Jonah Bokaer's big wave hits Next Wave

Scenes from Rules of the Game
(photo: Sharen Bradford)

What eye-popping, impulsive joy Jonah Bokaer brings to a stage--every inch, edge and corner of it. He's got a fantastic crew of dancers who, if they haven't exactly absorbed his exalted degree of exquisiteness as a performer, more than make up for it in agility, stamina and adventurousness. He has, in longtime collaborating scenographer Daniel Arsham, a fellow artist with a keen sense of that dream-like place where bold, luscious imagery overlaps with anxiety and menace. In a new ensemble work, Rules of the Game, he's joined by Grammy-winning hit-maker Pharrell Williams (original score) and arranger/co-composer David Campbell for rousing, viscerally affecting sound that straddles and destroys borders between pop and symphonic, cinema-like orchestration. Nino Rota might have dug it.

The season, part of BAM's Next Wave Festival also includes a couple of notable head trips from repertory. There's RECESS (2010), the signature solo in which Bokaer's body, clad in jet black, disturbs, romps with and brazenly "writes" its way across a massive unrolling sheet of white paper. In Why Patterns (2011), Bokaer's dancers share a marked-off square of space with thousands of hyperactive ping-pong balls. The program--one hour and 45 minutes with intermission--might be the most visually clever, stimulating event I've seen this season.

Rules of the Game fields eight players in dusty-pink hoodies with Spalding basketballs in a game that, over time, gets less abstractly playful--less civilized--and more personal in its tension and viciousness. It's backed by a video showing the rise, fall and frequent slow-motion shattering of oversized plaster casts of basketballs and statue heads. The effects behind the stage, as on it, can be startling, often unnerving, but unfortunately repeat themselves beyond reason. No sooner does a possible ending of the piece subside than new action starts up on the stage with a new round of rising, falling, shattering behind it.

Visionary Bokaer and his team make impressive, appealing theater magic. They truly rock. But there comes a point, in each work, where you question why the excess needs further elaboration and where all of this is meant to take us.

Performances by Wendell Gray II, Laura Gutierrez, James Koroni, Callie Lyons, James McGinn, Szabo Pataki, Sara Procopio and Betti Rollo

Rules of the Game concludes tonight with a performance at 7:30pm. The program runs 1h 45 min with intermission. For information and tickets, click here.

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
Peter Sharp Building
30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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Bokaer installation honors women's acts of resistance

Have you read this New York Times article about dance artist Jonah Bokaer's tribute to four little-known women of courage?

Commissioned by the American Jewish Historical Society and curated by Rachel Lithgow (AJHS's executive director and Bokaer's co-researcher), October 7, 1944 is a multimedia installation inspired by the resistance activities of a network of Polish Jewish women, laborers at a munitions factory near Auschwitz and Birkenau. Róża Robota, Estera Wajcblum, Regina Szafirsztajn and Ala Gertner were among the women recruited by the underground to smuggle out small quantities of gunpowder to be used to create grenades and, on the date of Bokaer's title, destroy a crematorium. Just a few weeks before the advancing Soviet army could reach and liberate the camps, the Nazis arrested, tortured and hanged these four women while their fellow workers were forced to watch.

"These women were not remarkable in any way that is known to us," writes Lithgow in her essay for the exhibition's brochure. "They were young women who believed what they were doing was right."

Bokaer's structurally elegant, haunted arrangement of archival documents, fragmented music instruments, blow-ups of sheet music and projected imagery includes two dance films--one made for this project (Four Women), another from 2012 (Study for Occupant) with eerie echoes of his current theme. Both films feature the dancing of Laura Gutierrez, Catherine Miller, Irena Misirlić and Sara Procopio.

The exhibition is small in size, but its inner density invites commitment of time to lengthy videos and documents in plexiglass display cases. These cases stretch along a white table, oddly protected and recessed just far enough from its edge to make a reader bend in an awkward way to read the typed or printed words. To read each document, you end up leaning over a concrete block in front of each case. Each block has a piece of a musical instrument resting on it. A strange experience, as I saw it: You must decide to skim a selection of a document's words, get a general sense of what's there and move on or to tilt yourself just so, hold that pose and read word for word until you're done. With his dancer's sensibility, Bokaer seems to be trying to create discomfort and effort in our bodies as well as our minds. He introduces a sense that learning all there is to know about the gruesome reality of the Holocaust is both important and impossible.

I keep returning to Lithgow's words about this exhibition's heroes. Are they not, in fact, remarkable? In a sense, they most certainly are. But in another sense--her meaning, surely--they were ordinary women and ones whose small but essential contributions have remained largely obscure except to scholars of the Holocaust. Bokaer does not overdramatize this heroism but his work reminds us that anyone of us, at any time, can choose to do the one thing that will make a difference.

October 7, 1944 will be on view in the Popper Gallery at the Jewish Historical Center (home of the American Jewish Historical Society) through December 30. For visitor information, click here.

Center for Jewish History
15 West 16th Street (between 5th and 6th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Merce? There's an app for that!

Now, from 2wice Arts Foundation

Merce Cunningham Event for iPad

Between 2001 and 2007 Merce Cunningham choreographed a series of performances for the visual and performing arts journal 2wice. Working with photographers Katherine Wolkoff, Christian Witkin, and Joachim Ladefoged, creative director Abbott Miller created a series of publications that fuse choreography, photography and design. This series is here adapted to the unique context of a digital tablet, and enhanced with three newly-created videos featuring Cunningham dancers Jonah Bokaer and Holley Farmer. The project honors Cunningham’s lifelong devotion to new ways of seeing dance, and is supported by the 2wice Arts Foundation, a non-profit organization that supports the visual and performing arts.

Want it? Get it here.

Collaboration on the "Corner"

Here are a handful of my photos from the premiere of Untitled Corner, a site-specific work by Jonah Bokaer and Judith Sánchez Ruíz (choreographers/performers) with Daniel Arsham (visual designer/performer) and Alexis Georgopoulos/ARP (original sound score).

Sitelines 09
at One Chase Manhattan Plaza

All photos (c)2009, Eva Yaa Asantewaa
InfiniteBody (http://infinitebody.blogspot.com)

Above Chase Manhattan Plaza

Jonah Bokaer & Judith Sánchez Ruíz
in “Untitled Corner”

Bokaer with Daniel Arsham


Untitled Corner will be performed again on July 10, 13 and 17 at 12:30pm and on July 8 and 15 at 7pm.

One Chase Manhattan Plaza faces Nassau Street, between Liberty and Cedar Streets. Take the 2/3/4/5 to Wall Street.

Admission is free. Chairs and other seating options are available, but come early.

Sitelines 09 is a presentation of Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the River to River Festival.

Collaborations stack up--or not--at Skirball

Stacks--presented in a packed, one-night-only affair at Skirball Center for the Performing Arts--felt to me like a tug of war between Anne Carson's poetry on one side and the rearrangeable sculpture of Peter Cole and rearrangeable dancers of Jonah Bokaer on the other. I found myself mightily tugged in the direction of the visuals. I figure I can always go back and read Carson's lines in peace. And, in quiet, I'd like to watch the re-piling and tossing and kicking away of Cole's clutter of cardboard boxes and the clean-air look of Bokaer's movement, the silky, resilient way handsome bodies make plain the space around them as well as within them. I had a similar but less regretful reaction to Bracko--the juxtaposition of a Rashaun Mitchell duet with Carson's translation of Sappho. These artistic encounters did not work for me, which is not to say they could not be someone else's perfect arrangement.

Catching up...!

Another whirlwind week+ finds me needing to quickly catch up here. As Governor David Paterson would say, "It's Monday. Let's get to work!" Errrr..., okay, so it's Wednesday!

Credit where it's due: Times critic Gia Kourlas got it right in her review of Aviva Geismar's Line of Descent, which premiered last week at Dance New Amsterdam. So right in every way, in fact, that I was amazed to read the following sentence: "For a dance so intent on creating raw emotional characterizations, the lack of conviction among the dancers in delivering the text is most problematic." I remembered watching the dance and thinking one word over and over--unconvincing--and how jarring it was that Geismar's dancers were all notably fresh-faced, vibrant young women attempting to convey the emotional struggles of descendants of Holocaust survivors. For me, the lack of conviction Kourlas noted extended beyond the text to the embodiment of Geismar's idea itself.

Congrats to another Aviva: Last night, I attended An Evening with Dancing in the Streets--a reception, celebration and introduction to the coming season of Aviva Davidson's well-regarded site specific dance series. After welcomes from Davidson and board president Anthony Russell, we were treated to explosive performances by Larry Keigwin (AD of KEIGWIN + COMPANY), who later spoke of how his involvement with the program had refreshed his creativity, and Brandon Albright (AD of Hip Hop Generation Next, a Dancing in the Streets community project in Red Hook, Brooklyn) with his colleague Engine. (I hope to get Brandon--aka Peace--and Engine on Body and Soul podcast in the near future.) Most surprising was a loving and humorous statement from Michael Shaver, Chief Park Ranger of Governors Island National Monument which hosted a spectacular site presentation by Davidson's organization in 2006 at historic Fort Jay. Shaver's enthusiastic support for dance and for Davidson (shared by Robert Pirani, ED of Governors Island Alliance) gives me great hope that this extraordinary mound of land at the confluence of waters and winds will remain a powerful location for the arts.

St. Patrick?: Walking home from a show at Dixon Place on St. Patrick's night--which means dodging pubcrawling students and tourists but, since I'm talking about the East Village, the only thing unusual about that is the color green--it suddenly struck me that I'd forgotten something very important about St. Patrick. He's the Catholic saint identified with the voodoo loa Damballa, the snake god! St. Patrick, as the old myth would have it, rid Ireland of snakes (a euphemism for Catholicism conquering paganism). Afro-Atlantic people, who sought to retain something of the integrity of their traditional beliefs, always twisted what they learned of the Catholic saints to fit their own purposes. The Haitian slaves, for instance, decided that their "St. Patrick" was a big snake himself. With that saucy thought in mind, I continued my Paddy's Day walk with a jauntier step.

By the way, I was coming from a showing of Nile Ford's work-in-progress, In Search of the Invisible People, and you can read Claudia La Rocco's review here. You can read my Dance Magazine review...well, whenever they get around to posting it on the Web. I'll try to remember to tell you. And, yes, Ford and his manager gave both of us permission to review a work-in-progress.

Cranes falling from the sky: On my way to a Brainwave event on the Upper East Side, I passed through midtown east--luckily by subway--close to the time of last Saturday's crane accident. Let's get serious about putting an end to these terrible incidents in our city. I keep walking past that big one down here on the Bowery and giving it a wide berth.

Jonah Bokaer at Abrons Arts Center: You'll agree with me, surely, he's perfection. He could dance the phone book and be rivetting. After a while, though, you want more than the phone book. The notable thing about False Start (2007) is Bokaer's fine-tuned facility, previously noted. He moves like a kind of cyberposable doll. The Invention of Minus One, his premiered ensemble, is cleverly, brazenly overstuffed for the ADD Age. Keep watching this guy, though. How can you not?

Jeremy Nelson at Danspace Project: I liked watching fleet but surefooted Jeremy Nelson dance with his ensemble. He's beautiful.

CPR for dance and performance

A (Green) Place for Dance and Performance to Bloom
by Gia Kourlas, The New York Times, March 7, 2008

Picture this!

I was much too busy looking around and catching the eyes of people I knew to step back and get a sense of how many of us showed up for yesterday's Dance Community Picture New York photoshoot at Bryant Park, a collaboration between Chez Bushwick and Sarma. Our corner (northeast) of the park was bubbling and buzzing, and it was a delight to see everyone, greet old friends and make new ones. It was sort of like the Bessie Awards without the awards and with a slightly scruffier crowd and with the handsome and gracious Jonah Bokaer personally handing you a bottle of Poland Spring. Can't do better than that.

As one observant colleague mentioned, this gathering could in no way represent the extensive and varied "New York dance community" since, for one thing, it was scheduled for Sunday matinee time. Ooops! Still, when I later took a look at the photos from similar projects held in Berlin and Cairo, I felt pretty good about our numbers and our overall congenial, collegial spirit. New York, you've really got it going on!

So let's call ourselves a community of communities and be out, loud and proud about it.

By the way, if you're curious about the conceptual nature of the Dance Community Picture New York, check out Sarma's What is A Community Picture?--although I have to tell you that this is the type of language that makes me nearly tear out what's left of my nearly nonexistent hair. Had I stopped to read this before I showed up on Sunday, I might have stayed home and listened to the Yankees instead. Here's a sample:

7. Community revisited: cultural critique and resuscitation

In recent socio-political literature notions such as the 'multitude' have gained currency to depict structures of self-organisation and possible political resistance. Authors in the line of Toni Negri, Michael Hardt and Paulo Virno are eager to divest these `groupings´ from a transcendental and common denominator since such a ‘unifier’ would take precedence over the fundamental and immanent differences of singular people, who resist categorization into `one´ entity. In such discourses ‘multitude’ is not on a par with ‘community’. While the former is seen as resisting hierarchy and transcendentalism, the latter is considered to do just that: to subordinate singularities to sameness, identity or the identical.

Notwithstanding these attacks, the notion of community keeps reoccuring and keeps a strong foothold. The question is not only why it relentlessly returns, often in celebratory ways, but also how we can, instead of burrying the notion of community altogether, have it haunts us as an open question. How can we recuperate the radical potential of community through a process of cultural analysis and critique? How can we avoid the trap of romanticization of community while staying alert to the forces that are helpful when looking for ways to intervene in the enactment of exploitations.

"Fetishizing community only makes us blind to the ways we might intervene in the enactment of domination and exploitation. I see the practice of critique, and in particular a critical relationship to community, as an ethical practice of community, as an important mode of participation" (ix).

(Miranda Joseph, Beyond the Romance of Multiculturalism: Radicalizing Difference and Community in Cultural Studies, 2002)

Please... Does this language represent me and most of the people I know (inside or outside of dance)? No. However, I do see the "radical potential" of this community. I feel it. Feels real good, too.

I felt our radical outsider-ness and the way that we inhabit New York and feed New York (and the world) with radical creativity. I felt the goodness of our energy as an enduring, positive, forward-moving force.

I do like the way Sarma's list of items ends:

10. More than a parade?

Could The Dance Community Picture in New York City on September 23rd be more than a ‘Hurray-we-are-a-community-parade’, and facilitate occasions for people to gather and talk, listen, speak up and reach out.

Yes, and what a great thing that could be. We need to gather and talk, listen, speak up and reach out, and I hope folks will cook up all sorts of excuses for that--group photos or whatever. Let's do it!

Only the great know Brooklyn

In this video interview, Jonah Bokaer of Chez Bushwick talks with blogger Doug Fox of GreatDance.com.