Body in Plural

At a critical juncture of Body in Plural, the narrator describes mass protests as a “choreography of disobedience”. The phrase speaks volumes about how director Marta Popivoda manages to connect the seemingly very different performative acts of contemporary dance and social activism. Illustrating two dancers who defy their wildly different backgrounds with an artistic practice that confronts racism, patriarchy and ageism, the Serbian director offers an intriguing yet visually captivating piece punctuated sporadically by archive footage from a Communist-era Yugoslavia of decades past.

One of two projects funded by the JEONJU International Film Festival as part of their annual JEONJU Cinema Project, Body in Plural is an extension of Popivoda’s long-running fascination with exploring the political significance of seemingly apolitical objects. Landscapes of Resistance (2021), her previous feature, explores the wild forests, concentration camps and Communist-era apartments marking the life of a former anti-Nazi partisan in Yugoslavia.

In her new feature, Popivoda expands on the material she used in last year’s Slet 1988. This short film is about Sonja Vukicevic, a dancer renowned as much for her choreography as she was for her performances in highly charged political events, including the final edition of the Youth Day parade in socialist Yugoslavia in 1988 and then during the mass demonstrations against Radovan Milosevic in 1996. The contextualizing tool she used in Slet 1988 – a teenager musing about her life and her favourite music in the titular year – is again very much present in Body in Plural, but now expanded into an account of the young woman’s departure to Berlin after the disintegration of Yugoslavia and her thoughts about a country she loves and hates in equal measure.

Here, Popivoda has largely abandoned the crossfades she used in Landscapes of Resistance as a slow and gentle juxtaposition of past and present. With Jelena Maksimovic’s intriguing splicing, pixelized TV footage from 1988 casts a ghostly presence over Ivan Markovic’s pristinely filmed present-day sequences, like interferences seeping in through a bad antenna.

The new element in Body in Plural is Ligia Lewis, a veteran U.S. choreographer who arrives in Belgrade to record a performance, staged at the same Belgrade stadium which once hosted the Youth Day events decades ago. We see her wandering around Communist-day concrete housing estates, taking photographs and doing a deep dive int a world very much alien to her. Her solitude soon gives way to meetings with Sonja Vukicevic, during which the two dancers look at videos of each other’s work and devise new movements from them. Some of these eventually make their way into Lewis’ collaboration with an international troupe of dancers of various races, genders and body sizes.

In Lewis, Popivoda finds a very interesting counterpoint to Vukicevic. While we mostly see archive footage of the Serbian national treasure performing by herself, the U.S. dancer is shown working as part of a whole. In “minor matter”, which Vukicevic (and the viewer) get to watch in fragments during the film, Lewis dances with two other Black performers, while a voiceover explains how the piece represents one’s “Blackness not as an essence… but in relation” to others.

All this actually serves as Popivoda’s own manifesto against the atomisation of society and her belief in the strength attained in numbers. However much Body in Plural is a piece about the philosophy of contemporary dance, Popivoda’s film is very much the director’s own clarion call in support of the anti-corruption, pro-democracy demonstrations in Belgrade and across Serbia for the past year and a half – something she made very clear in the aerial shot of Belgrade’s Slavia Square at night, packed to bursting with people and illuminated by cellphones.

Director: Marta Popivoda
Screenwriters: Marta Popivoda, Ana Vujanovic
Producers: Zsófia Lili Kovács, Jasmina Sijercic, Marta Popivoda, Adis Dapo, Amra Bakšic Camo
Executive producer: Jelena Angelovski
Cast: Sonja Vukicevic, Ligia Lewis
Cinematography: Ivan Markovic
Editing: Jelena Maksimovic
Sound: Vladimir Živkovic
Production companies: Fiskultura Films, Bocalupo Films, Theory At Work, SCCA/pro.ba
World sales: JEONJU International Film Festival
Venue: JEONJU International Film Festival (JEONJU Cinema Project)
In Serbian, English
75 minutes