EDIT KALDOR

Edit Kaldor is recognized internationally as a unique voice in the contemporary theatre landscape. She works mostly with nonprofessional performers over extended periods of time and across various projects, merging documentary and fictional materials, and often addressing seemingly unspeakable experiences, such as statelessness, abuse, or the dying process. Her performances, which stretch considerably the boundaries of theatrical conventions, have been presented in over 30 countries in Europe, the Americas, Asia and North Africa. She frequently integrates in her work digital media and interfaces, focusing on the metaphorical and theatrical possibilities in the daily use of technology. In her most recent performance piece she works with the augmentation of reality through the use of the mobile phone and covert performance elements in public space.

Born in Budapest, Edit Kaldor immigrated as a child to the United States, where she lived for ten years before moving back to Europe. She studied English Literature and Theatre at Columbia University in New York and at DasArts in Amsterdam. She had worked for years as dramaturge and video-maker with Peter Halasz (Squat theater/Love theater, New York), collaborating on numerous theatre performances and film scripts, before starting to write and direct her own pieces.

Kaldor has taught and lectured at (performing) art academies and universities across Europe, and has led numerous workshops at theatres and festival, among them at the International Forum at the Berliner Festspiele and the Shanghai Biennale. She is currently a doctoral fellow at the Norwegian Theatre Academy, developing the artistic research project The Many and the Form on new aesthetic and social practices for contemporary performance. She is co-editor (together with Joe Kelleher) of the book Theatres of Powerlessness: Acts of Knowledge and the Performance of the Many, which is published by Bloomsbury / Methuen Drama.

The press about her work:

Essential theatre – people in a room together considering what it can mean to be human. Reviews Gate U.K.

The Hungarian Kaldor, working in the Netherlands, made in the last few years furore with her theatre performances, in which mostly amateur performers expose us to unspeakable subjects. de Volkskrant, the Netherlands

The way in which Kaldor uses the theatre, - a place for collective dialogue - as a platform to show extreme isolation and the inability to communicate is absolutely brilliant. La Presse, Montréal, Canada

The work has a paradoxical directness. We sense here a very strong artistic personality. Liberation, France

It doesn’t look like theatre, but it is. The best kind of theatre that exists. Folha de São Paulo, Brazil