In her new work that is created for and with Ballet of Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb, awarded choreographer Marjana Krajač continues to confirm her artistic profile as intriguing combination of sensibilities of a choreographic imagination with the depth of structures and forms.

DARK LANDSCAPES is a choreographic poem about dark traces, intuitive spaces and areas of disappearance. This ballet work for 16 dancers defines performing gesture as poetic, intuitive and durational practice. In another words, there is a trust that creates a space of a movement as the mutual place of thinking and sensing. This gesture of creation with the fragments of the future, with something that is freshly formulated and therefore still fragile, is precisely what dance can offer as a meaningful understanding of the world. In this regard, something sensitive and open to reformulation can only be a dark landscape, a dark trace, a space with many unknown relations.

Created along and with the choreographic score, music is composed originally for this work by iconic composer of electronic experimental music Thomas Köner.

State Ballet of Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb invited Marjana Krajač to create her new work for the 2016/2017 repertoire. Premiere took place on 11th of November 2016.

A DARK LANDSCAPE can signify everything that is intuitively inscribed in to the world, in another words, everything that has not yet found its possible occurrence. If we imagine any form that communicates something that is unmarked by language then this understanding inscribes itself in to the framework of our inner knowledge by its very manifestation upon the form. Amplitudes of imagination within the volume of space, able to replenish that volume with some other experience of rhythm, time and substance, are focal points of this ballet and its dark visions. In the realm of choreography, body is able to expand itself further, unifying the narratives of animate and inanimate matter and moving closer to the understanding of all phenomena in a singular hierarchical line, whether animate or (apparently) inanimate matter: objects of various volumes, space as an object or as a time structure, time as a facility or an absence, and then further; thought as an object or as an absence, emotion as a volume-as a thought-as a space, form as a thought-as an object in time-as a knowledge without history, dynamic as a trace of a substance-as a kinesthetic tension-as a thought. This choreographic ballet work then, articulates in several frames reliefs of dark landscapes creating a possibility of different worlds, in the differentiation of its own metaphysical, formal and transformative reach.

This ballet formulates a performing gesture as poetic, intuitive and durational practice. Poetic in the sense of the awareness of a possibility of aesthetic knowledge; intuitive in the sense of embarking to the outermost edges of consciousness and articulation; and durational in the sense of understanding dance as a medium of time and the flow of time, that furthermore perceives it as a building material where expression of the length of time is a porous structure.

In a long dance sessions, in which body passes through the layers of existing patterns, inscribed sequences, limited scopes and compulsive reactions, what slowly emerges is a confidence in the upcoming undefined. This interpretive opened undefined stabilizes a confidence in what is still uninscribed, what is still unfounded, what is still unrecognized. In another words, there is a trust that creates a space of a movement as a mutual place of thinking about the world.

Singular body, able to self-determine itself in a relation to the whole, is grasping the whole and is re-creating it anew. This gesture of creation with the fragments of the future, with something that is freshly formulated and therefore still fragile, is precisely what dance can offer as a meaningful understanding of the world. In this regard, something sensitive and open to reformulation can only be a dark landscape, a space of dawning edges.

Marjana Krajač