Photo: Battery Dance.
Hussein Smko, a mostly self-taught Kurdish dancer/choreographer whose talent was spotted by Battery Dance over social media in 2014, inspring the company to give him training over Skype.
I love stories of surprising personal journeys, like the one today about a Kurdish boy whose admiration for a soldier’s hiphop move started him on a road to a dance career in the US.
Here’s Brian Schaefer at the New York Times . “When Hussein Smko was 9, the American military arrived in his hometown, Erbil, 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, N.Y., where he was rehearsing with the Swedish choreographer Pontus Lidberg last week: the dance they were preparing, ‘On the Nature of Rabbits. …
“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. … 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 United States Department of State. That led to a two-month tour of several East Coast cities, including Niagara Falls, N.Y., 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, ISIS 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. … 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. …
“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.’
“[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 Erbil to see his family, his first visit in seven years.
“His prospects improved in 2022, when he was introduced to the 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.’ … 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. …
“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.’ “
More at the Times, here.
I liked how Battery Dance described its original connection with the dancer: “Hussein Smko was the Adel Euro Fellow from 2016-2020. A self-trained Kurdish dancer/choreographer whose talent was spotted by Battery Dance over social media in the summer of 2014, he was subsequently trained via Skype from his home in Iraq connected with Battery Dance practitioners in their studios in New York City. He managed to get to the U.S. in early 2016 and was granted Permanent Resident Status.”
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