Good-looking choreographer Jonah Bokaer has done quite a bit to change Bushwick. His rehearsal/performance space Chez Bushwick, off the Morgan Avenue L stop, is a bright beacon around which artists and dancers cluster. But one thing young Bokaer can’t change is the L train. Bushwick is still far, far away. At least for anyone who is white and over 50. And most of the people at the Chez Bushwick Gala on Thursday were just that.
Instead, they brought Bushwick, in the form of Bokaer, to Chelsea’s AIGA National Design Center. On the walls, the pages of 2wice, a dance magazine by Patsy Tarr and designed by Abbott Miller, were unfolded and mounted. (The event was a gala to benefit Chez Bushwick but honored Tarr and Miller.) Sipping Rosé, many of Tarr’s friends looked at the specimens of youth and beauty with wistfulness and awe. So lithe! So lean!
Alan and Betsy Cohn, from East 90th and Park, were well coiffed. “We’ve never been to Bushwick,” they confided. But, added Alan, “a manhole cover blew up on Fifth Avenue, so getting down here was hard enough.”
The night also marked the debut of a new Bokaer piece. And so, in front of the design center’s plate glass windows, a shoeless Bokaer began to herk and jerk to the rattle and hum of experimental cello. The well-practiced balletomanes inside the gallery looked on appreciatively. Meanwhile the pedestrians down Fifth Avenue, passing by the gallery, did double and triple takes. That’s one thing you don’t get much of in a Bushwick loft: street traffic.
