Starry ride for a Batsheva dancer
After 10 years with Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company, Bobbi Jene Smith moved back to the United States to further her career. Hannah Brown reports.
After 10 years with Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company, Bobbi Jene Smith moved back to the United States to further her career. Hannah Brown reports.
IT’S rare to see an Israeli movie audience sit in silence when invited to ask questions, but that’s what happened following the screening of Elvira Lind’s documentary Bobbi Jene at Tel Aviv’s Docaviv Festival last week.
Former Batsheva dancer Bobbi Jene Smith, the subject of the intimate and compelling documentary, was present, but the appreciative audience, which burst into applause following the screening, didn’t have anything to ask her because the movie said virtually everything.
So a moderator from the festival stepped in, asking Smith how it felt to be the subject of a documentary.
“It was terrifying,” she said in her soft, midwestern-accented voice, with a dazzling smile.
Lind’s remarkable film won the Best Documentary Feature Award at the Tribeca Film Festival in April, as well as awards for cinematography and editing.
Bobbi Jene follows Smith’s journey from a Batsheva star in Tel Aviv to triumphant choreographer and soloist in the US, as well as examining how Smith’s background and personal life inform her work.
Born and raised in Iowa, Smith was drawn to dance from her childhood – the movie shows photos of her in all-American dance recital costumes and full, glittery makeup – and went to study at Juilliard, the premiere arts school in the US.
When Ohad Naharin’s Batsheva dance company came to perform in New York, Smith knew immediately that she wanted to dance with them.
“I didn’t even have a passport,” she recalls in the film.
But she got one, and danced with the company for a decade. Smith blossomed under the artistic guidance of Naharin, the subject of the Heymann brothers’ acclaimed documentary Mr Gaga, and became an expert in his Gaga dance technique, which mines the essence of each movement, and which she now teaches.
The two had a personal relationship as well, as Bobbi Jene makes clear, and were lovers for several years.
While they are no longer together, he has been a guiding force in her life, and his teaching will always be a key influence on her.
Although Smith is now in a relationship with Or Schraiber, a gifted Batsheva dancer from Jerusalem who is 10 years her junior, in 2014 she decided it was time to head back to the US and work on her own choreography.
The documentary revolves around her dilemmas: how to build a career of her own, virtually from scratch, and, more importantly, figure out what she wants to say through her choreography; make a long-distance relationship with Schraiber work; and reconnect with her traditional family.
All of this would be no more than interesting if Smith didn’t possess a phenomenal and original talent, as well as the kind of charisma that makes you hang on her every word and gesture.
The film opens with an arresting shot of her naked, performing A Study on Effort, a mesmerising hour-long solo piece that has drawn rave reviews all over the world.
She returned to Israel for its premiere at the Israel Museum in 2015, which drew Naharin out of Tel Aviv for a rare visit to Jerusalem.
Reflecting on the success of the piece, Smith notes how, in the dance world, there is no big payoff as there is for an acclaimed piece of art in any other field. You don’t win prizes, money or contracts, but must simply be satisfied knowing that “a few people saw it”.
Some of the film’s most interesting moments show Smith working on this piece, at times in a studio but at other moments in New York playgrounds, as she pushes her muscled body against a wall while a group of guys plays handball nearby.
She is completely focused and doesn’t seem to be aware that they are there.
The movie contrasts her singleminded focus on her work with her slowly dawning awareness and confusion over other aspects of her life.
THE JERUSALEM POST
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