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Do Iowa dancers go on to reach the international stage? For Bobbi Jene Smith, born in Centerville Iowa, she became not just an international dancer with the Batsheva Dance Company from 2005-2014, but became the subject of a dance documentary, Bobbi Jene, which followed her as she set out on a career as a choreographer and performer of her own work.
The documentary is powerful because it follows Bobbi Jene’s decision to part with the company that she started with right out of her undergraduate schooling at Julliard. She is the subject, not dance, but because dance is her profession and because her work intertwines life, expression and art Bobbi’s character and her work come together to enhance our understanding of dance and art.
The film doesn’t go into Bobbi’s dance training in Iowa, but there is a scene where she comes home to visit her family. Her childhood home is filled with the things of a Midwestern upbringing – the overstuffed couch, the oak shelving, kitschy art – a misty print of Jesus helping a child hold his baseball bat hangs on the wall. “It’s creepy” is all Bobbi has to say.
“Well, they didn’t have a dancer,” her mother says. Bobbi isn’t sure they will ever have a Jesus helping a modern dancer, and from some of the scenes in the documentary we can certainly say, if someone were to paint it, it would be creepy.
The scene in Iowa contrasts the stark, simple, clean architecture we see at the beginning of the film when she is in Israel making the decision to move on with her career and to leave the dance company. There, furniture is modern and simple. A whitewashed wall with kitchen utensils hanging from a rack is simple, pedestrian and beautiful. In Israel no spiritual being is represented as facilitating your physical ability. The dancer dances – maybe before God, but there is no deity uplifting the dancer during his or her leap. The dance is beautiful because it is utterly human, without intervention. In Israel people drink wine and talk and laugh around a table. In Iowa it’s different – people fulfill roles. People watch TV.
The body is an important part of Bobbi Jene’s work. The dance technique Gaga, changed her focus from ballet and other modern dance forms toward a centering and body-centric approach to movement. According to The Harvard Gazette, “Developed by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin, Gaga is a movement language intended to help practitioners raise physical awareness by focusing on (or in Gaga terms, “listening” to) the rhythm of their bodies.”
Bobbi Jene describes overcoming an eating disorder she struggled with as a teen in Iowa and as a dance student through the process of radical self-exploration the movement technique teaches. Something that is present, but not overtly described is the conflict between American Christianity and secular humanism, or between Judaism and secular humanism, for that matter, but there is this dynamic tension as an American, Iowan raised in Christianity performs a piece about effort, work, and the body in an Israeli museum. The commonality, maybe, is a shared, yet different historical experience of oppression and bodily harm.
When Bobbi Jene goes to California to teach after leaving the Batsheva Dance Company, she starts by talking with professionals – does she have an agent? Does she have work to show? Does she have bookings?
“I don’t think anybody knows I’m here,” she says.
It’s not long before she is in New York and back to Israel for performances of some of her emerging work and she learns quickly how to assemble the components to move her career forward.
Bobbi Jene is a beautiful film about how to make one’s way in a larger world having grown up and started dancing in a field of dreams. The question for Iowa is this: can people grow up and dance and build their artistic as an artist (not as a teacher of art or dance) right here?
Maybe some documentaries on dance in Iowa will come along and answer that question right here.
Learn more about the work of Bobbi Jene Smith.

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