Transitions Central Europe: Melodrama

HUNGARY / GERMANY

While googling herself a few years ago, Eszter Salamon discovered a woman in a Hungarian village who shared her name. She travelled there in 2006 to meet her and to listen to her tell the story of her life. She repeated the trip and the interview in 2012.

Then, using material from the two interviews, she created a performance-documentary based on the life of a normal 60-year-old woman from Hungary. Sitting in an armchair on stage, Eszter Salamon becomes another Eszter Salamon, adopting her namesake’s ways of speaking and moving, her gestures and her life story. For two and a half hours, the choreographer and performer keeps the audience hanging on her every word through an unaffected monologue that breathes life into a life as though it really were her own.

The elder Mrs Salamon was born right after World War Two in a Hungary which was now part of the Eastern Bloc. Full of vivacity and love, she faced up to the trials of a life which forced her to put what she might want in second place. Her life was marked by the historical events of the latter half of the 20th and the early 21st century, which flash before the audience’s eyes like a film, viewed through the prism of one person’s life.

By re-enacting a life in this way, Salamon poses questions about the workings of memory and history. How much of what we remember is memory and how much interpretation? How are unofficial histories recorded in History? What can a shard of memory and identity mean to us as individuals? And can we each rewrite history?