Dancing to her own beat

Nicole Smith, a world arts and cultures student, handed out
tickets for her one-woman performance last summer to attendees of
the Jacob’s Pillow dance festival as they sat on the lawn.
After personally collecting the tickets before her show, Smith
began to dance 15 minutes of the unique piece that she had been
preparing for two years, “Ms. Spellings of Be.” The
problem was, Smith was not scheduled to perform at the
festival.

“I was like, “˜I’m sorry, but I got to bust
out,'” Smith said. “The more I performed it
though, the more I’d get a positive response. People were
telling me that I needed to make this an evening.”

So almost a year later, Smith will be among a very small but
growing number of undergraduate WAC students who perform their own
pieces outside of the UCLA community. Whereas this practice is
common for graduate students who receive funding and support for
their performances, undergraduates who don’t already have a
name for themselves have a hard time finding theaters in Los
Angeles that will run their shows.

“Without having a piece done, it’s kind of risky
(finding a stage). A lot of theaters that I contacted in L.A. just
didn’t return my phone calls. They don’t know who I
am,” Smith said.

Luckily, Smith has found a theater. The Electric Lounge in
Venice decided to give her the space she needs for her show this
Thursday and Sunday ““ almost a year after Smith’s stunt
at Jacob’s Pillow.

Her innate tenacity and unabashed creativity, said Smith’s
mentors and friends, are why she has come so far as an
undergraduate.

“Figuratively, she has the biggest ovaries of any person I
have ever met,” said Elizabeth Guilliam, a WAC alumna and
friend to Smith.

Where many WAC undergraduates prefer less abstract dance styles,
said David Rousseve, a WAC dance instructor who has worked with
Smith for several years, this is where Smith is finding her
voice.

“She’s also hysterically funny,” Rousseve
added. “What she brings to her work is real, unabashed humor
with a desire to say something meaningful.”

Adam Berg, UCLA alumnus and Smith’s sound producer for
“Ms. Spellings of Be,” is working with Smith for the
first time after meeting her at a “WACSmash”
after-party.

“Sometimes she’ll say something that’s totally
out there. She’ll come in and say, “˜I want a sound that
goes like LA BLA BLOO BLA.’ What kind of a sound is she
talking about?” Berg said jokingly.

Berg added, however, that on top of Smith’s artistic
creativity, her understanding of the business, marketing and
advertising aspects of putting on such a performance gives her an
advantage that many young performers may not have.

Smith originally conceived “Ms. Spellings of Be” as
a humorous improvised exercise about her first grade teacher, Miss
Ellen, who Smith impersonated and described with a Midwestern
twang.

“She’s like one sandwich short of a picnic, but
it’s a big picnic. She’s deep. But people don’t
take her seriously because she’s really out there,” she
said.

Smith developed the semi-autobiographical piece further in her
“Text and Movement” class, eventually scrapping her
original senior thesis a month before performance for this piece,
then convincing WAC dance instructor Rennie Harris to direct
it.

“I had actually prepared a group dance piece, but I
didn’t feel like the group dance piece was tapping into what
I needed to say,” she said.

Every character in Smith’s performance, from Miss Ellen to
“La-pump-a-lump,” Smith’s mischievous version of
her six-year-old self, are facets of who she is, and personifying
them is a way of accepting them, Smith said. “I might be 23,
but I’m also 7, plus 8, and so on,” she said.
“How old would that make me if I keep the spirit of each year
alive?”

Smith’s colorful childhood included excursions to yard
sales with her father to build her collection of wigs and spatulas.
After finding one spatula Smith calls “Daddy Spat,” she
has built a collection of spatulas since, even including them in an
abstract dance routine for class.

“I came from a family that let me be who I was. My dad was
real encouraging of my inner performer. When I was 6 years old, I
asked my dad, “˜Do you have any Tina Turner?’ I made
everybody leave the living room, closed the shutters, and just
rocked out to Tina Turner,” she said.

Smith was exposed to performing arts early. Her father is a
musician who plays tenor sax, and her mother studied dance therapy.
Smith came to the realization at age 12 that dance was her
passion.

Playing her pocket trumpet to the Stevie Wonder song “Sir
Duke,” Smith said, “I had to put down the trumpet and
just dance. That’s when I figured out that dance is more
important.”

At age 14, Smith found hip-hop classes through the phone
book.

After coming to UCLA, Smith said she learned to appreciate more
fully her gift of being a dancer and what she can do with her
skills.

“I had a realization when I was watching Modern Dance with
the American College Dance Festival Association: You watch a
hundred modern dance pieces, and they’re all like
this,” Smith said, standing up to gesture a silly
impersonation of a modern dancer.

“It’s so pretty, but people think of modern dance as
being so serious. I didn’t see any humor in it, or any
humility. What I want to create is what I wish I was seeing:
someone using some humor. I had this realization that I
didn’t just want to make pretty dances. It had to be somewhat
accessible. You want to watch technique and skill and all that, but
if I can’t see the person inside of the body that’s
dancing, then I might as well be watching a robot.”

UCLA profiles run every Tuesday in A&E.