Age(ing) and Archives – A conversation between Boglárka Börcsök and Eszter Salamon

Eszter: Let us start with the history of our interest in the archive.

Boglárka: My interest in ageing and archives emerged from my experience of leaving Hungary at the age of 18 to study contemporary dance in Austria and Belgium, and later reconnecting with those I had left behind. My dance education took place in the Western- European institutional framework, and after working professionally for some time, I began to reflect on my studies, particularly on the historical narratives and power-relations I had been exposed to.
At a certain point, I asked myself whether I could recall a single name from Hungary or Eastern Europe ever being mentioned by any of my teachers in the context of my dance historical education. This occurred around the time of an exhibition at Centre Pompidou Paris in 2012 titled ‘Danser sa vie’ (Dance Your Life). The exhibition focused on major movements and artists from the 1900’s to the present day tracing the development of dance in the 20th century from Nijinsky on, intersecting with visual arts and other fields. Yet, my impression at the time was that there was no mention of artists from outside the Western European and North American contexts. Confronted with this institutional gap, I also had to ask myself: where does my lack of knowledge come from? Is there a historical reason for this absence? How can I address it artistically?

This led me to return to Hungary the following year to research dance history there. Around this time, I had a profound experience with my grandmother, who had Alzheimer’s disease. Taking care of her, and especially the encounters with her naked body, left a deep sensual imprint on me. It heightened my sensitivity toward aging and aging bodies, not only on the level of physical touch or care but also of experiencing the loss of memory and personal history. These experiences gradually led me to the process of encountering elderly dancers in Budapest who were part of the development of modern dance in Hungary. These encounters led me to explore dance history through the lens of aging. Over time, I developed a more critical perspective on the archive, while also investigating my relationship with Hungary and its political landscape.

Eszter: We have similar historical, political and geographical backgrounds. I am from a different generation and left Hungary in 1991 after studying classical ballet at the National Academy in Budapest. I was destined to become a ballerina. However, I realised relatively early on that this wasn’t what I wanted for my body or my art. From a young age, I had also practised Hungarian folk dance. Later, I was able to reflect on and analyse my attitude to these forms of expression, shaped by the historical context following the Second World War. My dance education was, in many ways, a product of the political situation at the time, when all forms of modern dance were non-existent. Due to this void in dance education, I was only exposed to these two forms of dance. Their systems of representation were rigid and codified in terms of expression and gender behaviour. Neither was fully satisfying as both were extremely dominant and indoctrinating, colonising my body —while the Red Army and Russian tanks were still present in Hungary. After leaving Hungary, I spent ten years in France as a contemporary dancer. However, I gradually became dissatisfied with the lack of questioning around the representation of female bodies within the field. When I started working as a choreographer, I therefore focused on this issue.

What narrative lies behind the body?
How has it been shaped by my dance background and the related ideologies?

My interest in the archive emerged through a series of questions on the body and its history: What narrative lies behind the body? What is my body’s story? How has it been shaped by my dance background and the related ideologies? I explored these questions in a lecture-performance, for which I invited my mother, a folk dance pedagogue; my brother, a folk musician; and other musicians and childhood friends with whom I shared those experiences of my youth.
Created in 2005, this performance, Hungarian Dances, aimed to share my past experiences and questions with Western European audiences, proposing a dialogue about the tensions between tradition and modernity and between different concepts of identity.
Confronting popular culture within the realm of the high arts led me to female autobiography and my homonyms, raising questions about historiography and memory. This became my entry point into the works I later created around the archive and performative monuments.

Boglárka: I also wanted to reshape my approach to making work after my studies because I felt that, especially coming out of the Belgian dance education system and P.A.R.T.S., I was very much a product of it. There were clear mechanisms for success—ways of producing work, temporal frames of making work, formats, and so on. I wanted to explore how to adapt and organize my process in a way that aligned with my artistic interests. I questioned whether this even needed to be a choreographic work. However, it was not obvious for me to make a documentary film: first, I did interviews with several women connected to the Art of Movement in Hungary. They were mostly between 80 and 104 years old.
I strongly relate to your point about breaking out of frames, even concerning the bodies you want to work with. Right after school, I felt suffocated by working with people my age. Working with you for several years on the Monument series was part of my process of growth and maturation—seeking that kind of intergenerational exchange.
In terms of relating to history and archives, archival materials alone wouldn’t have inspired me to work with film. I needed to go beyond the conventional archival sphere and move into the personal realm and subjective history telling. Filming required an urgency that came from the personal encounters and the relationship that developed with the three elderly dancers, Irén Preisich, Éva E. Kovács and Ágnes Roboz, and the desire to physically include them in the process.

Eszter: I also worked with video and the concept of the ‘third space’ in a ‘film choreography’ entitled AND THEN in 2007, alongside Bojana Cvejić. For this piece, I searched for my homonyms and finally invited seven of them, living in Hungary and the UK, to participate. Working with people who shared my name – this arbitrary thing- and were non-professional performers was another attempt to make choreography relevant in society at large. As they could not tour, I opted to film the participants to capture their stories and performance. At that time, the spaces in between — outside the wings and off-screen, onstage and onscreen, and between the various autobiographical traces — made me realise that choreography could exist beyond the here and now, connecting people, places, generations, practices, stories, and histories. This inspired me to continue exploring narration through documentary and fiction, and through film.
You mentioned how you needed to reconsider which form or medium could best address the issue you wanted to tackle. While theatre and performance allow us to experience many things, they also exclude subjectivities and perspectives.

Boglárka: Indeed, and sometimes—speaking of archive and aging —there are also limits to what a body can do. Sometimes a body cannot perform on stage anymore. During the filming, the physical limitations of the elderly dancers became an important consideration in adapting the working conditions to their age. At the time we filmed with them, Irén was 101 years old, Ágnes in her 90s and Éva 95. Not only was there an intersection between the private spheres of their lives, but there was also the positioning of the personal spaces of elderly women concerning the history of dance in Hungary, intersecting with the socio-political contexts of the times they had lived through. As you have previously mentioned, modern dance was banned in the 1950’s. And this generation of women carries those narratives of banning in their bodies as well. For decades, the private apartments were spaces where people performed, danced or staged neo-avant-garde theatre in the ‘second public sphere’.  I began to see these private spaces as temporary stages. When working with people of such advanced age, you realize that you’re archiving their final performances. Nonetheless, I see this process less as preservation or fixation, and more as creating a relational space.

Eszter: I can relate to the idea of a relational space. The many fragments of the Eszter Salamons’ lives, stemming from different regions, cultural backgrounds, languages and generations, came together as a work of fiction but also as a way of relating to and telling the history of the second half of the 20^th century up to 2007. Created from interviews, this form of archiving offered a multidimensional and previously unseen perspective. My desire to make female experiences more tangible in the collective consciousness drove the project. Historically, female autobiography is a minorised form of storytelling. Focusing on this form sheds light on how historical narratives are shaped in patriarchal societies, including in the history of Western modern dance.
We are both interested in questioning how we relate to history, and our relationship with history has its own history. This leads us to the question of positionality, which is always present. Positionality defines how we learn, what we focus on, what we shed light on, and what we engage with or exclude from our attention.

How do I situate myself in the context of where I work
in relation to the context I come from?

Boglárka: An early research question just came to my mind: How do I situate myself in the context of where I work in relation to the context I come from? It interests me how situated knowledge can emerge from listening to one’s own conditioning.
As I listened to the stories of the elderly women, I was intrigued by what they chose to tell and what not to tell—the silences and the negative spaces that opened up to where the gaps lay.
I became interested in this approach of listening to those people whose lives and dance trajectories intersected with multiple raptures, – personal, social and political – including the banning of modern dance. It became a form of intergenerational responsibility and solidarity. My desire was to connect the stories of these women to my generation in Hungary who are currently dealing with the cultural politics of erasure. This understanding became a guiding principle for critically engaging with these subjective stories and archival materials also led me to move beyond a mere aesthetic approach to the aging body. Their stories could be told from different points of view and different subjectivities, because there is not just one truth in that experience.

Eszter: Your point that there is not necessarily one best way to tell stories or connect with history is significant. It highlights the influence of interpretation and subjectivity in historical writing. As an artist, it is important to consider which voices to amplify, whether through a microphone or camera, or simply by creating a space for listening. This is something we discussed and addressed during our collaboration in projects on the life and work of German avant-garde dancer and artist Valeska Gert. When I received the invitation from the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg to create a work using the Derra de Moroda archive, I had to make a decision. Finding out that Derra de Moroda had collaborated with the Nazi government by choreographing performances for a Nazi dance company, I accepted the invitation but decided not to research the archive. Instead, I proposed to address this and many other historical facts through the project.
Confronted with certain institutional positions on the history of National Socialism and post-war Germany, and realising how these perpetuate historical omissions, important questions arise about artists’ responsibility to create a more inclusive historiography.

Boglárka: Such attempts are particularly significant in the current climate of resurgent fascism. They can influence how we perceive the present and shape our vision for the future.

Recorded by Boglárka Börcsök
Transcribed and German translation by Jette Büchsenschütz
Edited by Zsolt Kozma