Eszter Salamon Appointed Thirty-Sixth Valeska Gert Visiting Professor

Eszter Salamon has been appointed Valeska Gert Visiting Professor during this special anniversary semester. Salamon is a Hungarian choreographer, filmmaker, and performer who lives and works in Berlin and Paris. She uses choreography to combine and structure a variety of media, including images, sounds, music, texts, and voices, as well as bodily movements and actions. Her works have been showcased at performing arts venues and museums worldwide, including the Centre Pompidou Metz (France), the Festival d’Avignon (France), MoMA (USA), the Museo Reina Sofía Madrid (Spain), the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (Spain), the Ruhrtriennale (Germany), and the Akademie der Künste Berlin (Germany).

Salamon is known for her interdisciplinary, research-based artistic practice. She has engaged with Gert’s legacy in many of her own works. For example, Salamon has been developing the Valeska Gert MONUMENT since 2015, a series of performative works relating to the life and works of Valeska Gert. Her latest performative installation in the series, Study for the Valeska Gert Pavilion (2022), was presented at the Sixteenth Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art. The short film Reappearance (2022) is the first of a planned series of films by Salamon, and aims to present a cinematic speculation on history and memory. It is based on two anecdotes recounted by Valeska Gert. Salamon will present the second part of this series, Sommerspiele (2023), at the opening event of her visiting professorship at Freie Universität on June 8, 2026, at 7:00 p.m.

“The Living Book”: History as a Lived Archive

As Valeska Gert Visiting Professor, Salamon will be offering a seminar to students in the English-language master’s degree program Critical Dance Studies. Titled “The Living Book,” the experimental seminar bridges the gap between teaching and performance. It will focus on questions surrounding memory, forgetting, and the role of archives in understanding the past and the future.

Public Lecture Series: “Valeska Gert and Her Afterlives”

A second central feature of “Valeska Gert Season” at Freie Universität Berlin’s Institute for Theater Studies is the public lecture series “Valeska Gert and Her Afterlives.” This series features contributions from both faculty and international guest speakers, who discuss Gert’s significance in the context of Weimar dance, her position during the Nazi period, her autobiographical writings, and her anti-authoritarian, queer-feminist work in the arts. The speakers also reflect on artistic practice, current research, and public debate, approaching questions surrounding bodies, society, and memory. Together, these lectures present a state-of-the-art picture of research on one of the most fascinating figures of twentieth-century modernism in dance. The program has been curated by dance studies experts Professor Lucia Ruprecht and Dr. Lindsey Drury, both from Freie Universität’s Division of Critical Dance Studies.