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Posts Tagged ‘Kurdish’

He Learned Dance Moves from a Soldier

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on May 18, 2024| 2 Comments »

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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24 Years After the Gift of a Bike

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 22, 2019| 5 Comments »

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Photo: Mevan Babakar
Years ago, a 5-year-old Kurdish refugee received a bike from a kind man in the Netherlands. Recently, Mevan Babakar, now an adult, tracked down the man known only as Egbert to express her lasting gratitude.

As we break our hearts over what is happening to today’s Kurdish refugees, it may be time for a story about the beauty that can occur when refugees are treated with respect and compassion. The story is also about the good side of social media.

Megan Specia reported at the New York Times in August, “Memories of a brand new bicycle — and the mystery man who gave it to her when she was a 5-year-old in a Dutch refugee center — have played out as vignettes in Mevan Babakar’s mind for most of her life.

“Ms. Babakar, now 29, said the generous gift from a man whose name she couldn’t remember had shaped her childhood. On Tuesday, she suddenly found herself reunited with the man whose face had flickered through her memories for more than two decades.

“And it all began on Twitter.

“ ‘I was a refugee for 5 yrs in the 90s and this man, who worked at a refugee camp near Zwolle in the Netherlands, out of the kindness of his own heart bought me a bike. My five year old heart exploded with joy,’ Ms. Babakar wrote in a post on Twitter, before pleading with the internet to help her track him down.

“The photo she shared — a fading snapshot of the man that her mother had kept — was among a handful of belongings they had from that time. When he gave her the bike, she said, it made a lasting impact.

‘I remember feeling so special. I remember thinking that this is such a big thing to receive, am I even worthy of this big thing?’ Ms. Babakar said. ‘This feeling kind of became the basis of my self-worth growing up.’

“She and her parents fled Iraq after Saddam Hussein’s brutal crackdown on the Kurdish population in the early 1990s, which included a gas attack on a village near their home. Their journey took them to Turkey, Azerbaijan and Russia — where her father stayed behind to work for the next four years — and eventually to the Netherlands. …

“Ms. Babakar took a sabbatical from her technology job in London this summer to retrace the journey, and visited Zwolle to spend a few days attempting to piece together her scattered impressions of her time there. … While there, she wrote a Twitter post that she described as a ‘last-ditch attempt’ to learn more about the man who had struck up a friendship with her and her mother, and gave her the bike.

“Within hours, Arjen van der Zee, who volunteers for a nonprofit news site in Zwolle, saw the photo and recognized the man.

“ ‘I looked at the picture and immediately knew this guy who I had worked with in my early twenties,’ said Mr. van der Zee. … Mr. van der Zee made contact with the man’s family on social media, and they put the two in touch.

“ ‘He started to tell me that he remembered Mevan and her mother,’ Mr. van der Zee said. ‘He said he always told his wife, if there were people he wanted to see again in his life it was Mevan and her mother.’

“They quickly scrambled to arrange a meeting with Ms. Babakar, who was due to travel back to London in the coming days. …

“ ‘He was, I guess, equally overwhelmed,’ Ms. Babakar said. ‘It was like seeing a family member that you hadn’t seen in a long time. It was really lovely.’ …

“Ms. Babakar was ‘incredibly humbled’ that her story had resonated with so many people around the world — both fellow refugees and those who just felt touched by the tale. … ‘I think it’s really easy for people to forget or to feel really powerless in the face of these big, abstract problems that we hear about all the time,’ she said. “It’s really a comfort to remember we are all very powerful in the way that we treat others. Especially in the small acts, we are powerful.’ ”

More here.

 

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