Sonny (Sine) is a dance theatre performance that appears as anthropological research of virdžina also tobelija (from the Turkish tövbe for “vow”) and burrnesha (in Albania), while presenting it through a subversive performative form. Virdžina is a Western Balkan (mainly in remote parts of Macedonia, Kosovo, Central Serbia, Vojvodina, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and the already mentioned Albania) historical phenomenon of institutionalized social gender change for women in families without a male presence in the household. Virdžinas took a vow of virginity and celibacy for life. They cut their hair, dress in men’s clothes, take up a male version of their name, and take on the rights and obligations of a man in a patriarchal society—participating in male gatherings and may enlist for military service (Vince-Pallua 2014, 16) to ensure the survival of the clan. In that regard, virdžina could be defined as a ‘drag’ phenomenon. Nataša Živković, with her specific androgenous figure, takes written life stories in order to present them directly through impersonation. The artist moves from one to another virdžina story to represent their (mainly forgotten) voices. The setting mimics a fashion runway, through which the artist moves, gesticulates, dances, and speaks while underlining masculine features that instil uncanniness into the perception of the figure and reaches its peak at the moment when the artist calls ‘their’ ‘sisters,’ again represented through a gender shift. Transvestites (Daniel Petković, Loup Abramovici, Slobodan Malić) appear on the stage to serve rakia to the male representatives in the audience and wash their feet, and by doing so further escalate their discomfort. Through the performative act, in Sonny Živković succeeds in pinpointing the cracks of fixed gender, not only as an invented cultural phenomenon but also through the third gender, opening up its potential for further emancipation and acceptance of a wider gender fluidity, playing also a crucial, critical role within the City of Women festival that produced this performance.
From Nika Arhar, Jasmina Založnik (ed.), Bodies ofm Dance, Aspects of Dance as Cultural, Political, and Art Work in Yugoslavia and After (Belgrade, 2024)
