Friday night found me at the New Museum to see Jonah Bokaer, Judith Sanchez Ruiz, and Daniel Arsham performing Replica. I am a not-so-secret admirer of Jonah Bokaer (the youngest ever Cunningham dancer, beginning at 18), particularly in the way that he has successfully founded or co-founded two of the most vital performance spaces in New York City, Chez Bushwick and Center for Performance Research, and still has time to maintain his career as a dancer/choreographer. And of course it’s not enough to simply maintain these various modalities but his work in all of these areas is really about digging, about exploring in a very serious way. The one time I briefly met him, at a joint Eyebeam/Chez Bushwick event, he was extraordinarily charming, which may be a prerequisite for all of his endeavors.
Back to Replica itself, the stage contained a large white cube, angled such that the audience could only see two sides of it, each side with large cracks out of which the dancers appeared. Ostensibly about memory and memories of memories, there was also video projection onto the cube of the same cube being broken out of in their rehearsal studio.
The dance primarily featured Ruiz and Bokaer pulling from a collection of movement and reaction, exhaustively rehearsed and developed beforehand. Throughout the 60 minute piece, it was as though they were slowly teaching us this language, the audience experiencing in a very controlled way the act of remembering each gesture to see it come back again later in a fresh iteration. More than any dance piece I’ve seen in a long time the visual movement really felt like music. In a sense, the movement contained more squarely defined moments than the sound by ARP/Alexis Georgopoulos (formerly of Tussle), which was mainly long washes of textures folding into one another. This worked so nicely in conjunction with the dance, the stylistic tension between the angularity of the movement and the softness of the sound was lovely.
