Monument 0.6 : Hétérochronie

How to bridge past events with the present time? Over the last few years choreographer Eszter Salamon has been exploring this question in a series of works entitled Monuments. The latest one, HETEROCHRONIE/Palermo 1599-1920 is a choral piece conceived for 9 performers which draws inspiration from the mummification rituals of the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo as well as Sicily’s vocal traditions.

By juxtaposing distant geographies and times, the work attempts to prevent oblivion by building a fictional time capsule. The coming-together of Palermo’s mummies and the bodies of the dancers on stage gives us vistas across an imaginary area located between the past and the present.

“I’m not looking to embody a mummy, Eszter Salamon explains, but for dancers to reach into their bodies for resonances, figures, postures, petrified gestures, grimaces and rictuses, that smile of the dead.” Her show interrogates the possibility of a continuum between life and death, between the living and the dead, and invents its own utopian body: a dancing and sonorous body. Through slow movements and the common breathing issuing from the songs, the piece speaks to our own bereavements, the life we construct with our dead, and invites us to consider those issues privately and collectively.