In a rehearsal studio at Juilliard on a sunlit afternoon, multiple small dramas were unfolding in quick succession.
Dancers draped and corkscrewed around each other as they wrestled through a series of fraught, unsettled duets. One extended an arm, and a partner pressed her forehead urgently into its upturned wrist. Another couple’s simmering tango bubbled over into a quarrel, with punches mimed in time to a Brahms piano trio. Each pair of dancers seemed both desperate and unable to hold on to each other.
The choreographer, Bobbi Jene Smith, stopped the music. As the dancers panted and sipped water, one cocked an eyebrow and asked, “So — it’s about abandonment?”
Smith chuckled. “Sure, abandonment,” she said. “And,” she paused, “slippery fish.”
Though delivered like a joke, the comment held a truth about the dances Smith creates with Or Schraiber, her partner on and offstage. Nearly everything they make — including this latest work, “Seven Scenes,” which has its premiere at Little Island on Aug. 22 and runs through Aug. 28 — hinges on an evocative, slippery-fish ambiguity. Their dreamlike montages are often turbulent and disorienting, but can also feel unnervingly familiar.
“I think we’re always trying to make the invisible visible,” Smith said in an interview this month after the rehearsal, “to expose something that is true, but deep inside.”
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