Collaborate and Listen

It would take a generous travel grant to keep up with Jonah Bokaer’s many far-flung projects. The 29-year-old choreographer has been more than busy since he left the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, working extensively in Europe. And he estimates that about one-fifth of the work he does gets seen in New York. Fortunately, he is touching down on home soil this week with the U.S. premiere of Anchises at [Abrons Arts Center].

The 70-minute work, which had its premiere in Bournemouth, England, last month, features an intriguing, multi-generational cast that includes two stellar former Cunningham dancers: Valda Setterfield (longtime muse and leading lady of David Gordon’s Pick-Up Company and a vivid, fascinating performer in many other dance-theater works) and Meg Harper. Bokaer, who is also performing, is someone who puts a premium on collaboration—not just giving the term lip service, but working in a close, detailed way with his collaborators. For Anchises, he is collaborating with the multi-disciplinary design firm Harrison Atelier, whose partners—Ariane Lourie Harrison and Seth Harrison—have devised a movable, modular set. The commissioned score is by Loren Dempster and lighting is by Aaron Copp.

In The Aeneid, the aged Anchises was carried out of the burning city of Troy by his son Aeneas, and Bokaer’s work explores issues of youth and age, responsibility and compassion. “The piece deals a lot with range and potential—for all of our bodies,” the choreographer says, speaking by phone from Miami, where Replica, his recent work that was shown at the New Museum last year, was being performed at two venues. Contrasts between the performers, who range in age from 24 to 76, abounded. “James [McGinn] just turned 24. In some ways I feel he’s more limber and able than I am, even though I’m just five years older. So the range definitely has been a focus for us. We tried to find a leveling vocabulary that brought us onto the same page physically. We all spent weeks, almost months, exploring some of those more basic interactions.”

Anchises was commissioned to inaugurate Pavilion Dance, a new performance space that was a former art deco ballroom, and during the work’s creation, he discovered “a ballroom theme that we started exploring early on, and then we took it in a much less literal direction. But we realized that we could all dance together that way: partnered, one-to-one dancing.”

The Harrisons have served as dramaturgical advisors to Bokaer for the past two years. “They have been involved with almost every project. They come and see work in the studio weekly; it’s a real deep collaboration,” he explains. The diverse backgrounds of the pair provided much insight for Anchises since Ariane is an architect and Seth is a doctor.

There is a filial aspect to the original music of Anchises that reverberates intriguingly with the overall theme. Loren Dempster and his father Stuart will perform the original score Loren composed—which combines electronics with live cello, trombone and percussion. “At certain points, the music Loren is sourcing is his father’s, [from] a 1994 score,” Bokaer explains. “He’s doing a series of transformations to it, appropriating or changing it,”

For Bokaer, collaboration is a guiding principle; he calls it the “cornerstone” of his work. “It always troubled me that in the Cunningham company, we would work with the best visual artists, who were often venturing into stage design for the first time. We would meet them at the dress rehearsal. There would be great artistic tempests about how the thing is lit. The curtain went up the next day, and we never saw them again. That was called a collaboration, and it is, in a certain way. But the way that I’ve been working for the past three years is that the designer is so integral—almost to the point that they’re in every rehearsal. It’s a demanding way to work. It’s more like the design and the performance are fusing, rather than operating independently. I’m making choreography that’s interdependent on its design components, on the collaboration—and really giving the collaborators a full seat at the table.”

Anchises

Nov. 17-21, [Abrons Arts Center], 466 Grand St. (at Pitt St.), (212) 352-3101; 7:30, $20.