Pharrell Williams creates score for Jonah Bokaer’s dance work in Brisbane
- The Australian
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Jonah Bokaer, the so-called mystery man of American dance, has packed a lot into a short life. At 18, the New York-based artist was the youngest dancer to join Merce Cunningham’s company; in his early 20s, he launched a stellar choreographic career with multimedia dance works that straddled the worlds of architecture, sculpture, theatre, digital animation, biomechanics, performance art, video and visual arts.
His works have featured everything from large cubes suspended in nets to used metro cards, gracefully unfurling sheets of paper and 5000 ping-pong balls cascading from the heavens (often “souvenired” by dance audiences post-performance).
Along the way, the man The New York Times hailed as “contemporary dance’s renaissance man” has developed a range of pioneering dance apps, collaborated on six operas with avant-garde theatre maestro Robert Wilson, and staged his unorthodox dance works in galleries and museums around the world in a move to break down the “fourth wall” enclosing dance on stage.
Before he turned 28, he also co-founded two pioneering non-profit performance and rehearsal spaces in New York that now serve as fertile incubators for young artists in an increasingly expensive city. “I wanted them to have the same opportunities I did,” says the American dance world’s consummate overachiever.
Creative cross-collaboration is having a moment — particularly between dance and visual arts — and Bokaer, now 34, is one of the leading innovators in the movement to dismantle silos between different art forms.
Since 2002, Bokaer has created more than 55 works in a variety of media, drawing on everything from film and motion capture to mobile applications and interactive installations. “Look no further if you’re interested in the emerging dance forms of the 21st century”, art journal Bomb magazine proclaimed last year.
The photogenic face of a new breed of creatives, Bokaer looks like a high-fashion model (partly of Tunisian heritage, he’s a darling of hipster art mags and “hot 50” creative lists) and speaks with a precise, professorial intensity. “I’m so looking forward to coming to the Brisbane Festival,” he says. “It will be just the second city to see [the new work] after Dallas so it’s a special occasion for us.”
The work in question is Rules of the Game, a multidisciplinary production he describes as a rare “white whale” that he will present in its Australian premiere at the Brisbane Festival after its world premiere at the Soluna International Music and Arts Festival in Dallas, Texas, in May.
For Bokaer, it is the most ambitious, large-scale work of his career, bringing together four world-class creative minds in a melding of music, dance and video art. The production features an original score by pop and hip-hop maestro Pharrell Williams — he of the extravagant corkscrew hats, high-octane production career and Happy global megahit — in his first musical contribution for a live dance and theatre production.
Loosely based on Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello’s 1918 play of the name same, exploring sex wars, grief, madness and revenge, alongside Pirandello’s better known 1921 classic Six Characters in Search of an Author, it unfurls against a dramatic video art backdrop by Bokaer’s long-time collaborator Daniel Arsham, a prolific visual artist and scenographer of cutting-edge architecture and visual projects made through his design firm Snarkitecture. Think giant basketballs, microphones, slowly exploding body parts and classical busts reminiscent of ancient statuary — these are Arsham’s supersized “future relics”, modern objects made to look antique, says Bokaer.
Eight dancers in dusky pink costumes make sculptural, slowed-down movements against this curtain of objects, and to Williams’s signature upbeat, soulful score, studded with synthesiser-generated licks. Described by Arsham as “identifiably Pharrell but very different from pop music”, the score was arranged by superstar arranger-composer David Campbell (the father of alt-rock musician Beck, Campbell’s co-collaborators include Michael Jackson, Beyonce and Adele), who conducted the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in the work at its Texas premiere.
An eccentric young dance visionary, a Grammy award-winning singer and producer, a garlanded arranger and composer, and a visual arts innovator: it’s a case of strange bedfellows indeed when the quartet came together to forge the creation of a work Williams describes as a “new frontier”.
For all four, it was a case of moving well outside their comfort zones, of experimenting and adapting individual, highly idiosyncratic styles over a laborious two-year period, Bokaer says.
“This seemed to be a way that all parties could cross over. Pharrell was moving into dance and theatre, which he has not done before, and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra was crossing over into a kind of music which was probably the most radical departure. And David Campbell conducting for this was yet another departure. The multiplication of crossovers was extraordinary. Each collaborator is very accomplished in their own field but it asked for new ways of working together. I think that’s where the project was most successful.”
The seeds of the production, described as a marriage of high art and cool pop, were sown when the Soluna Festival’s director Anna-Sophia van Zweden asked Arsham to come up with a collaborative work involving music and dance. Arsham suggested Bokaer and Williams. Arsham had worked with Bokaer, whom he first met at Cunningham’s company in 2006, on a range of signature productions, with the latest being their 10th project together.
His creative relationship with Williams began in 2013 when Arsham made a replica of Williams’s childhood Casio keyboard from volcanic ash for an exhibition (the following year, Arsham cast Williams’s entire body for GIRL, Williams’s curatorial debut at Galerie Perrotin in Paris.) Williams had slowly been building his artistic resume outside music, designing chairs that debuted at Galerie Perrotin, curating works in Paris, and collaborating with art superstar Takashi Murakami. He was thrilled to be asked.
“I was the gnat, bugging Daniel to ask, ‘What can we do now?’ ” Williams told Rolling Stone in March. “Before it was something that didn’t move. It was beautiful but it didn’t move. This is a brand-new medium where movement is not only an addition, it’s essential to communicating the point. I feel lucky to be working with such explosive, combustible ideas.”
Williams’s music, an explosive “gift to dance”, as Bokaer has described it, was the glue that held it all together. An enthusiastic Williams reportedly created an entire demo album worth of music that was then edited down to be converted to an orchestra by Campbell.
A Dallas reviewer described his score as splitting “the difference between the electro-funk futurism that’s been his hallmark and the more abstract, classical demands of scoring conceptual dance, possessed by a regal pop bounce that feels integral to the rest of the production”.
Bokaer says the Pirandello plays provided a “unifying platform” for the ideas he wanted for the work — think unravelling social rules and disintegrating societies. He says he read more than 40 of Pirandello’s works, and was intrigued by Pirandello’s use of “play within a play”.
For Bokaer, visual design occupies a central space in his work. He gave Arsham plenty of autonomy with his designs in Rules; Arsham, he says, is into “fictional archeology” — creating old-looking things and “ageing” them, and using a special camera called a Phantom that can shoot 7000 frames per second.
There were challenges aplenty, from matching Arsham’s dramatic visuals to the choreography, to “trying to find new ways to address Pharrell’s “unusual rhythms … there is so much attack in [Pharrell’s] music”, as Bokaer has described it. The trio continued finetuning the work right up to the Dallas premiere, working together with laptops linked to speakers in Arsham’s Long Island City studio, tweaking and playing with texture, images and arrangements over seven-hour sessions.
Bokaer is thrilled with the result. “In this particular case, what is rare, I believe, is for dance to act as [the containing entity] for a touring production involving a co-production with visual arts and music on this scale … it’s so great for this company to deliver on this scale.”
After Brisbane, Rules of the Game will be shown in part at the Guggenheim in New York before it premieres in November at BAM’s Next Wave Festival. The work will feature in Brisbane alongside two other signature works, Recess and Why Patterns. Both feature key elements of Bokaer’s aesthetic — dramatic visuals courtesy of Arsham, experimentation with randomness and games of chance a la Cunningham, and explorations of space, time and structure.
In Recess (2010), he performs with a giant roll of white photo paper, which operates as “costume, landscape and partner” in a graceful ballet he describes as “somewhere between a solo and a duet … I think it is why it is so interesting for audiences. It’s the closest analogy I can make to collaborating, having dance and visual arts come together, because it’s never just dance and never just visual arts, there’s always a third form, and so Recess represents that in some ways.”
In Why Patterns (2011), thousands of ping-pong balls cascade down, flooding the stage and ricocheting among the dancers, creating hypnotic, unpredictable patterns and initiating a series of “choreographed games”.
Bokaer describes it as a homage and reinterpretation of the Morton Feldman 1978 composition of the same name. Feldman stated, “There is not one organisational procedure more advantageous than another, perhaps because no one pattern ever takes precedence over the other.” Bokaer, in turn, believes “30-plus years later it still remains a radical, architectural and poetic gesture to question the need for patterns — either imposed, designed or random.”
Born in Ithaca, New York, on October 1, 1981, Bokaer is one of six children. His mother is a theatre director and his father, who is from Tunisia, is a filmmaker and screenwriter. “I grew up in a theatre family and so that definitely helped.” His first stab at choreography came at age six when he marshalled his siblings in a complicated dance routine at home. He trained in dance at Cornell University and the University of North Carolina school of the arts, and joined Cunningham’s company. Bokaer was later invited by theatre artist Wilson to choreograph operas, including Faust. He cites Cunningham and Wilson as his two creative fathers, seeding his view of dance as an expansive, cross-media art form. “They taught me how to harness the power and theatrical grammar of the stage … I have been very lucky to work with them both.”
The visual arts act as an equal creative partner to his choreography — design never serves simply as backdrop or prop. His choreography always begins with visual art and design, and he remains committed to moving dance into museum spaces, in the US and internationally, “tapping into the grammar of visual and installation art to stage dances” and striving to “move beyond the scenic”.
His engagement with digital technology has also been vital to the development of his choreographic process, with Bokaer often employing motion capture, digital animation, 3-D modelling and choreographic software. He has developed a range of dance apps and has said that one app, Fifth Wall, produced with 2wice Arts Foundation, Pentagram and Abbott Miller “was the most successful in terms of its interface with the user. Some people even say that it competes with Angry Birds in terms of maintaining audience interest.”
In an interview last year, he stated that “in my choreographic universe, the ‘autonomous body’ is over. It’s over. That’s not how we live or work or behave any more. This idea of the pure body moving through space, the modernist body, divorced from context and meaning — that stems from the 1950s.”
It’s a bold statement but one he stands by. For him, dance needs to expand and engage with multiple forms rather than exist, fossilised, in some kind of pure, abstract capsule.
As he said last year, “I choose to intensify the relationship between dance and visual art, and all my work has followed from that. What happens when you blend visuals with dance?
“They can occupy one another’s presentational formats. This notion of occupation is about space, vocabulary, ownership, possession, even annexation — and this slippage between media is becoming increasingly complicated and nuanced.”
This year is being described as a banner year for Bokaer. Rules aside, his new ballet Scheherazade will open at the Royal Ballet of Flanders, touching on topical issues about Middle Eastern identity. For him, as a Tunisian-American artist, the region is a source of enduring creative inspiration. He is working with a composer on a new project “that will address the humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean basin. We will likely have to travel in that region and also through the Red Sea. I’m very interested in what artists from that region have to say, and in making sure that part of the world is represented.”
Rules of the Game opens at Brisbane Festival on September 14 at Brisbane Powerhouse.
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