Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber reveal the works of an L.A. Dance Project residency.
WORDS Ninette Paloma
First, the impact of crimson carpeting. Wall to wall and in a plush 70s pile, it injects the subdued bones of L.A. Dance Project’s downtown theatre with a dose of impending risk. Dim lights and fraying furniture and dancers tugging at handfuls of wiry hair hint at a time that hope forgot. We are in a decaying hotel lobby, a Wes Andersen film. No, this feels more like The Breakfast Club. Through fits and pauses and a haunting score by Yonatan Daskal, dancers glide and hinge across a banquet table and ooze across a worn settee. They leap off a rickety ladder and press into one another’s shoulders and chests in a restless rhythm, tethered only to the sound of the weather report being broadcast through an ancient mic. The tone is dark and reassuring, the tempo erratic yet familiar. If Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber set out to make full use of their L.A. residency by simultaneously absorbing the temperature within and outside of these studio walls, then “The Missing Mountain” cuts an intuitive and kinetic portrait of empowered dysfunction; the enduring struggle to reach the pinnacle of… (fill in the blank.) The dancers might soon discover that the mountain is little more than a painting on a wall, but the journey is satisfying just the same. When documentary filmmaker Elvira Lind first introduced us to the realm of Bobbi Jene Smith back in 2017, the global dance-scape was leaping with contradictions: televised competitions were saturating primetime, Justin Peck was staging political ballets inside the New York City subway, and you could barely walk into a grocery store without bumping into kids “flossing” down the cereal aisle. Smith’s physical representations of strength in vulnerability and loneliness in autonomy were in good company then as they are today. Only this time, she is not flying solo and there is not a sandbag in sight.
