Hudson Valley Dance Community

Featuring Jonah Bokaer, Jack Ferver, Denise Roberts Hurlin, Alyson Pou

Jonah Bokaer
Jonah Bokaer has been active as a choreographer and exhibiting artist since 2002. The creator of 55 works in a wide variety of media (dances, videos, drawings, motion capture works, interactive installations, mobile applications, and film), Bokaer’s work has been produced in venues around the world, including Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Festival d’Avignon, Spoleto Festival, La Triennale di Milano, and SOLUNA International Music & Arts Festival. Bokaer has performed at the Guggenheim Museum, P.S.1 MoMA, and The New Museum in New York City. He founded Chez Bushwick in 2002, and co-founded CPR – Center for Performance Research with John Jasperse in 2008. Bokaer has collaborated with artists including Lynda Benglis, Anne Carson, Merce Cunningham, Robert Gober, Anthony McCall, Tino Sehgal, Lee Ufan (Guggenheim Retrospective 2011), and Robert Wilson. As choreographer for Robert Wilson, he has completed 6 operas including Faust (Polish National Opera), Aïda (Teatro dell’Opera di Roma), and On The Beach (Baryshnikov Arts Center). Bokaer has collaborated with Daniel Arsham on nine full-length works since 2007. In 2015 he received the United States Artists Fellowship in Choreography, was named a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellow in Choreography, and in 2016 won Italy’s Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, in the Visual Arts category.

Jack Ferver is a New York based writer, choreographer, and director. His genre defying performances, which have been called “so extreme that they sometimes look and feel like exorcisms” (The New Yorker), interrogate and indict an array of psychological and socio-political issues, particularly in the realms of sexual orientation, gender, and power struggles. His visionary direction blurs boundaries between fantastic theatrics and stark naturalism, character and self, humor and horror.

 Ferver’s works have been presented in New York City at the New York Live Arts; New Museum; The Kitchen; The French Institute Alliance Française, as part of Crossing the Line; Abrons Arts Center; Gibney Dance; Performance Space 122; the Museum of Arts and Design, as part of Performa 11; Danspace Project; and Dixon Place. Domestically and internationally, Ferver has been presented by the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College (NY); American Dance Institute (MD); Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (IL); Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (OR); the Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA (ME); the Institute of Contemporary Art (MA); Diverse Works in collaboration with the Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston (TX); and Théâtre de Vanves (France).

 His work has been critically acclaimed in The New York Times, La Monde, Artforum, The New Yorker, Time Out NY, Modern Painters, The Financial Times, The Village Voice, and ArtsJournal. Ferver has received residencies and fellowships from the Maggie Allesee National Center of Choreography at Florida State (2012); Baryshnikov Arts Center (2013); the Watermill Center (2014); the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art (2014); and Live Arts Bard, the commissioning and residency program of The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College (2014); and Abrons Art Center (2014-2015). He is a 2016 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant.

 He teaches at Bard College. He has also taught at NYU, SUNY Purchase, American Dance Festival, Interlochen Center for the Arts, and has set choreography at The Juilliard School. As an actor he has appeared in numerous films and television series. www.jackferver.org

Denise Roberts Hurlin

Denise Roberts Hurlin’s career has taken her down diverse paths as a dancer, educator and activist. She’s a founding member of Parsons Dance who also set Mr. Parson’s work on the Purchase Dance Corps and Netherlands Dans Theater. She was a member of the Paul Taylor Dance Company, where she danced the leads in such Taylor classics as Aureole, Big Bertha, Sunset and Company B and was featured in the PBS/WNET Dance in America special Speaking in Tongues.  For her work with Taylor, she was named outstanding performer of 1994 by New York dance historian and critic Joan Acocella. As an educator, Ms.Hurlin has taught at Julliard, LaGuardia High School of the Performing Arts, Keene State College and her alma mater, Purchase College. As an activist, Ms.Hurlin is the founding director of Dancers Responding to AIDS, a program of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. Under her leadership, DRA has produced over 150 events including the upcoming Hudson Valley Dance Festival on October 12th at The Historic Catskill Point. Together with Broadway Cares over $300 million raised to help provide lifesaving medication, healthy meals, emergency assistance and other social services for people living with HIV/AIDS and other critical illnesses across the United States. Thirteen organizations in the Hudson Valley now receive annual grants through Broadway Cares National Grants Program.

She is an inaugural member of the advisory council for The Dancers’ Resource, a program of The Actors Fund founded by Bebe Neuwirth,and the newly created Times Square Arts Advisory Committee. Ms.Hurlin received, on behalf of DRA,a Bessie Award Special Citation,the Creative Excellence Award by Jennifer Muller/The Works at its 35th anniversary gala, was a contributor in Danspace Project’s 2016 Platform Lost & Found: Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS Then and Now was presented with the 2017 Martha Hill Dance Fund Mid-Career Award and 2018 honoree at the Chase Brock Experience Gala. 

Ms.Hurlin is especially proud of her work uniting the dance community with the common cause of providing for the health and well-being of all performing artists from every genre. She graduated with a BFA in Dance in 1984 from the Conservatory of Dance at Purchase College, where she received the President’s Award for Achievement. Ms. Roberts is married to Broadway Cares Production Manager Nathan Hurlin. They are proud parents of Henry and Catherine, a soloist at American Ballet Theatre.

Please visit dradance.org for more information about DRA and Hudson Valley Dance Festival

Alyson Pou

Alyson Pou is an artist, arts professional and advocate passionately committed to artist driven enterprises that hold the creative process at center while building sustainability and community. Pou currently serves as Petronio Residency Center Director for Stephen Petronio Dance Company working with staff to plan and implement integrated programs for their 175 acre mountain top Center in upstate NY. Current programs include Artist Residencies, Community Dance Education, somatic workshops, and earned income from facility rental. Other recent projects include program development and financial strategy for New York Foundation for the Arts, CEC ArtsLink, and New York Arts Program. Additionally, Pou develops curriculum and teaches workshops for professional artists and students to help them gain practical business and life management skills needed to establish sustainable lives and careers. During her tenure at Creative Capital, a national organization that supports the work of innovative artists, she played a key roll in developing it programs. As Director of Programs and Services, she created and implemented the Artist Services Program and oversaw the awards process for more than $12 million to 242 artists’ projects.  As Founding Director of the Professional Development Program, she designed and implemented an education model to provide business and life management skills for artists in all disciplines. Under her leadership, the program partnered with over 100 arts organizations nationwide to serve more than 15,000 artists in 700 communities.

Prior to Creative Capital, Pou was the Director of Programming and Public Relations at Creative Time Inc. where she worked with hundreds of artists to produce their public art projects. Pou maintains an active artistic practice and has exhibited and lectured at numerous museums, galleries, art centers and colleges around the country. Her installations and performances, deeply rooted in story telling and women’s history, make use of movement, text and objects to create an immersive visual and theatrical experience. She is the recipient of the New York Dance and Performance Award (aka The Bessie Award) in the category of Choreographer/Creator. Her work has been presented in New York City by The New Museum, The Bronx Museum, Performance Space 122, Danspace Project at St. Marks; Grants include Art Matters, Inc., NYC Dept. of Cultural Affairs, and the National Endowment for the Arts with commissions from Deutche Bank and the Atlanta Arts Festival.