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,” opens Wednesday at the Joyce Theater in Manhattan.
Lidberg was working with Smko on a small moment of improvisation. “It has to be yours,” Lidberg told him. “It has to feel right.” Smko prowled the stage to some spiky Shostakovich music, displaying an uncanny mix of intensity and naturalness.
“Pontus has been really asking me to be free,” Smko said during a cigarette break outdoors. “I’m trying to move more with gentleness and ease.”
For a traditionally trained dancer, that might be a purely physical note. But for Smko, it felt more personal. “I’ve always been so rough with my life and with my movement,” he said. “And now it’s like, ‘Relax.’”
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, though. Iraq was “an extremist space at the time,” he said. “We had no studios, we had no art.” 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. “I was like, ‘OK, I need to go back to New York. I need to pursue what I really want to pursue.”
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. Hollander had been planning to bring another Iraqi dancer, Adel Euro, to perform in the company’s annual festival, but Euro was killed in a bombing in Baghdad less than two months before the event. Hollander asked Smko to dance in his honor.
That performance led to four-year relationship with the company as the inaugural Adel Euro fellow. 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.”
During that residency, Smko moved away from hip-hop, embraced contemporary dance and began to choreograph. But when it ended 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,” though Smko couldn’t perform in the work’s premiere at the Venice Biennale last year because of travel restrictions. But 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, calling them “rare qualities” for a dancer.
This week at the Joyce, Smko will get to perform in the work that he helped create. His role has now been expanded after a Swedish dancer was unable to travel to New York because of his own visa issues.
“Rabbits” examines the transition from adolescence to adulthood, the line between dreams and reality, and the damaging impact of H.I.V. on romance and intimacy between gay men, drawing from Lidberg’s own experiences, which have “haunted me for a while,” he said.
Though homosexuality wasn’t openly spoken about in Kurdistan, Smko said he had done research to understand the history and impact of H.I.V. and AIDS, and that the exploration of sexuality was one he related to.
“I have had my own experiences with different sexualities,” he said. “My mind was always open toward it, but obviously I couldn’t express it back home.” Getting the opportunity to probe his feelings through work like Lidberg’s is “one of the main reasons I came here,” he said. “To be myself.”
That desire for self-expression has influenced his other work as well. 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,” he said.
One showing caught the eye of Handan Ozbilgin, the artistic director of the LaGuardia Performing Arts Center in Queens, who said she was “mesmerized” by a Smko duet that she described as “vulnerable even though it’s masculine.” She offered him rehearsal space and encouraged him to apply for grants to support larger work.
Last fall, Smko presented an evening-length work-in-progress at LaGuardia called “Sarah,” inspired by his sister who still lives in Erbil. The loosely narrative work explores — with his sister’s permission — her struggle for autonomy and agency in an evolving, yet still traditional and patriarchal, society.
Smko credits Lidberg with giving him new dance-making tools, particularly the use of abstract imagery and storytelling. “I always spoke about the reality part only,” Smko said of his own choreography. Working with Lidberg inspired him to re-evaluate his approach to “Sarah,” which he hopes will receive a full production later this year.
Now, Smko said, when he considers the story he wants to tell and how to tell it, he thinks, “More dreams.”
