Shana Nys DambrotFor dancers and choreographers Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, life has become a long and lovely pas de deux. After their overlapping years with legendary Batsheva Dance Company, they’ve pursued a multitude of independent performance and production projects — like the stunning dance film Aviva, a host of innovative movement works with dance and music companies around the world, and a beautiful young daughter. The pair, both in their own work and in their collaborations, is known for their uniquely expressive language of movements, which range from the bright and angular to the jaunty and syncopated, natural and stylized, intensely emotional, muscular, sensual, witty, graceful, moody, seemingly spontaneous, and always unexpected.
Missing Mountain, Choreographed by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, Rehearsal Photos by Josh S. Rose for L.A. Dance Project, 2023
They’ve been closely associated with internationally acclaimed, intentionally accessible company L.A. Dance Project (LADP) as well — and it’s there that they are currently in residence, and in the throes of creation on their latest collaborative work, Missing Mountain, an extension of their acclaimed 2019 work Lost Mountain, which will have its premiere in September. L.A. Weekly caught up with the pair between sessions to talk about the new piece, navigating collaboration, and what ties it all together.
Missing Mountain, Choreographed by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, Rehearsal Photos by Josh S. Rose for L.A. Dance Project, 2023
L.A. WEEKLY: Thank you so much for letting me watch last week’s rehearsal — it was really illuminating. Watching the whole company be fully present, engaged with what other performers were thinking through, working things out with you both and each other before putting all the pieces together. It seemed so collaborative and organic, and yet it’s your vision, your ideas, and you are both dancers used to expressing yourselves directly in movement.
So what comes first when you go to build a whole original work from the ground up?
BOBBI JENE SMITH: Well, I think for me, it feels like the people always come first. I’m always kind of trying to understand the elements in the room and the different combinations of artists that are there, and trying to then create an atmosphere or to create a circumstance that would bring these people together. So even if that’s like a dreamscape or a landscape or a scenario or a song, you meet at a dinner party and crazy things happen, or they all meet in this one dream and they never see each other again. It starts there. Because I feel like we all can empathize with that. We all kind of understand and we can all get lost in what it is to dream and then to forget. And that’s what I love so much about contemporary dance, is how it feels.
Missing Mountain, Choreographed by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, Rehearsal Photos by Josh S. Rose for L.A. Dance Project, 2023
LAW: I love that answer because it’s almost counterintuitive. One could imagine you saying, well, I read this short story or I heard this song or it’s about my parents or my divorce, or climate change or human rights — and then you’d start building it to serve that. But what I hear you saying is that it’s almost the opposite.
BJS: It’s like almost trying to create enough space so people can fill in all of those things they need to. But, you know, trying to do that, it comes from a very personal place. But then it can also go very universal in a sense of letting people come towards it. It’s like saying come, come with us. You know how to do this. You have all the tools. You don’t need to know anything else.
Missing Mountain, Choreographed by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, Rehearsal Photos by Josh S. Rose for L.A. Dance Project, 2023
LAW: Knowing that in works like Quartet for Five and a number of other LADP pieces that the cast often changes, how does that all come out? How much input do the performers have as it takes shape?
BJS: So many things start to get decided in the room without trying to make a decision. Certain people gravitate to each other. Certain people don’t. Certain people have conflict or tension that’s healthy and important. Rather than saying, we need this. How can you give us this? We tried to just say, like, what is there already? Who’s here? And then trying to amplify and play with volume and — oh, this person tends to do this. Let’s try to turn that up. Or could we oppose that? And then just play with the options.
OR SCHRAIBER: I think it’s also connected to what Bobbi said about the fact that the cast will always be — or the people in the room will always be — the people who inform the piece. So there is a piece and if there is another cast all of a sudden, which happens all the time, the piece morphs, the piece changes and the piece is alive. And that’s kind of like one of the goals, actually. And then in terms of our process of working together, I think we’re still finding that every piece is different. In terms of roles, it varies all the time. We talk a lot. We argue a lot. We keep on brainstorming all the time. Constantly. We go home after the studio, in the car on the way home. It’s like in the middle of the night, first thing in the morning before saying good morning. It’s like a constant. Hey, wake up! I personally love it. It’s very intense and the frequency is like the highest it can be.
Missing Mountain, Choreographed by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, Rehearsal Photos by Josh S. Rose for L.A. Dance Project, 2023
BJS: And I think for this process, it’s been interesting because we started our residency at LADP with the idea of trying to recreate an older piece called Lost Mountain. And in doing so, it started to morph into a new piece, which I love. And a part of me was like, you knew that was going to happen. It has elements from another older work called Caldera and from the sister piece Lost Mountain, and now it becomes a trilogy with this new work. Caldera was a place that the people never got out of. It was a space that they were stuck in. Lost Mountain was a place they passed through. And this piece now, Missing Mountain, they begin being stuck, but eventually, they leave. And I like those three different ways around it, and how there are elements of both of those earlier pieces coming back and finding new expressions inside this piece, but then there are brand new elements that are so specific to the people in it now, and where Or and I are at in our lives now.
Missing Mountain, Choreographed by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, Rehearsal Photos by Josh S. Rose for L.A. Dance Project, 2023
OS: So maybe there is a narrative, but it’s not a linear narrative. It’s not like a story. It’s a different way of looking at plots or at characters.
BJS: We all know what it’s like, trying to listen really closely to those small moments that we all recognize in our own lives. Like that one look that changed, that made you decide the big decision? How can we fall in love with someone and then be also upset by the choices they make and then love them again? And how can we kind of put all of those little moments into this piece — the ones that maybe we missed when they were happening. Or when we look back on it, we think, Oh, that was the thing. Or it becomes kind of outsized in retrospect. What would have been different if he hadn’t gotten there right then, or that song had or had not come on, or the letter was or was not delivered…
Missing Mountain, Choreographed by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, Rehearsal Photos by Josh S. Rose for L.A. Dance Project, 2023
LAW: Is it hard for you to not just do it yourselves?
OS: That’s an amazing question. I don’t know. It’s like this question has like five, 15 million questions within it. Yes. For me, yes. I sometimes, especially when I see, you know, the camaraderie and the togetherness and the listening and the connection of the people who are performing or just doing a run. I’m not only talking about performance, doing a run in the studio or running one section, and I’m sitting and seeing it from outside. It’s like I have this urge in me, I want to charge. I want to go and be there with them. I want to feel what they feel. And so I’m assuming that’s proof of them doing the right thing in the right way! Because they’re really conveying something. You know, I played soccer for many years and sitting on the bench was really tough for me because you always want to go in, not just from a place of showing off your skills, but also to be there for your teammates. And it’s something that I always have in mind when other people are doing our pieces, yeah, I always want to go and support from inside, even just sitting on a sofa, not necessarily dancing, just be there with them and for them.
Missing Mountain, Choreographed by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, Rehearsal Photos by Josh S. Rose for L.A. Dance Project, 2023
BJS: I mean, I feel like each case is so different. And it’s also what the place is, what the circumstance is. I find both roles really informative and that they feed each other. I hope that we’re always going to be dancing and still connected. To show up for performances is a really important thing because I feel like it keeps us close to the dancers and it always keeps things in check like, Yes this is hard. It takes a lot of strength and it’s amazing and it’s fun and the more you give, the more it will give you. That love for it, I think it really is powerful and yes, it’s also really hard to be in it and to be outside of it at the same time.
But I also have to say, that exchange with the dancers, for me, I find that so precious. I feel like each one of them brings themselves. Seeing how people bring themselves to what we do makes things much larger than we could ever be without them.
Missing Mountain, Choreographed by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, Rehearsal Photos by Josh S. Rose for L.A. Dance Project, 2023
There’s one part in the new piece, we call it The Hopeful Parents. And it’s taken from an older piece we made when we were expecting our daughter and I was pregnant and we made that duet. And, you know, before coming to L.A., I don’t think we’d ever have thought about doing it with someone else. You know, it felt so personal. It was like only Or and Bobbi can do it. I remember people even saying that about us. Yeah, it was made at a specific time. It’s very private and personal. But it gives me so much joy to see them do it now. And they do it amazingly. And I feel like they do it better than we did it. And they bring other colors and more life to it. And that feels incredible, too.
Missing Mountain, Choreographed by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, Rehearsal Photos by Josh S. Rose for L.A. Dance Project, 2023
LAW: What about your relationship to music, partly because your taste is so omnivorous, right? Like there’ll be western canon of classical right next to niche singer/songwriters that I can barely find online.
So how and when does music become a part of it?
BJS: I feel like it’s different for each piece. Each piece has its own musical journey. Sometimes the music was given to us. This piece is commissioned. We stick to it. We try to find the world of it. We try to justify why it’s there. I think of trying to use music as a character in itself, like, what’s the music of this room? Almost thinking of it as tone of the room, of the dream, of the space. Are there interruptions? Is it like the radio was turned on? What song would this character listen to? I love to think about things like, you know what if Tom Waits and Connie Converse and Nina Simone all could meet, and they’re in that dream, and how can we create different meetings of music in our pieces? And then the pure idea of what gets people dancing. What sounds familiar. I love playing with what sounds familiar to an audience and how that lets people go in further, opens emotions and helps them let go.
Missing Mountain, Choreographed by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, Rehearsal Photos by Josh S. Rose for L.A. Dance Project, 2023
OS: The composer that we’re working with, except for the excerpt you heard, he’s going to make the room tone that Bobbi spoke about. His name is Yonatan Daskal. He’s a dear collaborator of ours. We’ve worked on various pieces in the past. He’s just amazing.
LAW: But also, too, when you are working with, say, a classical piece, but you’re thinking about movement in a contemporary way. So what is that space like? Like, does it pull you back into your classical training? Do you have to fight against that? Those rhythms weren’t necessarily made for how we move today. Or were they?
OS: I love putting on like the Bach cantatas and seeing where our movement collides. And I find that collision really interesting, of where our bodies are now with the sound from then and, and how maybe it brings out other things in the music or it makes my body do different things that I wouldn’t normally do. I love that relationship and how it brings out, you know, younger versions of myself or much older versions of myself. Many times I love making movements to silence, so I don’t have any beat or groove or meter in my head because I go OCD. It’s the collision, like Bobbi said, the collision of sound and movement, all of the different grooves and rhythms all of a sudden are so out there for me and so odd in a way that really turns me on. It creates a whole different emotion than what I created without the music. And that just baffles me every time. And it’s amazing.
UPDATE: New dates added: November 16-18. The evening-length premiered to sold-out shows in September 14, 15, 16 & 28, 29, 30 in Downtown Los Angeles. Find out more and get your tickets: ladanceproject.org.
Missing Mountain, Choreographed by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, Rehearsal Photos by Josh S. Rose for L.A. Dance Project, 2023
Missing Mountain, Choreographed by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, Rehearsal Photos by Josh S. Rose for L.A. Dance Project, 2023
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