Fighting through art: A Kurdish dancer's journey to New York stages
The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Monday, December 2, 2024


Fighting through art: A Kurdish dancer's journey to New York stages
Pontus Lidberg, left, and Hussein Smko in Tarrytown, N.Y., on Feb. 29, 2024. Smko’s encounter with an American soldier in Iraq led him to become a dancer and this week he performs in Pontus Lidberg’s work at the Joyce Theater. (Amir Hamja/The New York Times)

by Brian Schaefer



TARRYTOWN, NY.- When Hussein Smko was 9, the U.S. military arrived in his hometown, Irbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdish region. It was 2003, and Smko, already a survivor of the Kurdish civil war, would chase the American Humvees with other kids. One day a soldier beckoned him over and demonstrated a simple, beguiling gesture: He held out a straight arm then made it ripple like water, a classic hip-hop move.

“I thought it was like a big sparkle,” Smko, 30, said in an interview. “And I was like, How could you break your bones like that?”

That brief encounter loomed large for Smko, starting him on an unlikely dance journey that eventually brought him to a small, sun-dappled theater in Tarrytown, New York, where he was rehearsing with Swedish choreographer Pontus Lidberg last week. The dance they were preparing, “On the Nature of Rabbits,” opens Wednesday at the Joyce Theater in Manhattan.

Lidberg was working with Smko on a small moment of improvisation. “It has to be yours,” Lidberg told him. “It has to feel right.” Smko prowled the stage to some spiky Dmitri Shostakovich music, displaying an uncanny mix of intensity and naturalness.

“Pontus has been really asking me to be free,” Smko said during a cigarette break outdoors. “I’m trying to move more with gentleness and ease.”

For a traditionally trained dancer, that might be a purely physical note. But for Smko, it felt more personal. “I’ve always been so rough with my life and with my movement,” he said. “And now it’s like, ‘Relax.’”

Smko’s path to this moment has been twisting and at times precarious. After his encounter with that liquid-armed soldier, he immersed himself in hip-hop dance, learning Michael Jackson routines through pirated music videos. Finding outlets for dance was difficult, though. Iraq was “an extremist space at the time,” he said. “We had no studios, we had no art.” He was teased and called gay. But he persevered, and at 13 he started the Street Wolves, a hip-hop troupe that helped spread the form in Kurdistan.

His pursuit of dance brought him to workshops offered by American Voices, a cultural exchange program affiliated with the U.S. State Department. That led to a two-month tour of several East Coast cities, including Niagara Falls, New York, where he met his future wife, a U.S. citizen. After the tour, he moved in with her, then brought her to Kurdistan in 2013. The next year, the Islamic State group laid siege to the region.

Smko’s wife returned to the U.S. to give birth to their daughter while he stayed and prepared to fight. But a relative dissuaded him, which sparked a realization.

“I decided then that I want to fight through art,” he said. “I was like, ‘OK, I need to go back to New York. I need to pursue what I really want to pursue.”

He applied for a green card and moved to Niagara Falls in 2015. The next summer, he was contacted by Jonathan Hollander, the founder and director of Battery Dance, a New York company that had briefly trained Smko on Skype years earlier. Hollander had been planning to bring another Iraqi dancer, Adel Euro, to perform in the company’s annual festival, but Euro was killed in a bombing in Baghdad less than two months before the event. Hollander asked Smko to dance in his honor.

That performance led to a four-year relationship with the company as the inaugural Adel Euro fellow. The company quickly absorbed him into its classes and rehearsals, and suddenly Smko was dancing with trained professionals. “Hussein came up to that level,” Hollander said. “It was just a miracle.”

During that residency, Smko moved away from hip-hop, embraced contemporary dance and began to choreograph. But when it ended in 2020, he found himself at a crossroads. He worked for the Muslim American Leadership Alliance, and at a hotel front desk. He and his wife separated. He went back to Irbil to see his family, his first visit in seven years.

His prospects improved in 2022, when he was introduced to dancer and filmmaker Sasha Korbut and cast in the short film “Incomplete,” alongside Lidberg. “Our energies were synced up,” Lidberg said of working with Smko. “It was the most natural thing.”

That chemistry inspired Lidberg to include Smko in the development of “Rabbits,” though Smko couldn’t perform in the work’s premiere at the Venice Biennale last year because of travel restrictions. But Smko’s contribution to the process proved invaluable. Lidberg, who is used to working with polished, formally trained dancers, appreciated Smko’s raw physicality and unaffected vitality, calling them “rare qualities” for a dancer.

This week at the Joyce, Smko will get to perform in the work that he helped create. His role has now been expanded after a Swedish dancer was unable to travel to New York because of his own visa issues.

“Rabbits” examines the transition from adolescence to adulthood, the line between dreams and reality, and the damaging impact of HIV on romance and intimacy between gay men, drawing from Lidberg’s own experiences, which have “haunted me for a while,” he said.

Although homosexuality wasn’t openly spoken about in Kurdistan, Smko said he had done research to understand the history and impact of HIV and AIDS, and that the exploration of sexuality was one he related to.

“I have had my own experiences with different sexualities,” he said. “My mind was always open toward it, but obviously I couldn’t express it back home.” Getting the opportunity to probe his feelings through work like Lidberg’s is “one of the main reasons I came here,” he said. “To be myself.”

That desire for self-expression has influenced his other work as well. In 2019, he founded a company, Project Tag, that has shown work at the Battery Dance Festival and other small performance platforms. It is “a goal for me to speak about my background and my history,” he said.

One showing caught the eye of Handan Ozbilgin, the artistic director of the LaGuardia Performing Arts Center in Queens, who said she was “mesmerized” by a Smko duet that she described as “vulnerable even though it’s masculine.” She offered him rehearsal space and encouraged him to apply for grants to support larger work.

Last fall, Smko presented an evening-length work-in-progress at LaGuardia called “Sarah,” inspired by his sister who still lives in Irbil. The loosely narrative work explores — with his sister’s permission — her struggle for autonomy and agency in an evolving, yet still traditional and patriarchal, society.

Smko credits Lidberg with giving him new dance-making tools, particularly the use of abstract imagery and storytelling. “I always spoke about the reality part only,” Smko said of his own choreography. Working with Lidberg inspired him to reevaluate his approach to “Sarah,” which he hopes will receive a full production later this year.

Now, Smko said, when he considers the story he wants to tell and how to tell it, he thinks, “More dreams.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.










Today's News

March 14, 2024

Asia Week New York celebrates a decade and a half of cultural and artistic diversity

Museum of Chinese in America names new leader

Princess Catherine apologizes, saying she edited image

Nations agree to refine pact that guides the return of Nazi-looted art

Smithsonian American Women's History Museum names new director

Final known work of Maria Cosway given to Nelson-Atkins from James and Virginia Moffett Collection

Bard Graduate Center honors Eli Wilner with the Iris Foundation Award

The Met receives gift From Pinkowitz Collection of more than 300 prints by Mexican artists and 31 Chinese woodcut prints

Audience snapshot: Four years after shutdown, a mixed recovery

'Ancient Egypt & the Napoleonic Era: Masterworks from the Dahesh Museum of Art' at Vero Beach Museum of Art

Frick to launch video series, online programs, and more

Independence Seaport Museum to unveil new entryway and introductory gallery exhibition

A 'Perfect Monolith' appears in Wales

With pride and hope, Ukraine celebrates Oscar win for Mariupol documentary

Marnia Lazreg, scholar of Algeria and the veil, dies at 83

Kahil El'Zabar, spiritual jazz's dapper bandleader, keeps pushing ahead

It's never too late to be a style influencer

$1,780 to spend the night in a 'Cocoon'? Hotels are betting on sleep tourism.

First building of axially loaded portico system by Jean Prouvé, 1939-1940, for auction

Fighting through art: A Kurdish dancer's journey to New York stages

Juli Lynne Charlot, creator of the Poodle Skirt, dies at 101

Baronian opens new exhibition entitled 'Trickle-down Economics'

James Cohan Gallery announcing the representation of Kelly Sinnapah Mary




Museums, Exhibits, Artists, Milestones, Digital Art, Architecture, Photography,
Photographers, Special Photos, Special Reports, Featured Stories, Auctions, Art Fairs,
Anecdotes, Art Quiz, Education, Mythology, 3D Images, Last Week, .

 



Founder:
Ignacio Villarreal
(1941 - 2019)
Editor & Publisher: Jose Villarreal
Art Director: Juan José Sepúlveda Ramírez
Writer: Ofelia Zurbia Betancourt

Royalville Communications, Inc
produces:

ignaciovillarreal.org juncodelavega.com facundocabral-elfinal.org
Founder's Site. Hommage
to a Mexican poet.
Hommage
       

The First Art Newspaper on the Net. The Best Versions Of Ave Maria Song Junco de la Vega Site Ignacio Villarreal Site
Tell a Friend
Dear User, please complete the form below in order to recommend the Artdaily newsletter to someone you know.
Please complete all fields marked *.
Sending Mail
Sending Successful