Dr. Marjana Krajač is a choreographer, dance theorist, and researcher. Her work explores the spatial praxis of choreography as both an intervention and a theoretical framework. Her research examines the political potential of spaces and sites, approaching them as aggregatory modalities and procedures. It delves into the possibilities of thinking with spatial environments, illuminating frictions between bodies, spaces, and temporalities. She received her Ph.D. in Dance Studies from Ohio State University in the summer of 2024, with a dissertation titled A Dance Studio as a Process and a Structure: Space, Cine-Materiality, Choreography, and Revolution—Zagreb, 1949-2010, investigating spatial processes of the political at the intersection of experimental choreography, dance theory, and urban history.

This research explores spaces at the former Workers and People’s University Moša Pijade in Zagreb that served as dance studios and were used as movement sites during the socialist and post-socialist periods. Tracing the institution’s progressive educational concepts alongside its modernist architectural ethos, the research suggests a continuum of these concepts in the contributions of contemporary dance artists who precariously occupied some of its spaces in the early 2000s. Drawing on Derrida’s notion of buildings as fluid conduits rather than static structures, the research brings forward the possibilities of movement-concept interventions of experimental dance practices as powerful tools for the emancipation of art, processes, and spaces. 

The lecture is in English, with an introduction and discussion in Croatian.