“MONUMENT 0: Haunted by wars (1913 – 2013), the first part of a series reflecting on the relationship between choreography and history. The choreographer and performer Eszter Salamon looks at the past 100 years as a history of wars, and together with six dancers brings to stage the tribal and folk dances, as well as other popular dance forms originated from the conflict zones of four continents. Embracing the approach of an archaeological history, this “dance macabre” brings about an impressively sombre yet stirring scenario bringing to light an invisible world and dance history.
That elsewhere is, however, not a unique “other place“. MONUMENT 0 is thus a feast devouring and reinterpreting movement paradigms that our modernity has erased in order to create a tabula rasa as its own historical fiction.
The score is based on a selection of wars that took place between 1913 and 2013 worldwide. The main criterion of the selection is the First, Western world's manifold implications in the wars happening elsewhere. The territories named in the score – which are the contexts where the dances performed on stage are transformed from – are those that have been attacked, invaded, violated or occupied during the armed conflicts.”
