The warmth is palpable in the rehearsal room when Kia Smith and I meet for the first time. She gives me a hug, not a handshake. The dancers of Smith’s seven-year-old company, South Chicago Dance Theatre, readily introduce themselves. “Hi, I’m Kelly.” No strangers here.

The company is in the midst of preparing for an ambitious program, on Saturday at the Auditorium Theatre, with six world premieres. Ambitious, that is, by dance-world standards, but typical for this group, which has blazed into Chicago’s dance scene despite its still-short life. Smith has grown South Chicago Dance Theatre from a pickup group of friends and friends-of-friends in 2017 into a ubiquitous presence on Chicago’s burgeoning contemporary dance scene, through new work, collaboration and sheer force of personality.

They rehearse at the Hyde Park School of Dance, which is attached to the First Unitarian Church of Chicago. Smith studied here herself, in high school. She has wanted to run her own dance company since she was 5 years old, but began her own formal dance training only when she was 16.

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“I grew up in a really challenging financial situation,” says Smith, who moved around as a child across Washington Heights, South Shore and Hyde Park and graduated from King College Prep in Kenwood. “I didn’t have any money to go take dance classes. I just watched it on TV. I used to watch PBS all the time growing up, and I’d be like, Oh, I’m going to do that one day.”

As a teen, Smith needed to catch up with dancers who already had a decade under their ballet belts. So she became inured early to putting in extra work, and to tuning out people quoting her long odds. “Those voices don’t really mean anything,” she says. “Because you have to hustle — and you know that.” The hustle mentality has carried through to today. “If it didn’t stop you before, it can’t stop you when you’re a director of your own thing.”

Now that she is a director of her own thing, she oversees more than a dozen performances a season. Her dancers put in plenty of hustle themselves, of the literal sort, learning all kinds of new work. The piece I’m there to watch, “Under the Skin” by the Taiwanese choreographer Tsai Hsi Hung, will close the first half of the company’s April 27 program, with 10 or 11 minutes of energetic, athletic, sharp movements, accentuated by Hung’s call for loose hair and the costumes’ bagginess.

“[Hung’s] movement is so fast, it looks like the movement is happening in a fast-forward on television, but it’s happening in real life,” Smith says.

Smith encountered Hung’s work on a program at Western Michigan University, Smith’s alma mater for her bachelor’s degree. “It was just the most, honestly, one of the most exciting things I’ve ever seen — and it was on a student program,” she says.

Hung has been very impressed with South Chicago Dance Theatre. “This company is very special,” says Hung, who has set dances for the Joffrey Academy, BalletX in Philadelphia, and New York’s Battery Dance, among others. “It has a lot of style, and it’s very powerful. The dancers are so smart.”

And also with Smith. “Superwoman,” she says. “I always call her ‘Boss.’ ”

Smith’s ever-flowering network has provided the engine for the rapid growth of South Chicago Dance Theatre. In the early days — early being a relative term for a seven-year-old company — the group often danced at shows or festivals featuring several companies. More recently, many of the company’s gigs have been collaborations, with organizations such as Music of the Baroque, Chicago Opera Theater and Giordano Dance Chicago.

All of this means a ton of new choreography, some of it by dancemakers in Smith’s network, naturally, and also some by Smith herself. “I was joking with Nan Giordano about this,” Smith says. “In our fifth year, she was like, ‘Here, why are you doing five world premieres? That’s a lot.’ And I was like, ‘Man, you have 60 years of rep! You can afford to repeat stuff!’ ”

Smith feels that she has grown as a choreographer since she founded the company. In the beginning, she says creating new work brought a reality check: “Even though I’ve always wanted to have a dance company, when I got in the studio with the dancers, I realized I had no idea what the heck I was doing. I was like, wait, what, now that I have everybody here, what do I do?”

Steady progress brought her to her first evening-length work, Memoirs of Jazz in the Alley, about the well-known South Side jazz club co-founded by Smith’s father, the saxophonist Jimmy Ellis. The work premiered, with live jazz accompaniment, on the Auditorium stage this past June.

Smith notoriously has a 75-year vision plan for the company, which she will not show me. She will acknowledge, however, when some of the points have been accomplished, such as taking the company to Colombia, South Korea, and the Netherlands. She calls it her “Choreographic Diplomacy initiative,” a name she coined and recently pinned down a federal trademark for. It means collaborations across the globe, with dance companies and traditions that do not have a strong presence in Chicago. She says there are somewhere around 25 countries on the list.

She will tell me that she is on track with the plan, even with the pandemic thrown in there. It’s almost inconceivable that she would not be on track, given that the grade-school-aged company is now playing the Auditorium stage for the second time, a hall so big that the next step up is sports arenas. If this is where Smith planned to be at year number seven, this company will be its own sovereign nation by year 75.

Back at the studio in Hyde Park, after the aerobic workout of Hung’s piece, the dancers are hydrating, stretching, and smilingly congratulating each other. In a smallish space — much smaller than the Auditorium stage — the room still feels full with the at-ease, sweaty company.

Smith dispatches my questions, thanks me profusely, and gives me another hug. Then gets right back to work.

If you go: South Chicago Dance Theatre performs on April 27 at 7:30 p.m. at the Auditorium Theatre, 50 E. Ida B. Wells Dr. Tickets from $33 to $85.

Graham Meyer is a Chicago-based arts journalist.