Station–Service for Contemporary Dance, BITEF Theatre, premiere26th December 2024
Sparked, the new production by Station–Service for Contemporary Dance, the leading organization of Serbia’s independent dance scene, is a lustful, erotically charged and sexually untrammelled choreographic piece that’s so open and unapologetic in its sex-positive feminism that you can hardly find anything similar in the regional performative landscape. Using the metaphor from the title (žiška in Serbian means a flame or a spark from a fire), the performance uses both movement and poetry to fire up the audience with its erotic power.
As this performance starts, conceptualized and choreographed by Ana Dubljević, you will find yourself submerged in the beats and rhythms of the electronic dance music composed Emilija Đonin. If you were to hear only the melodies and not be aware of your surroundings, you might actually think that you’re at a nightclub that will go on partying till the wee hours of the morning. But four performers, two female and two male – Tamara Pjević, Bojana Stojković, Igor Koruga and Marko Milić – are already on the stage, everyone in their lone corner, calm until the storm arrives. Then they approach and interact with each other, taking off a bit of their clothes along the way, creating choreographed and stylized gestures that unambiguously bring to mind different sexual positions. Dozens of sexual positions, to be more precise. Oral sex, intercourse, anal sex, rimming, male-male, female-male, female-female, one-on-one, group action… You name it – the performers simulate all of these sexual practices. I’m not even sure if to call the show’s sexuality pansexual, omnisexual or omnivorous.
But not all segments of Sparked are so sexually explicit, nor do dance passages always literally represent a real-life act such as sex – the shift in the show’s sensitivity is considerable. There are periods when the performers tenderly dance with each other, particularly in one scene where they dance next to one another, everyone in their own unsynchronized moves, circling around the other’s body but never touching it. Those are also the moments when Đonin’s music transforms from club craziness to an eased-up, meditative tone. And then, there are verbal parts of the show when the Sparked Four recite erotic poetry whose style ranges from passionate to comical, from narrative to abstract. Ana Dubljević has been collecting such poems for years, gathering hundreds but ultimately selecting 40 or so for the performance. Dubljević’s approach to erotic poetry is inextricably linked to and inspired by the Black feminist Audre Lorde who sees such enormous power in deep and non-rational female desire that she thinks that it can endanger the repressive social order.
This is not the first time that Station–-Service for Contemporary Dance has explored issues of sexuality, desire and politics of the body. Igor Koruga’s last-year performance Unstable Comrades has in its center the question of queer comradery, expressed in various intimate, physical and political forms. Dubljević also has a long history of exploring desire in dance and choreography, at least since her 2016 performance Koreoerotikon. She wrote a master thesis and published a book based on it, The Feminist Pornscapes, on Feminist Dramaturgical Thinking in Dance and Performance Practice in which she examined how a female body, or any other body for that matter, can be presented sexually outside the conventional objectifying male gaze. Her theory and practice are equally influenced by feminist dramaturgy and feminist pornography. While the former strives toward a more egalitarian, participatory and humane way of performance creation, outside of rigid hierarchies of theatre institutions, the latter seeks pleasure unconstrained by patriarchal norms and violence. The two make a stupendous blend.

ŽIŠKA,, Station–Service for Contemporary Dance,
One can easily observe how this strain of theoretical and creative thinking has influenced Sparked. Not only are female and male bodies treated equally in their sexcapades – neither one is more passive or sexualized than the other – but the show closely follows the recognizable structure of indie theatre performances or feminist-queer porn flicks. While the conventional road to staging a show or filming porn would be to adhere to an exposition-complication-climax storyline (meet-have sex-orgasm), Sparked nurtures a fragmentary, diffuse structure in which scenes are not hierarchically sequenced. In fact, one could comfortably imagine seeing the scenes in a different order and the show would still have a near-similar effect. Another crucial element of the performance’s feminist aesthetics is the gaze. While in conventional and patriarchal visual constellations a sexual object – almost exclusively female – is deprived of agency, a feminist and humane setting implies that an object becomes a subject, not only aware that they are being looked at but provocatively returning the gaze toward the original spectator. This dynamic is ever-present in Dubljević’s performance – the dancers often stare back at us. The audience is also aware of its own gaze since we are seated across each other with the stage in the middle.
The only thing that puzzles me about Sparked is its sporadic effect of estrangement and, yes, that could be interpreted in a Brechtian way. The mentioned opening scene of orgy mimicry is intentionally choreographed with a degree of artificiality and mechanism. The dancers simulate over and over again the same assortment of sexual acts, always in the same order but with gradually increased intensity. Is this supposed to reflect the joys of perpetual sex or a Sisyphean ordeal where we cannot get enough pleasure no matter how hard we search for it? Near the end of the show, there is a segment where the performers recite comical erotic poems that are so saturated with simple rhymes, that they would have been cringe-inducing if Dubljević hadn’t used them in a slightly ironic manner. For a performance that so passionately strives to drown us in the whirlpool of desire, these ironic, distancing effects are not sufficiently elaborated and disrupt an otherwise compact choreographic work.
These few incoherences aside, Sparked is a valuable performance because it brings the pleasure-inducing sex-positive branch of feminism back into public life and it does so with a playful creative vision.
Further reading: Interview with Igor Koruga: “Emancipation of queer culture is not just a Western creation”
Borisav Matić is a critic and dramaturg from Serbia. He is the Regional Managing Editor at The Theatre Times. He regularly writes about theatre for a range of publications and media.
He’s a member of the feminist collective Rebel Readers with whom he co-edits Bookvica, their platform for literary criticism, and produces literary shows and podcasts. He occasionally works as a dramaturg or a scriptwriter for theatre, TV, radio and other media. He's the administrator of IDEA - the International Drama/Theatre and Education Association.