A friend sent me two videos of the precocious preteen dancer, Israeli Gaya Bommer.

The first featured Bommer in the sort of weird, techno, robotic, gymnastic sort of choreography that’s known as “contemporary” but that I don’t quite get and I really don’t like, although I can see she’s technically accomplished. The second shows her remarkable versatility, because it features classical ballet of a very traditional sort. She is twelve years old in both of them:

I find Bommer more interesting than most young dancers today. She’s highly precocious, but in a way that’s unusual—startling technique isn’t uncommon among youngsters lately, but it’s Bommer’s presentation more than anything else that makes her stand out. Her extremely mature use of her upper body (especially head and arms), and her focus and intensity and what’s known in dance as “attack,” are usually the last things a dancer develops, and are ordinarily relatively unformed at that age. Not so Bommer.

I’ve already said that I don’t much care for the “contemporary” clip. But ballet isn’t really Bommer’s genre either, despite her considerable charm; she lacks the strongly articulated feet and extreme turnout necessary, which usually are well-developed in a female ballet dancer by Bommer’s age. And her body proportions are far from ideal for the longest and most elegant lines.

I was mulling over the question of what genre might best suit Bommer’s gifts and style (not that she’s asking me), and it occurred to me that modern dance (as opposed to “contemporary”) might be her genre. In modern dance her body proportions and feet, and her not-especially-lovely/long legs, really wouldn’t matter—and her style of attack, attack, attack and groundedness could really shine.

And then, as luck would have it, I found a clip of Bommer doing some sort of modern dance, and I think she hits it right on the nose. Hard to believe this laser focus belongs to a 12-year-old—and in fact it doesn’t, because Bommer was only 11 here: