SALTA began as an anonymous collective of seven artists based in Oakland, California. Responding to the precariousness of making dance in the Bay Area, we came together as a collective in 2012 with the intention of starting a studio in the Oakland Omni Commons for process and performance. Since that time, our aims have expanded and changed to include projects that make space for dance and performance to happen more broadly.
Salta is a Latin word meaning “to leap” or “to jump,” appearing in the Latin phrase: Hic Rhodus, hic salta! (“Rhodes is here, here is where you jump!”). The maxim originates from the punch line from Aesop’s fable “The Boasting Traveler.” In the story, a traveler claims that when in Rhodes, he performed an impressive jump, and that there were witnesses who could attest to his feat. A bystander interrupts him to say, “Now, my good man, if this be all true there is no need of witnesses. Suppose this to be Rhodes and leap for us” (Aesop 2014: 22). The fable points to the importance of actually doing the deeds that we claim or aspire to for ourselves. Karl Marx cites the phrase “hic Rhodus, hic salta!” in his book The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon and offers an alternative translation: “a situation has been created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out: Here is the rose, here dance!” (Marx 1963:19). It is in this spirit of leaping and dancing within present social and political conditions that SALTA formed as a collective.
From 2012 to 2016, we curated a free monthly performance series that took place in a different venue each month, collaborating with an ever-expanding network of public and private spaces, institutions, communities, and performers Admission to SALTA shows is always a nonmonetary donation to the free bar and boutique, where everyone eats, drinks, and shops for free. This noncommercial context frees us to be inclusive, experimental, and eccentric in our conceptualization of each happening.
SALTA is in the practice of making sense of our love of dance, despite its historical implication in the hetero-capitalist white supremacist patriarchal art world. It is important to us that we continue to interrogate how and what we are doing, navigating our relationship to economic and institutional resources. In 2017 we began our newest space-making project; an artists’ residency in Mendocino County. By letting SALTA remain undefined, we are able to shift who is part of the collective as well as create dynamic structures that can support many different aspects and needs of artists as they become evident to us. As a collective, we try things out as experiments, leaving space for our sense of what our group is and does to morph.
Facebook :: https://www.facebook.com/SaltaCollective
Photos :: https://www.flickr.com/photos/saltaoakland/
Check out SALTA’s chapter in:CURATING LIVE ARTS