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Jonah Bokaer

Choreographer, Media Artist, Social Entrepreneur
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Jonah Bokaer is an international choreographer, media artist, artist space developer and social entrepreneur. His work integrates choreography with digital media, resulting from cross-disciplinary collaborations with artists and architects. Jonah’s choreography has been produced in Belgium, Canada, Cuba, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, India, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In 2011 he was awarded the Prix Jeune Talent Choregraphique by the SACD in Paris, the Bogliasco Foundation special fellowship of Choreography in Genoa, and 40 Under 40 by Crain's NY Business. In 2008-2009 Jonah became the first dance artist to be appointed a Young Leader of the French American Foundation. He led a group of choreographers in the formation of Chez Bushwick (2002). He later founded CPR Center for Performance Research, a 4,000 square foot arts facility in Williamsburg, in collaboration with John Jasperse (2008).

Highlighted project
ECLIPSE is a multidisciplinary performance that will examine pattern recognition and perceptual faculties, applied to the moving body, and the human eye. A collaboration between Jonah as choreographer and visual artist Anthony McCall, with newly commissioned music by Loren Kiyoshi Demspter, the work stages movement in relationship to built spaces, objects, lighting, and other media, creating illusions in space through synthesizing choreography, visual design, and sound. That is to say, the production creates beautiful illusions of expanded space through the use of movement, visual design, lighting, objects, and media-including choreography and design. ECLIPSE disassembles common definitions of Dance, Performance, Sculpture, and Architecture, and is experimental in the forms it produces.

Work environment and institutional setting
Jonah's work and research are primarily conducted at CPR - Center for Performance Research, a nonprofit arts facility co-founded by Jonah and choreographer John Jasperse. CPR is housed in "Greenbelt," the first L.E.E.D. green building in Brooklyn. The 4,000 square foot arts facility is an-artist driven initiative co founded by Jonah Bokaer/Chez Bushwick, Inc. and John Jasperse/Thin Man Dance, Inc. This new development provides affordable space for rehearsal and performance, innovative arts programming, education and pedagogical engagement with the communities of New York City and abroad, as well as a dynamic new model for sustainable arts infrastructure in dance and performance. In a real-estate climate that threatens to displace the arts from maintaining permanent and affordable space in New York City, CPR offers a pioneering approach to both civic development and fortification for dance and performance at the community level. The center is also devoted to allowing long-term project development to artists across disciplines. Proportions of the space are 45 feet wide by 45 feet deep, by 13 feet high. This space is ideal for the expanded kinesphere of the performer, and accommodating the scenography in an adequate manner: for long-term installation, build out, and/or video recording.