DocTalks is a series dedicated to ongoing investigations conducted by doctoral, postdoctoral, or early-career researchers about the expansive entanglement of architecture with the natural environment. These sessions are meant to create an intercollegiate cohort of scholars that workshop writing, share research findings, and experiment with methodological tools while engaging with the vision and investigations of the Ambasz Institute.
These Doc Talk sessions are intended for scholars or architecture history and theory, but scholars in related fields and the general public are welcome to attend.
Unfolding Spaces: Avant-Garde Environments, Experimental Choreography, and Politics of Space in Milana Broš and Dubravko Detoni’s La voix du silence at the 1973 Music Biennale Zagreb
Speaker
Marjana Krajač, Ohio State University
This paper investigates the intersection of the politics of space, experimental music, and improvisational choreography in Milana Broš and Dubravko Detoni’s La voix du silence, a site-specific performance created for the 1973 Music Biennale Zagreb. The paper examines La voix du silence as a specific environment of the avant-garde in Yugoslavia that activated public spaces through experiments in art, contributing to the development of the public sphere. As there are no archival recordings of it, the work is being reconstructed from fragments, peripheries, and memories, highlighting the relevance of choreographic traces as witnesses of spatial and political histories. La voix du silence was staged in 1973 as part of the experimental happening titled Carrousel II, which brought together a large number of music ensembles, along with its first part, Carrousel I. In 1977, the Biennale programmed a similar project titled Carrousel, a large-scale composition by Vinko Globokar, and in 1979, Urbofest, a program of site-specific happenings in experimental music across the city of Zagreb, curated by Nikša Gligo. By considering the relationship between public space and the avant-garde, this paper explores how the thinking space mobilized through experimental music and experiments in choreography expanded the possibilities of public spaces and their complex social encounters. Tracing the work’s contribution to the archives of experimental choreography and contemporary music in Yugoslavia, this paper examines La voix du silence as an example of avant-garde experiments that have the potential to inquire into current social and political issues, particularly those related to public spaces and their archival, architectural, and social ecologies.
Marjana Krajač is a dance studies scholar, choreographer, choreographic researcher, and PhD candidate in dance studies at Ohio State University. Her research focuses on the intersection of modernism, postmodernism, and contemporaneity in dance, with an emphasis on site, space, environment, text, media, and process. Her work explores the spatial histories and politics of space, as well as the concept of dance and its experiment. She has received a number of awards for her choreographic work, which examines symptoms, consequences, and temporalities of form. She has published in the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, Body, Space & Technology Journal, Performing Arts Journal Frakcija, Journal for Dance Inquiry Movements, and Movement Research Performance Journal, among others. Her research encompasses dance history, theory, and choreography in Central and Eastern Europe, architecture, urbanism, and environment, as well as continental philosophy and experimental film and media studies.
Respondent
Stelios Giamarelos, The Bartlett UCL
This series was made possible through a generous gift from Emilio Ambasz. The Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and the Natural Environment is a platform for fostering dialogue, promoting conversation, and facilitating research about the relationship between the built and natural environment, with the aim of making the interaction between architecture and ecology visible and accessible to the wider public while highlighting the urgent need for an ecological recalibration.