a stream of signs and wayward energies percolates the dancers’ bodies, turning them into a terrain of traces and micro-events. Repetition and extreme slow motion function as choreographic tools that allow one to better observe this process of being affected by a regime of signs.
In Tales of the Bodiless (2011) Salamon wonders about non-human bodies (animal, mineral, astral, acousmatic) and even ventures into a remote future devoid of material substance. Yet today there is still ample chance for bodies being scripted or scored, ventriloquizing or murmuring. And also for appropriating these processes, that is for negotiating one’s place in the symbolical order, like one can witness in Salamon’s careful attempts to master a “trance of multitasking” in Dance for Nothing (2010).