Jonah Bokaer – Body Language
Written By: Michael D. McClellan | Jonah Bokaer’s roots are in dance, but the world in which he lives is hardly confined to a single category. The son of Tunisian and American parents, Bokaer abandons traditional dance and theatre elements, his choreography spilling over into the visual arts, the objects onstage anything but props or eye candy. 35mm cameras cast in chalk? Large cubes suspended in nets overhead? Lines drawn in the grid of an athletic field? All of it, in one way or another, is interacted with by the dancers who breathe life into Bokaer’s inventive choreography. It should come as no surprise, then, that the New York-based dancer/choreographer/media artist is fast friends with contemporary visual artist Daniel Arsham, whose appetite for interdisciplinary collaboration has become a defining characteristic of his practice. Or that he hangs with the likes of Pharrell Williams, the multi-talented Renaissance Man who, along with Bokaer and Arsham, collaborated to create the worldwide toured piece, Rules of the Game, a multi-disciplinary work that brings together dance, visual arts, and music.
That Bokaer’s choreography resists easy classification and tends to require explanation is part of its allure. His dances can be playful, devilish and self-referential. He’s unafraid to take risks, the virtuosity in his dancing on display in the 60+ original works produced since leaping headlong into choreography back in 2002. Bokaer’s fascination with the melding of dance, music, and design helps explain his collaborative efforts with artists like Arsham and Williams.
“I’ve worked with Daniel for more than ten years,” Bokaer says, his soft voice as fluid as his dancing. “We collaborate in a way that that allows us to feed off of each other. With Rules of the Game, for instance, Daniel would present me with an idea – the types of things he visualized on the stage, like thousands of balls or a giant roll of paper – and I would develop the choreography in a way that uses the material motivate movement.”
Bokaer, who trained in dance at Cornell University, graduating from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and also receiving degrees in Visual & Media Studies at the New School in New York, is considered one of the mystery men of American dance. In 2000, he joined the Merce Cunningham Dance Company as a teenager – the youngest performer in its history – and immediately rose in the ranks of the professional world. Bokaer and Arsham actually met working with Merce Cunningham, the dancer/choreographer himself known for rule-breaking and collaboration with cutting edge visual artists.
“I worked with Merce for eight years, as well as with choreographers John Jasperse and David Gordon,” Bokaer says. “I think that what they all have in common is the conceptual aspect of their work, and that definitely influenced me. In my works I usually begin with the concept. My choreography always deals with moving images, and always requires a very physical performance. I think that the real difference between me and them is that my works are very interdisciplinary.”
Today, the newly minted Guggenheim Fellow is as busy as ever – touring, collaborating, and choreographing on a grand scale. I had the pleasure of sitting down with Jonah Bokaer to talk about his amazing career, working with Arsham and Williams, and the always important question: What’s Next?
Please take me back to the beginning. On a continuum, when (and how) did you fall in love with dance, choreography, and the other multi-disciplinary areas that drive your work?
Jonah Bokaer: I started choreographing in my backyard at age six. It just happened. I would create routines for my siblings that lasted for hours. As a teenager I would do a few auditions, but my professional career really started at the age of 18, when I was hired by Merce Cunningham as his youngest dancer. Working with Merce was an unforgettable experience, in which we became very close.
Your work incorporates various interwoven elements of graphic arts, drawing, animation, choreography, performance, and projection, depending on the project. When you are working on a project, how do you move in and out of these spaces? Does one take priority over another when all elements are being incorporated into a project?
Jonah Bokaer: While dancing as a young man, I used my per diem from touring to pay for art school The New School, and Parsons, attending by night for seven years. My degree is in art. But because I am known as a choreographer and stage director, I need to have a good understanding of all parties involved in the production of a performance. There is nothing more inspiring than working with all different fields. I work with architects, fashion designers, landscape designers, scenic designers, composers, and sound producers. I work very closely with each of them, and there is always a moment in the creation when all efforts merge.
Your work is constantly evolving. Please provide an example of how enhancements in the tools that you use have led to (or played a part in) creative innovations that show up in the finished product.
Jonah Bokaer: I have always been extremely interested in new digital tools. The development of VR and AR, and every other integrated and interactive design option that are currently flourishing, offer enormous potential to choreography – and to live arts in general.
Let’s talk collaboration. What do you enjoy most about working with a broad range of artists, performers, composers and designers? Is there a particular way that you prefer to collaborate?
Jonah Bokaer: It should be known that there are a lot of people involved in the creation of a performance, besides the artists there are often many producers and curators involved. Sometime I am invited for a project, and the curator or the co-producer would offer to put artists in touch. It happens often on my end, as I work closely with a dear curator of my work called Charles Fabius. Together we have produced incredible performances for theatre – and many museum spaces. I would say that I like to be surprised. There are collaborators I work with on a regular basis, such as Daniel Arsham, and others such as Pharrell Williams or David Campbell with who we had to meet artistically.
Please tell me about your creative relationship with Daniel Arsham and Pharrell Williams, and how the chemistry between the three of you translates into Rules Of The Game.
Jonah Bokaer: The story with Daniel started ten years ago in 2007, which is also the year we began collaboration on a short performance at Galerie Perrotin in Paris that December. We were both young, and we were both on the same page. We both had the same visions, and ambitions, the same desires to make something to surpass our own limits and to challenge our peers, artistically. After a few years of collaboration, and when Daniel moved to New York from Miami, we began to contribute our own voice on the New York and Paris art worlds, and internationally through touring dance. We also share the same sensibility for some themes that are recurrent in our work: The ideas of disappearance, altered space, time, movement, and the correlation between time and space are themes that we both have been working on for many years, and that we also explore together in many productions. Because our creative outputs are both very prolific, even nonstop, we have defined a visual and choreographic language which includes my dance language, and Daniel’s design brilliance.
You have worked with Mr. Arsham on other projects, and the two of you always seem to explore the boundaries of what can be done on stage, and how this space can be re-imagined in ways that takes the audience where they’ve never been. Please tell me a little about the creative process between the two of you – how does it vary from project to project? Can you illustrate with an example?
Jonah Bokaer: We generally start with exploring visual materials as movement motivators. Then we split off, and we both work on our own craft – and then we go back and forth a lot. I often meet Daniel at his studio, and we sit together and talk for a good deal of time. Once we have a structure, a foundation to work with, I start directing and choreographing. We both might suggest sound composers, designers, technicians, lighting designers, but there has been extraordinary continuity with our creative teams. Sometimes Daniel suggests costume designs, most of the time they are fashion designers, or sometimes I do – it really depends on the project, and the texture of it. I enjoy working with fashion designers for my costumes, because they always bring a certain acuity that is very contemporary, and reflects real life very well. Most recently, I have worked with Azzedine Alaïa on Shahrazad with Royal Ballet of Flanders – which is a new version of Schéhérazade – and Narciso Rodriguez on Triple Echo, two projects I created independently.
Rules of the Game was two years in the making, and the production highlights three mediums; art, music, and dance. Take me on the creative journey; how did the project change from inception to realization?
Jonah Bokaer: Daniel and Pharrell have been working together since a few years, I believe beginning with a very special project in 2013. They did a few collaborations before Rules Of The Game was even a project. The story of Rules Of The Game begins with a dance commission from BAM next wave festival, and around the same time, a Dallas Symphony Orchestra SOLUNA Festival commission. We combined the two into what is known as co-production, in the performing arts. In February 2015, I was invited to Los Angeles to meet with Pharrell and Daniel. It was understood that we would work on a project together. I presented us all with a structure, and, by August, Pharrell had produced extraordinary demos, nearly album-length. It was really a short amount of time, given the fact that we all started from scratch, and that none of us had worked together as a trio before. Then I started to work on the choreographic phrases with the dancers, in the Dallas Arts District. Daniel and I met frequently during this time, and David Campbell joined the team about four months before the premiere – his role was pivotal, as arranger, orchestrator, conductor, and eventually co-composer. With the dancers I had worked all this time on the demos, which was of course a bit different than, the final music, but which helped considerably, as we kept the essence of the score until the live Dallas Symphony Orchestra performance. Pharrell, Daniel, and I met less frequently – but I remember a great meeting with him about two months before the premiere, in which Daniel, he and I went over the full scope of the project with a digital mock-up of the score by David Campbell. It was an intense and interesting meeting, about 5 hours – we were all very excited.
Please tell me about David Campbell’s work, and what the composer’s contributions mean to this project.
Jonah Bokaer: David Campbell is extraordinary. He was the biggest asset of the collaboration in terms of the final result by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. He certainly took us to the next level, and through a different scope, in terms of musicology as well. His acuity on scores, orchestral arrangement, and music, is truly unique. It was a privilege to get to work with him so closely.
Rules Of The Game is incredibly ambitious. If you could describe it another way, how would you do so?
Jonah Bokaer: My experience is that all performance productions are ambitious, in their own capacities. Doing a drawing by yourself, in your own studio, can be very ambitious, too. In Rules Of The Game, yes the orchestral size and popularity of the music and the scope of the project was challenging, in terms of production. Artistically I feel challenged every time I start a new piece though. Every single time I set the same high standards for myself. In this area, the dancers should be credited, too. One could describe Rules Of The Game in many different ways, it contains so many mature, masterful contributors – how does one even write about it, and who would be that very well-versed critic? Would they from dance, from art, from music – and what genre? It has been an exciting project since day one, a true adventure.
Looking back at Rules of the Game, what did you learn that you may not have expected going into this project?
Jonah Bokaer: I think we have all learned how to produce a performance of this scale together – and how to tour it worldwide. Again, much credit to the dancers, producers, and Technical Supervision experts, who make this possible.
If you could offer advice to other aspiring artists, what would that be?
Jonah Bokaer: I would tell them to love what they do. To work hard, and to stay focused. It takes a lot to succeed, in any discipline, in any country or any culture.
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