CHOREOGRAPHIC PERFORMANCE: MARJANA KRAJAČ: RECONSTRUCTIONS: A LANDSCAPE OF SHIFTS IN SURFACE STRUCTURE – TEMPORARILY BREATHING, NOTES ON TIME
Performed by seven female dance artists, this choreographic work explores the practice of spatial displacement: the way in which space is complexified and transformed through the inscription, duration, and displacement of the body. The work continues choreographer and dance theorist Marjana Krajač’s long-standing research into choreography as a complex dialogue of discourse, space, and materiality.
This is the second work in a series dealing with surface structure, while the first work is called Reconstructions: Choreographic Interventions on Surface Structure — Duration, Erosion, Accumulation, Disappearance, which was created in collaboration with the Croatian Museum of Natural History in Zagreb, and was awarded the Annual Award for the Best Choreographic Achievement in 2025.
The notion of dance as a point of intensity, as proposed by dance theorist Randy Martin, opens up space for understanding dance as a complex analytical practice. Within this framework, spatial displacement develops as a form of experimental environmentality: as a practice of the flow of atmosphere and time through the approximation of their immediate materiality, duration, and ambiguity. Notes on time here map the rhythms of breathing, retention, repetition, and disappearance of movement, as fragmentary traces of transience inscribed in the bodies, surfaces, spaces, forms, and interstructures of performance.
Located in several different spaces of the Museum of Contemporary Art, the work dissolves the notion of environmentality, opening a dance towards sociability, collectivity and the transformation of its own performance conditions. The landscape here is a complex material and political-theoretical structure composed of infrastructural relations, historical layers, the epistemology of visibility, the economy of movement and the process of organizing bodies in space. The landscape produces the conditions of perception and presence and shapes the ways in which bodies enter into relationships with their environment: it is an unstable and multi-layered field.
The dance practice within the work encounters the landscape through processes of repetition, displacement, retention, collective rhythm, and spatial dispersion. The performance opens up the landscape as a processual structure in constant transformation, while bodies become media through which tensions between surface and depth, duration and disappearance, and individual and collective experience of space are manifested. By layering such displacement, the work activates and permeates the landscape with the spatial practice of dance, producing temporary relationships between body, surface, time, and presence.
Performances:
Tuesday, June 9, starting at 17.00
Wednesday and Thursday, June 10 and 11, starting at 16.00
Friday, June 12, starting at 17.00
Saturday, June 13, starting at 14.00
Every day in a different space of the Museum of Contemporary Art:
Space 1: exterior front surface on the ground floor of the museum: establish something in the distance, map the view.
Space 2: exterior rear surface on the second floor of the museum: architectural fractures, solar syncope.
Space 3: interior staircase of the second and third floors: sketch a step, move the neon drift.
Duration: 100 minutes without intermission. Admission to all performances is free.
Curator: Jasmina Fučkan
Author, concept and choreography: Marjana Krajač
Performance: Jana Božić, Ana Kljujev, Valentina Miloš, Dora Pocedić, Dora Sarikaya, Eleonora Vrdoljak and Laura Vojnović
Photography: Inia Herenčić
Visual study and video documentation of the project: Lucija Marčec
Graphic design: Ena Jurov
Production: Sodaberg Choreographic Laboratory
The project was realized in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb and realized in collaboration with the Zagreb Dance Center. The project was developed in the Zagreb Dance Center’s residency.
Marjana Krajač is a dance artist and choreographer, as well as a theorist of dance and choreography. Her work explores the political potential of space and the urban environment in the context of feminist dance practices with a focus on discourse, temporality and experiment. She has received several professional awards, the Croatian Theatre Award for Outstanding Choreographic Achievement, and most recently the Annual Award for Best Choreographic Achievement in 2025 for her work titled Reconstructions: Choreographic Interventions on Surface Structure—Duration, Erosion, Accumulation, Disappearance, which was realized in collaboration with the Croatian Museum of Natural History in Zagreb. She publishes texts about dance in professional journals on the performing and dance arts, and in 2018 she published a book of collected essays Choreographic Journal: seeing / vidjeti. She completed her dance education at the Ana Maletić School of Contemporary Dance in Zagreb, graduated from the Academy of Performing Arts in Berlin, and in 2024 she received her doctorate in Dance Studies from the American university The Ohio State University with a dissertation entitled Dance Studio as Process and Structure: space, film materiality, choreography and revolution—Zagreb, 1949-2010, which explores the intersections of experimental choreography, dance and film theory, and the spatial and urban history of the city. Recent presentations of her research have been held at Princeton University, Yale University, Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University, City University of New York, The New School, Kingston University London, Ruhr-Bochum University, Washington University St. Louis, as part of the Emilio Ambasz Institute at MoMA in New York, and elsewhere.