In 1988, at the last major public performance of communist Yugoslavia before the outbreak of war, Sonja Vukićević — one of Serbia’s great dancers, also known for her anti-Milošević activism — performed a historic solo before a packed stadium. In a gymnasium in present-day Belgrade, we watch her return to the field: her body as an archive of collective memory.
Maurice Ravel’s Boléro is a work with a distinctly feminine perspective, as it arose from a commission by the dancer Ida Rubenstein, renowned for her expressiveness and boldness on stage, who starred in its premiere in Paris, in 1928. Since then, it has often been choreographed and performed by leading figures in the world of dance and, particularly in the 1980s, underwent various reinterpretations and witnessed significant moments in history. Filmmaker Marta Popivoda, a leading filmmaker focusing on women, returns to the archives to recover the performance of the dancer Sonja Vukićević (a well-known anti-Milošević activist), who in 1988 performed a historic solo to the famous Boléro before a sold-out stadium in the former Yugoslavia. The date is historic for Serbia, as it precedes the war, yet at the same time, it marks a moment of affirmation of a body within a space and within history. The performance evokes the deepest desires, the effort, the life that resides within a body, and the materialization through movement of that which is the secret each person carries within their own body. Between 1988 and the present day, Vukićević’s body activates the evocation of this very collective memory, because ultimately the syncopated, uniform and repetitive movement of this work—which was composed for its transformation through the various instruments of an orchestra—returns to us a body whose movements are the synthesis of that very construction. (Miguel Valverde)
