Eszter Salamon, dancer and choreographer of Hungarian origin, after classical dance training in Budapest, moved to France in 1992 where she collaborated with various choreographers. Since 2001, she has continued to realize her own creations: the solo What a Body You Have, Honey (2001) and Giszelle in collaboration with Xavier Le Roy, Reproduction (2004) a piece for 8 dancers, Magyar Tàncok (2005) with Hungarian folk dancers and musicians, Nvsbl (2006), the film-choreography AND THEN (2007) and the concert-performance Without you I am nothing together with Aranxta Martinez (2007). In 2008 she created the duo Dance # 1 / Driftworks with Christine De Smedt, and took part in the project of choreographic research focused on self-organization and self-learning 6Month1Location at the National Choreographic Centre of Montpellier. With the same group of artists, she participated in and co-curated the festival In-Presentable in Madrid. In 2009, Eszter Salamon developed, with Christine De Smedt, Transformers, a research project for a choral work through workshops and residencies leading up to the duo Dance # 2, and collaborated as choreographer in the project Dance # 3 at the invitation of the dancer and choreographer Cristina Rizzo, creating Voice Over. Then came the solo Dance for Nothing (2010) inspired by John Cage, Tales of the bodiless, (2011) a musical fiction-without-science in collaboration with the composer Terre Thaemlitz, and the performance-documentary Melodrama (2012). Salamon was assistant director for the opera Theater der Wiederholungen by Bernhard Lang at the Steirischer Herbst (Graz, 2003), and realized the mise-en-scène of the music of Karim Haddad for Seven attempted excapes to Silence at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden (Berlin 2005).
Christine De Smedt is a belgian artist. Her artistic work is situated between dancing/performing, choreographing, coordinating, organizing and curating artistic projects. Being a member of the company Les Ballets C. de la B. (Gent, Belgium) from 1991 to 2012, she created her own work since 1993, a solo, La force fait l’union, fait la force; a travelling project in the Balkans, Escape Velocity (1998) and a large scale mass choreography, 9x9 (2000-2005). In 2012 she premiered a series of performed portraits of different artists, titled Four Choreographic Portraits (‘I would leave a signature’, The son of a priest, A woman with a diamond and Self-reliance). She collaborated for several years with Meg Stuart - Damaged Goods (1995-1999) and for the last 10 years, had various artistic collaborations with Mårten Spångberg, Mette Edvardsen, Philipp Gehmacher, Vladimir Miller, Jan Ritsema and Xavier Le Roy. Between 2005 and 2008 she was engaged in projects with Eszter Salamon, creating Nvsbl, dance#1/driftworks and the group project Transformers. De Smedt was the curator of an artist residency project Summer Intensive. She is also performing in Le Roy’s Low Pieces and the choreography by Mette Ingvartsen Artificial Nature Project.
performance, italian première
coreography & performance Eszter Salamon & Christine De Smedt
production Le Kwatt, Eszter Salamon & Christine De Smedt
Dance #2 continues Dance #1/Driftworks, the duet that Salamon and De Smedt created in 2008. It focuses on one of the principles explored in the earlier duet: the relationship between movement and voice. Dance #2 attempts to extend potentialities of relation and communication between two performers mixing bodily gestures and words in a new hybrid language. For the performance at Live Arts Week, De Smedt and Salamon will present two of the three parts of Dance #2: listening & mouthing, and words & gestures.
Listening & mouthing is the transformation of language following its phonic aspect. It is a carefully composed speaking by synchronisation, where words (be)come by repetition and modulation. Here, voice and meaning gain a powerful physicality while the bodily choreography is almost reduced to the face.
In words & gestures the two protagonists construct a communication from the spatial distance that separates them. In a gestural language words are literally composed from syllables assigned to various body parts. This game is a language machine where the sound, bodily sign, meaning and sense of hybrid word-gestures challenge each other. Spectators, while watching this ping-pong of ‘question and answer’ become involved in the game they could possibly play themselves. The game could be compared with inventing by learning a language together, which is the poetic by-product of any artistic and love relationship at the same time. The apparently absurd formal invention gets contaminated by some pseudo social political concerns. But the effort to transcend naïve or idiotic statements appears difficult, or just funny.