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. The dance they were preparing, “On the Nature of Rabbits,” opens Wednesday at the Joyce Theater in Manhattan.

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Persons: Hussein Smko, Smko, Pontus Lidberg, ” Organizations: American, Joyce Theater Locations: Erbil, Iraq’s Kurdish, Tarrytown, N.Y, Swedish, Manhattan