Venues
Events
MediaDance
Jonah Bokaer’s Anchises
Jonah Bokaer x Harrison Atelier
Jonah Bokaer at Abrons Arts Center
| | More
Jonah Bokaer is an award-winning choreographer and media artist. He has dedicated a short lifetime to expanding possibilities for live performance through choreography, digital media, crossdisciplinary collaborations, and social enterprise, in the United States and internationally.
Anchises, a collaboration between himself and the design firm Harrison Atelier, receives its U.S. premiere at the Abrons Arts Center.
Inspired by the story of Anchises, the father of Aeneas, Bokaer and Harrison Atelier’s Anchises embodies the centuries-old conflicts between filial loyalty and progress which have expressed themselves in many forms through the ages.
What do we owe our parents when they become elderly, especially if caring for them impedes our own future? In Virgil’s The Aenead, Anchises is carried out of the burning Troy on the shoulders of Aeneas, who was later to establish the city of Rome. Aeneas’s loyalty to his dying father and the decimated city of Troy metaphorically expresses the issues of moral responsibility, especially in a contemporary world that defies youth.
Anchises takes place in nine powerful scenes during which the set, comprised of a series of modules, is created and recreated by the dancers as the performance moves through centuries.
The work is set to a commissioned score by Loren Dempster, and performed by a cast ranging in age from 24 to 75 years.