In Los Angeles, a city built around the business of make believe, the surreal can often feel as palpable as the real. If you happen to find yourself at some of Downtown LA’s most iconic spots like City Hall or the Bradbury Building or at a tucked away eatery like Coles, you may feel like you’ve been transported into the neo-noir movies that were filmed in them–Bladerunner, Seven, LA Confidential. The late and great David Lynch said that if on a spring night in LA, you smell night-blooming jasmine, you can “almost see Clark Gable or Gloria Swanson. The golden age of Hollywood is still living in some moods here, in the DNA of the city.” Just like dreams and make believe, Los Angeles can transport you in time. It seems the perfect place, then, for choreographer Bobbi Jene Smith–who masterfully creates dances oozing with dream-like surrealism–to spend on a two-year residency with L.A. Dance Project (LADP), a non-profit dance company under the Artistic Direction of renowned dancer and choreographer Benjamin Millepied. Having spent the last two years loving and writing about LADP and Smith’s work, I sat down with her to discuss this collaboration, the ways Los Angeles and its dreamscape has factored into her choreography, and how she believes in the power of dance to create and inspire a more empathetic world.

Born in Centerville, Iowa, Smith began her dance and movement journey as a young girl when she took up gymnastics, but quickly pivoted into dance. She briefly attended the Juilliard School of Dance, but left when she was offered a position in the prestigious Batsheva dance company. It was in Batsheva that she ended up meeting her partner in life and on stage–Or Schraiber. After 12 years with the company, she left to pursue her own choreography in the United States, a move that was the subject of Elvira Lind’s documentary, Bobbi Jene. Smith and Schraiber went on to become founding members of the American Modern Opera Company and have choreographed numerous original dance works, independently and collaboratively, for a wide variety of companies, and most recently Smith was commissioned for a new evening-length work for the Paris Opera Ballet. During their residency at LADP, Smith and Schraiber have choreographed and premiered pieces for LADP company dancers, led community classes for dancers of all levels, and ran LADP’s summer intensive in partnership with Everybody Dance LA!, an organization that teaches dance to youth from marginalized communities in Los Angeles.

Smith notes that the opportunity to develop new works over such an extensive amount of time with the same group of people is incredibly rare, especially in the United States. She says, “For an artist of Benjamin’s caliber to be like, hey, I’ve built this thing and I’m going to open the door, please take advantage of it, take chances, I’m here to support you…I’m just so moved by what Benjamin and LADP have given us. We know the dancers so well–so when we go into the studio, it’s just like, ok, let’s get to work–we know how they communicate through movement.”

Smith has approached her work with LADP as a collaboration between herself, Schraiber, and the dancers. Rather than giving the company dancers a set piece to learn, she and Schraiber begin with a theme or feeling, explore that theme or feeling through movement, and then have the dancers do the same. “When we're in the beginning of a process, I just sit and I just study the room–watch people. I watch how their hands move. I love watching who they gravitate towards, who they have an eye on, or, you know, who they're laughing with in the corner.”

Creating pieces inspired by dancers’ genuine connections and feelings, she says, helps audiences to experience that authentic, raw emotion too. And because the pieces reflect many different overlapping perspectives and stories–rather than a single narrative or vision–they take on a multitude of meanings. The result is a highly surrealistic aesthetic that she hopes allows the audience to move through the work as if they are in a dream. “We all have dreams, and we know they change and reroute, and then they come back. They aren’t linear, the storylines aren’t clear and they are full of contradictions, but isn’t that where the core of human emotions live? The minute I can tell where the story is going, I’m like, oh, we got to open it up, it’s getting too precise. I want people to let go–instead of going, so and so did this, that’s her brother who betrayed his lover–if we start doing that too much, I feel like it’s harder to get into the dream of the piece, which is where the miscommunications and the connection and the desire and longing is living, and that’s what I’d love to give to the audience.”

One of the most dreamlike choreographies Smith and Schraiber created during their residency is Missing Mountain. Performed at LADP’s warehouse studio, its set was sparse–a vintage couch and piano set atop of a red velvety carpet. Dancers weaved in and out, finding and then losing each other over and over. One of the dancers, Shu Kinuchi, dressed in a vintage tailcoat, announced an oncoming storm into a retro hanging mic, the sound of light rain interlocking with a soundtrack that included Bach and Tom Waits. It felt as if they were all huddled together at a remote mountain outpost but also, at the same time, were just imagining that mountain, that outpost, from a loft somewhere in neo-noir Los Angeles. At one point, dancer Courtney Conovan began to play the piano, then stopped–and yet the music continued, and it soon became clear that her playing had just been a simulation. This is a device often used by David Lynch in his films, and I can’t help but ask Smith if Missing Mountain was an ode to Lynch and the illusory qualities of Los Angeles he represented so well. “I’m so happy you caught that,” she says, beaming. “David Lynch has been such an inspiration. My big hope was that he would come to see the show, that somehow he would feel it through the cosmos, and we put [the player piano] and some quotes in just for him, in the hope that he would hear it.” So too, she says, has the Los Angeles he loved been an inspiration in her work: “I truly believe that where you make a piece and what is happening when you're making it, becomes the piece. Los Angeles is intoxicating…how it functions in a kind of chaotic dream, it has all these contradictions and [David Lynch] captured that.”

Smith and I discuss some of Los Angeles’s contradictions–its opulent wealth juxtaposed to its glaring poverty, for example, and how despite often being called the city of dreams, the opportunity to learn from renowned dance artists is usually out of reach for most young Angelenos. This is what makes LADP and Millepied’s vision so special, she says. She and Schraiber, along with LADP dancer David Adrian Freeland Jr., led students from underserved communities in two-week long summer intensives. Their approach to teaching these students was the same as their approach to teaching highly trained dancers–it’s collaborative and draws from the rich tapestry of movements the kids bring into the studio. “I don’t really think about [what] level [of dance] they’re at. It’s about expression. Everybody knows gesture, I say to them, every gesture matters, and the more care you give it, the more it turns into a dance–and so we did exercises where they created movement and made part of the dance. Everybody knows what happens in your body when you really want to hold someone, or when you really want to be held. It’s not only about doing a step right. It’s about, where we are today and how do we connect?”

And for Bobbi Jene Smith, dance is all about connecting, something she feels we need now more than ever given what’s going on in the country and around the world. “I’m constantly amazed at the power of nonverbal communication, how we can say things with our bodies that we struggle to say with words. I’ve seen what it does to people, how it can bridge differences and create community and empathy.” Our longing to feel connection with one another–and how fragile that connection can be–is something Smith accomplishes so poignantly in her work, Quartet for Five, the last work that will be performed as part of her LADP residency. In the piece, dancers Courtney Conovan, Jeremy Coachman, Lorrin Brubaker, Marcel Mejia, and Daphne Fernberger, come together and break apart in conflict and in love. I tell her that for me, the piece really captures the miscommunication and power dynamics between men and women that can often destroy relationships, even when there is profound, deep love. I half-jokingly ask her, “Am I right?” She laughs and says, “I’m so happy it meant that for you. My hope for the dancers and the audience is that in dance, no matter what you’re going through, you will be able to find your meaning, to find your story.”

As I reflect on Bobbi Jene Smith and her time with LADP, I realize how much her residency and the dance company has meant to me over the past two years. I, along with an entire city, have navigated losses, heartbreaks, the burning down of entire neighborhoods, the fear that multigenerational Angelino families like mine will no longer be able to afford to live in the only place we’ve called home. And now, of course, there are the inhumane raids targeting the hardest working and most vulnerable Angelinos for whom the American dream, the Los Angeles dream, has become a nightmare. I am half-Mexican, half-White. My story, like Los Angeles’s, is one both of oppression and privilege–of the contradictions Smith has so fervently captured in her works with LADP. Throughout my life, I’ve often heard visitors complain that L.A. is ugly, like its concrete river. I grew up near the L.A. river and for me, it has always been beautiful (as a little girl, I would just squint and focus on whatever I could see that was green). Smith’s dance works and LADP remind us all that even when there is ugliness and loss, the things that are beautiful or that have gone missing can come back to us, even if just in dreams, even if just at night. Such is also the last message sent to us by one of Smith’s greatest inspirations, David Lynch: at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, with a single, simple phrase on his gravestone: Night Blooming Jasmine.

***Quartet for Five will show at the Wallis Theater on June 13 and 14, as part of Gatherings, a triple-bill program also including Triade, a signature repertory work from LADP’s Benjamin Millepied and Sleepwalker’s Encyclopedia, from choreographer and former New York City Ballet Principal Dancer Janie Taylor, with set design by American painter Benjamin Styer.

‍