Wars & Dances

Wars & Dances insists on generating ‘poetics of relations’ and brings into question the collective imagination and the imagination of the collective. It celebrates new ways of collectively producing knowledge through learning and dancing together.

With twelve young international dance artists at P.A.R.T.S., Eszter Salamon seeks to develop a practice that focuses on cultural and linguistic interstices and questions dominant modes of teaching and learning movements, as an attempt to transgress frameworks of coloniality, heteronormativity and contemporaneity.

Through the practice of war dances and dances of resistance, Wars & Dances questions how self-learning and transformation can become tools capable of countering tendencies of homogenization present in professional dance education, and this way tries to contribute to the ongoing efforts to decolonize aesthetics, subjectivity, and knowledge.

This work is considered as a laboratory of relations, beyond the existing (physical, geographical, cultural, gendered) borders. The ‘anterior’ expressions that are investigated are mostly male dances of four continents, bare traces of colonial history.

Wars & Dances embraces questions such as which (dance) history do we refer to when we speak of history, what and how do we learn about history and how can we transform that experience into an emancipating one, and if a practice of relationality can become a new dance of resistance?


Concept and artistic direction Eszter Salamon Transmission Boglàrka Börcsök  Developed with and performed by Liza Baliasnaja, Sidney Barnes, Amanda Barrio Charmelo, Suelem Cristina Da Silva, Nikita Alexandrovich Chumakov, Anika Edström Kawaji, Bilal El Had, Cassiel Gaube, Stefan Govaart, Noé Pellencin, Laura-Maria Poletti, Kamola Rashidova Kaxxarovna