manual for empty spaces was created in Berlin and Zagreb. It fluctuates between a choreographic diary and a camera intervention, and can be described as an expanded choreographic cinema. It engages multiple cinematic, choreographic, spatial, and conceptual layers to establish an expanded choreographic site. The work has two versions: manual for empty spaces, a catalogue of options and manual for empty spaces, entering a performance.

The work engages the process and the outcome simultaneously while raising questions about the tools of choreographic intervention: whether in architectural, imaginary, or imaginative space, the tools that allow empty space to connect with its spatial development in relation to the body are essential components of choreographic thinking. How can the choreographic process reveal concrete abstractions that emerge from the foundational spatial and material framework—the very framework that shapes the space itself? What protocols activate spaces and bodies? What new possibilities can be explored, broadening the perceptual horizon where every abstraction is inherently available to all? Instead of treating choreographic labor linearly, this work engages both the process and the outcome, creating a distinct format that weaves together personal history, the history of spatial systems, the history of their processes, and the excesses of fiction.

“The result of this commitment to the process is a concept of dance that integrates both the level of the danced material and the level of the recorded material being danced through. It involves a pen leaving a trail and a body inscribing itself into the dance studio space or cinematic space, touching walls or floors. Marjana Krajač’s dancers seem to dance with a pen in hand, moving through the notebook while thinking about how to document a process.” (Katja Šimunić, Plesna scena.hr)

“A gesture of documenting the creative process communicates to readers or viewers the author’s need for discipline that cannot be reduced to learned rules. This discipline challenges superficial, trendy, already established, or widely accepted terminology. Instead, it requires a new level of attention and, certainly, new efforts to define one’s parameters for how to dance, what it means to dance, how to write, and what it means to write.” (Nataša Govedić, Zarez)