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Israel’s renowned Batsheva Dance Company won’t make its Cal Performances debut until next year, but the creative glow cast by Ohad Naharin, a choreographer and the modern dance institution’s longtime artistic director, will illuminate UC Berkeley this month.

Cal Performances’ 2024-25 season opens Sept. 27 with the U.S. premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s “Harawi,” an American Modern Opera Company production featuring star soprano and Cal Performances artist-in-residence Julia Bullock and pianist Conor Hanick. More than a musical presentation, Messiaen’s 1945 song cycle serves as muse for Or Schraiber and Bobbi Jene Smith, two dancers and choreographers who met and fell in love as members of Batsheva.

Inspired by the medieval myth of the ill-fated lovers Tristan and Iseult, “Harawi” is often mysterious, with Messiaen’s libretto occasionally using words in the Indigenous Andean language Quechua. (“Harawi” refers to a Peruvian folk music and poetry tradition referencing mortality and lost love). 

At first Schraiber and Smith responded directly to the score, with which they were largely unfamiliar before taking on the assignment. 

“Diving into this piece, it took a moment to calibrate myself,” said Schraiber, who was born and raised in Jerusalem. “The more we listened the more we immersed ourselves. You find all these cadences and rhythms that correspond with dance. As a choreographer, it’s a playground, whether you want to negate the rhythm or go with it. We went with both options.”

“The piece has so many layers and so much depth musically,” added Smith as they shared a speaker-phone call while driving through Los Angeles. “It’s a dance between the interesting language and following the music into this dream-like place, looking and noticing that there are so many stories here. We’re moving in and out of the literal and nonliteral, hoping that people can go on their own journey.”

The fact that the husband-and-wife team has created a work set to Messiaen’s meditation on thwarted love certainly adds an intriguing subtext for the audience. Smith was already enamored with the Batsheva ethos when she met Naharin as an undergrad studying dance at the Juilliard School in New York. Rather than finishing her degree, the Iowa native moved to Tel Aviv and joined the company for a brilliant decade-long stint that culminated with “Bobbi Jene,” a documentary about her decision to leave Batsheva and pursue work as a choreographer in the U.S.

She didn’t depart empty handed. Smith met and fell in love with fellow Batsheva dancer Schraiber. They also took their training in Naharin’s rigorously physical technique, known as Gaga, along with them. Now in their second year as artists-in-residence at the Los Angeles Dance Project, they use Gaga as the starting point for just about every project.

“It’s a building block, a foundation from which we grow,” Schraiber said. “There are so many lessons Ohad instilled in us. The work ethic, the constant digging. What Ohad gave us is a practice, and we use that practice to speak our own way.”

“We were so lucky to watch him work and be around all the amazing people he gathered,” Smith said. “It’s where we grew up and where we came from. The Gaga movement language has given me so many tools and shaped how I experience life and movement and pleasure.”

“Harawi” isn’t the first assignment that echoes their relationship. In 2021, Brooklyn indie rock band the Antlers cast Smith and Schraiber in a dance film as a companion for the concept album “Green to Gold,” which details the joys and tribulations of a romantic relationship. In an art form that uses the human body as its medium, maintaining separation between life and art is nigh impossible. 

The personal informs the professional, and professional informs the personal. The line is very delicate.

Bobbi Jene Smith, dancer and choreographer

“The personal informs the professional, and professional informs the personal,” Smith acknowledged. “The line is very delicate.”

“With Bobbi, being life partners and working together since 2013, that informs ‘Harawi’ or any piece,” Schraiber said. “Yes, we have all the history and knowledge of each other, but most of all this knowledge of two bodies in the studio that lead and follow each other.”

Bay Area dance fans might be familiar with Smith and Schraiber, who performed at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Batsheva’s 50th anniversary tour in 2014. And when Smith left the company about a year later she briefly moved to San Francisco, teaching dance at Stanford and the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance (which closed in 2018). Since then they’ve performed at ODC Theater and created works for Axis Dance Company.

They’ve both thrived since leaving Israel, but no other dance scene can compete with the intensity of Tel Aviv’s, Schraiber said.

“The center where Batsheva is located, the whole dance world passes by every day. Dancers from all over the world are there to take classes, to take a summer course, to set a new piece. It’s very versatile and eclectic,” he said.

“Nowhere else in the world have I experienced that.”

“Harawi”

8 p.m. Friday, Sept. 27, on the UC Berkeley campus, 101 Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley, $36–$78, tickets online, by phone at (510) 642-9988, or in person at the Ticket Office at Zellerbach Hall.