With FOR GLASS, Ballet BC dancers push and succumb to live string quartet’s rhythms
Star choreographic duo Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber return with a full-evening premiere that draws on the emotional layers in Philip Glass’s music—and in the company members themselves
Or Schraiber and Bobbi Jene Smith. Photo by Ted Belton
Ballet BC’s Vivian Ruiz and Emanuel Dostine in rehearsal for FOR GLASS. Photo by Millissa Martin
Ballet BC presents UNITY at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre from May 7 to 9
NEW YORK–BASED DANCE mavericks Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber just staged a sold-out production of Satyagraha at Paris’s legendary Palais Garnier. That was on the heels of choreographing Maggie Gyllenhaal’s punk-feminist Frankenstein remake The Bride!. Only a few months earlier, they wowed Toronto audiences with a buzzed-about new work for the National Ballet of Canada.
Those are just a few of the recent large-scale projects the couple has created—and so it says something that they’re beyond eager to be back in Vancouver at Ballet BC. Smith and Schraiber are crafting a new work, FOR GLASS, after debuting at the company a year ago with the restless, open-hearted Obsidian. The full-evening piece, on the season-closing UNITY program, will feature the Microcosmos Quartet playing two of Philip Glass’s string pieces onstage with the entire company of dancers.
Schraiber has no problem articulating why they admire the dancers at Ballet BC so much. “They have the sense of humour and the generosity and the commitment—it’s a reminder why this is what we do,” says Schraiber, joining his partner in life and art on a Zoom call with Stir. “There’s also the chemistry, and the talent, and the skill—and the ability to listen to each other.”
On the day of the interview, Smith is in Vancouver finessing FOR GLASS with the company here; Schraiber has been in New York, where their daughter goes to school, before heading back to the West Coast. The anticipation with which he receives rehearsal videos from Ballet BC—helmed by artistic director Medhi Walerski—speaks volumes about his excitement about the company.
“I receive videos every night to watch the runs that they do in the studio—and, you know, the videos come in at 10 p.m., 11 p.m.,” he recounts. “And I’m waiting all day to see those dancers, even though it’s a studio run. They have really something special, and I think it has to do with Medhi cultivating a culture and picking these people and supporting them. It’s unheard of for me.”
As Smith adds with a smile: “It’s a special dance vortex here.”
Smith and Schraiber’s connection with Ballet BC is key to their work. In an intimate process, they don’t come in with set ideas, instead improvising and drawing core ideas from company members for each creation.
For an idea of what it’s like to work inside that uniquely collaborative process, just ask Vivian Ruiz. In a separate interview, the powerhouse Ballet BC dancer says she considers working with Smith and Schraiber on the earlier Obsidian a turning point in her career.
“That was an artistic awakening for me. I just felt like something inside of me cracked when it needed to be cracked,” says Ruiz, a Miami-born, Arts Umbrella–trained, four-season company member. “I feel so much more free from working with them on Obsidian, and I noticed how much that filtered into other works and other things I was doing. What differentiates them from other choreographers is they really want us to bring our whole selves into the process, no matter how we’re feeling that day—if we’re emotional, if we’re angry, all these human emotions come up in our personal life and they really encourage us to just let it out through movement.
“Hearing that really just makes you able to let go and dance without fear,” she continues. “So whenever we work with them, it just feels so honest and pure….It’s a constant evolution of dance that never feels stagnant. It feels like it’s always this very alive thing. It’s never in a place of just repeating steps for the sake of repeating steps. Honestly, it’s everything you can hope for in a creative process.”
Another thing that sets Smith and Schraiber apart is their intense, dedicated work with live music. Obsidian found Perri Lo playing a suite of pieces by George Ivanovich Gurdjieff and Thomas de Hartmann on a grand piano right on the stage. Satyagraha featured soloists and the Paris Opera Orchestra and Chorus performing Philip Glass’s Gandhi-inspired opera. FOR GLASS will have live performances of String Quartet No. 3 (from Glass’s score for the 1985 Paul Schrader film Mishima) and 1991’s String Quartet No. 5.
The fact that two of their recent works have drawn on the pioneering minimalist’s music is partly coincidence: FOR GLASS expands on a short piece that Schraiber and Smith created for L.A. Dance Project, set to the No. 5. Pairing it with the track from Schrader’s stylized biopic Mishima felt natural.
Ballet BC in rehearsal for FOR GLASS. Photo by Millissa Martin
But the duo also has a close affinity with Glass’s music—a choice that, on its surface, might seem surprising. At first glance, Glass’s sound, with its repetitive structures and interlocking rhythmic patterns, might seem in contrast to the wild, raw, and rebellious dance of Smith and Schraiber.
“I find it very moving that it’s through the practice of the repetition that the emotion gets made,” says Smith of Glass’s music. “But it’s not necessarily looking for the emotion or striving for the result. Inside that kind of mathematical layering, all of the human emotion arrives and you feel his soul.”
Smith and Schraiber, who met in 2010 at Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company, play intricately with Glass’s complex patterns—as Schraiber puts it, “pushing the rhythm, succumbing to the rhythm”.
Having the string players onstage, within sight of the dancers, is integral to their work, he says, with the musicians’ interpretations feeding off and into the dancers’. The rhythmic movement of the musicians, as they perform the driving notes of Glass, becomes another force of motion to play with on the stage.
“What we’re really interested in is how the sonic and the physical world collide into each other, or constantly intermingle,” the Israeli-born artist says. “It’s not that the dancers are just dancing to the music. The dancers and the musicians are one—they are with each other.”
Though Schraiber and Smith prefer to keep the aesthetic look of FOR GLASS a surprise, you can expect a performance that demands rigour and endurance from all involved.
For Ballet BC’s dancers, Schraiber and Smith’s physically demanding choreography comes at a time when the troupe is recovering from a recent tour to Paris. But Ruiz loves the challenge. She describes one central section of the work when a large, all-female group dances together, fuelling one another’s movement.
“We all feel it together. It’s so exhausting. And at the end of it, we’re huffing and puffing. But it feels rewarding in a way, getting to feel that type of exhaustion,” she explains. “It’s not only physically exhausting; it is very emotional too. Through the movement, the emotions come out. And that can be 10 times more exhausting. And I think we’re all managing it together. We try to feed off of each other’s energy. There might be a section where I am basically just dead, and I look at someone in the eyes, and they seem a lot fresher than I am, and I feel like they’re passing some sort of energy to me. Just knowing that we’re in this exhaustion together gives you more energy, and the only way out of it is through.”
It’s the kind of exertion, she allows, that all the healthy eating and proper sleeping habits in the world can’t ever totally sustain. But Ruiz says: “Like, how lucky am I to be this exhausted by something I love so much?”
Entering new physical and creative terrain, the dancers may love working with Schraiber and Smith as much as the duo enjoys being back in Vancouver with them.
“Obviously, they have a lot of themselves in the piece, but there is so much of us in it, too, and it’s so beautiful,” Ruiz says.
As Smith says before heading back into rehearsals at Ballet BC: “We’re so excited to share this with the Vancouver audience—and, you know, honoured to be able to be in this vortex with them.” 
Ballet BC’s Vivian Ruiz and Emanuel Dostine in rehearsal for FOR GLASS. Photo by Millissa Martin
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