June 23–27, 2020

Five performances for camera of koreografska fantazija br. 5: architectures of time

five dances for camera, dance studio, and a city is a series of five performances of koreografska fantazija br. 5: architectures of time, developed between Zagreb, Berlin, and Columbus, during May and June 2020, amid the global Covid-19 pandemic. Embracing the limitations of the global health crisis as a structural condition, uncertainty as a method, and the artistic process as a space of solidarity, the work reorganized the choreographic process, temporality, and materiality. Co-created and performed by four dance artists, in collaboration with a dramaturg, a writer, a photographer, and a video artist, the work emerged across digital and physical spaces.

Five distinct performances for camera explore encounters between moving bodies, the dance studio, the urban environment, and technological mediation. The camera functions not merely as a recording device, but as a choreographic agent that produces new relations between duration, repetition, perception, and space. Following Jean-Paul Sartre’s proposition that time is both an organized structure and a force that continuously erodes, separates, and escapes, it approaches temporality as a material and spatial condition. In a related way, Gilles Deleuze examines time through the structures of symmetry and repetition, distinguishing between repetition based on cadence and repetition based on rhythm. While repetition through cadence relies on the return of identical elements, repetition through rhythm reveals the difference and discontinuity contained within seemingly equivalent intervals. The repetition of the Same is therefore never purely identical; it always contains another, concealed repetition that simultaneously produces and transforms it.

architectures of time is a laboratory of asynchronous temporalities and a field of dispersed spatial relations. The two-hour performance approaches dance as an event and as a site where biopolitical forces intersect: forces that continuously reshape the conditions through which bodies appear, move, and become present. Yet this very temporality—mediated, fragmented, delayed, and multiplied—opens toward other forms of spatiality and materiality: dispersed architectures, the temporalities produced by the digital camera apparatus, and the recurring act of looking.

koreografska fantazija br. 5: architectures of time is the final work in a cycle of five distinct choreographic works that examine choreography’s ontological dimensions. The term koreografska fantazija draws on the notion of fantasia as a compositional form characterized by variation, transformation, and structural openness, extending these principles into choreographic practice. The series has received several awards, including the Croatian Theatre Award for Outstanding Choreographic Achievement and the Annual Award of the Croatian Association of Dance Artists for Choreography.