On Vanishing: Site-Specific Performance Work by Jonah Bokaer
VIEW EVENT DETAILSPartnerships & Collaborations
Click here to listen to Catherine Lu's interview withJonah Bokaer on KUHA's "The Front Row." |
Thursday and Friday, May 17 and 18, 2012
Light Reception and Sculpture Viewing: 5:30
Performance: 6 pm
Jonah Bokaer, the acclaimed young choreographer known for his imaginative interweavings of the human body, contemporary technologies, and art, presents On Vanishing, a site-specific work, at Asia Society Texas Center.
On Vanishing follows changes in the bodies of five performers of diverse backgrounds as they respond to Korean artist Lee Ufan's Relatum — signal, commissioned to inaugurate the Texas Center’s Allen Sculpture Garden.
Presented in collaboration with the University of Houston’s Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, On Vanishing re-creates a performance Bokaer presented in July at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in response to the major retrospective Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity.
In this choreographic dialogue with sculpture, Bokaer poses the question, "How does the body erase itself, to prefer matter against presence?" Loren Kiyoshi Dempster contributes music with a rare live performance of John Cage's One⁸ (1991) for solo cello.
Born in Ithaca, N.Y., Bokaer trained in dance at Cornell University and the North Carolina School of the Arts. At 18 he was recruited for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, where he remained for seven years. Branching out into choreography, he quickly earned a reputation for expanding the possibilities of live performance through digital media, cross-disciplinary collaborations and social enterprise projects. He is also a frequent choreographer for director and playwright Robert Wilson.
In 2010 The New York Times named him one of the “Nifty 50,” an annual list of “America’s up and coming.” The Times’ Jennifer Dunning said Bokaer’s 2006 work RSVP, which was created on a computer, “hovered on the edge of cuteness but never quite topped.” “Crisp, emphatic yet understated,” she continued, “Mr. Bokaer could probably have gotten away with dancing just about anything.”
The Texas Center performances are part of Bokaer’s residency at the Mitchell Center and are sponsored by Houston Arts Alliance.
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Related Links
Article by Nancy Wozny in Arts + Culture Magazine Houston
The New York Times Style Magazine's "The Nifty 50:" Jonah Bokaer, Choreographer
Jonah Bokaer: Official Website