For much of the duration of this film, its main subject, dancer and choreographer Bobbi Jene Smith, works on a solo piece entitled A Study on Effort. You could say that it is a film about a young woman’s ambition to succeed—as many short descriptions of it do—but I see it as more about the effort expended on trying to attain our dreams. In this case, the dream is to break away from the dance company that she grew up in and built her career upon thus far—the world-renowned Batsheva Dance Company, as steered by its legendary then Artistic Director of thirty years, choreographer Ohad Naharin—in order to create her own independent work, both as a choreographer and as a performer. Naharin, Mr. Gaga himself, makes several appearances in the film as a secondary character, casting his own shade of shadow upon her story both interpersonally as well as artistically, as a complex former lover/teacher/mentor figure, but to be clear, this is not a film about his work or legacy. Though the first third of Bobbi Jene does take place in the troubled Holy Lands of Palestine/Israel, this film does not directly deal with the longstanding conflict there; nonetheless, its implications on art, culture, society, and interpersonal relationships are present.

Lind has crafted, here, a bildungsroman of dance that has universal implications: a tale of a modern woman in her Saturn return, an artist at the age of thirty, who has excelled at performing other people’s work but who is called, now, to find her own forms, “like echoes of flesh moving,” to use her own words. Smith’s deeply sensual journey finds her spring-boarding into the uncertain and vulnerable but ultimately empowering and emancipatory ground of self-actualization. It is indelibly a feminist story, one about the sacrifices women must uniquely make in choosing the path of art making. Smith’s themes, too, are unquestionably feminist, in her tireless research on the duality of pain and pleasure in the body as pathways to understanding something ineffable about being human, what it means to belong deeply to oneself and to others, and to find liberation in the purest corporeal sense of the word.

Aurora Prelević
Writer, performance artist, cinephile, programmer