Mélodrama is a solo “documentary performance” in which Eszter Salamon re-enacts interviews she made in 2006 and 2012 with a woman living in a small village in Southern Hungary and who happens to share her name.
Reading her homonym, Salamon embodies the 62 year-old woman’s life-story and by memory revisits her gestures and intonations onstage, thus offering the possibility for the spectators to experience the course of a lifetime within the performance’s duration.
The result is a meditation not only on the possibility of getting inside another person’s skin, but the extent to which personal hopes and desires exceed the determinations of class, age, geography and religion.

concept, interviews and performance: Eszter Salamon
text: Krimerné Dr. Eszter Salamon
text editing: Lindy Annis & Eszter Salamon
coaching: Lindy Annis
music: Terre Thaemlitz
soundtrack: Sabine Ercklentz & Eszter Salamon
music editing/sound mix: Sabine Ercklentz
visuals: Angela Anderson
translation : Peter Komlosi
technical direction: Andreas Harder
organisation and production: Alexandra Wellensiek/Botschaft
thanks to: Sasa Asentic, Bojana Cvejic, Sylvie Garot, Xavier Le Roy, Erzsebet Salamon, Ferenc Salamon, Minze Tummescheit, Haus der Kulturen der Welt and Hebbel am Ufer
funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds
co-produced by Berlin Documentary Forum 2 (Berlin), far°-festival des arts vivants (Nyon), Next Festival (Valenciennes)
supported by Le Kwatt