Lexee Smith sees dance as a kind of alchemy. She has amassed years of training, but for her, the body holds a deeper power than the ability to spin or to soar through the air. In her hypnotic movement studies, dance states become trance states.
Smith, 24, makes her living in commercial dance in Los Angeles, working with artists like Lady Gaga, Billie Eilish and Addison Rae. But Smith is an outlier: an experimental dancer living inside a commercial world.
While known for her work with pop stars, Smith also creates Instagram videos that float across the screen like dance poems. It’s here that she shows the experimental side of her artistry, where dance is a form of self-discovery. “Nothing feels as serious as just me and me sometimes,” she said.
Beyond muscular elasticity, an airy wingspan and tensile strength, there are heels, flesh and fabric. Fashion is important — not as a costume, but as way to give movement color and depth. It’s about living out a second skin.
“I wish I had mermaid tail and I could still wear loubs,” she writes, referring to one of her loves, Louboutin heels, in a caption for a video in which she thrusts her hips and winds from side to side in slow motion, eventually covering her face in powder blue silk. In another, she ripples through a series of balances: “I don’t know what you call it. Vinyasa erotica.”
Smith’s intimate Instagram dances are like windows into the moods of her imagination, in all its sunshine and shadows. While her outward appearance can change — a long, flowing dress one day, a bra strapped over seashells the next — what doesn’t shift is her sensitivity as a mover.
In her work with other artists, it can be hard to tell where Smith ends and they begin. “I have such a weird life,” she said. “It feels like I’m a mirror for a lot of people.”
She recently performed opposite Lady Gaga in the video of “Disease.” And she was the movement director for the wonderfully eerie “Santa Baby,” directed by Nadia Lee Cohen and Charlie Denis, with Kim Kardashian — improbably cool donning the outfit Smith wore to the shoot.
Smith’s style is a part of her dancing, just as dancing is a part of her style. She’s the creative director for Rae, an early TikTok dancer whose album “Addison” will have videos for every song. The six that have been released wash across the screen as sensual and conceptual expressions of what it’s like to be a slightly messy, artistically inclined woman in her 20s: feminine and feminist, fresh and free.
But Smith’s Instagram dances are all her own. “Performance is so personal,” she said. “It’s how you choose yourself. I try to give myself love when I feel less loved.”
She knows what she wants. Even at 3, when her mother enrolled her in a cheerleading class. “My body rejected it, like, completely,” she said. “I begged her to put me into dance.”
Smith, who was born in Houston, studied modern dance and ballet; at 13 moved to Los Angeles, where she switched her focus to forms like hip-hop and jazz funk. But she said she always wonders what would have happened had she stuck with concert dance. That question led to her Instagram dances. “I did feel like I neglected that part of myself,” she said. “I would rent studio space alone and just be with myself and experiment and do and record and document and then kind of then dissect it later.”
As a choreographer and improviser, she thrives in small, confined spaces. She likes objects. And lately she has realized that “when I wear things that are rich and elegant, I feel more free,” she said. Her black dress — one of three she bought for her 24th birthday — feels like it “unlocks something so crazy in me,” she said. “It also has a bit of a cheeky, flirty thing to it. There’s so much fabric so when you spin it, it opens up underneath. Like, what’s in there? It’s like elegance on top, freedom on bottom.”
She has started to think of her videos as self-documentary. “I’m always honoring other people in my work, so it’s really nice to have this moment of intimacy and to, like, praise the self,” she said. “Everybody should have a practice where they do that.”
She has also invented an alter ego named Juicy Cmon. In her commercial life, she works with collaborators — a choreographer, a singer or both. But Juicy Cmon is part of her. As she forges her own artistic path, she said, “Maybe it helps me feel more free.”
She’s tapping into the rebel inside. “Juicy Cmon feels like such a bandit,” Smith said. “She’s lawless. She not like the girl who turns lawless, she was always wild. And that’s how I’ve been feeling lately.
“And like, you know, just get free. I just want everyone to feel like that. I hope that the things that I make, make everyone feel free.”
Additional video camera operator: Jared Christiansen
Gia Kourlas is the dance critic for The Times. She writes reviews, essays and feature articles and works on a range of stories.
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