wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

Driving into Floyd Bennet Field is like entering an alternative universe. One minute you are in the heart of Brooklyn, the next you’re in this bare, windswept, rather wild environment. Driving down the runway of what was New York’s first municipal airport, all you see is sky, water and a few hulking but low-to-the ground structures.

Closed to commercial use by the Navy in 1941, the quiet, beautifully desolate grounds are now largely deserted. Until this week, that is, when Dancing in the Streets set up shop in Hangar B, home to a gorgeous array of historic aircraft, and the equally colorful volunteers, many of them military veterans, who take care of these singular machines.

The occasion? The latest installment of A Dance Charette, which gives five choreographers each the task of creating a five-minute work at a mystery site they only learn about five days before the public gets to see what they’ve been up to. There will be four free performances this weekend (directions here), but I got to go out a few days early and snoop around.

It takes some getting to get there, and I was lucky to catch a lift with one of this year’s choreographers, Jonah Bokaer, who probably only has about five days to spare for a piece right now. The soft-spoken, charismatic young artist has become quite a mover and shaker in the dance world (apologies, unavoidable performance pun). In addition to his own work and his choreography for Robert Wilson, he is the founding director of the innovative arts center Chez Bushwick, which proposed a new model for how artists could nourish and sustain themselves in such a tough city. This model has just taken a giant step forward with his and John Jasperse’s Center for Performance Research.

Bokaer and I covered a lot of ground on the trip, including the tension between Brooklyn as artists’ haven and Brooklyn as developers’ dream, the too-often competing goals between presenters and artists, and his attempts to navigate the incredibly loaded political, historical and war imagery in Hangar B.

Bokaer’s decision not to engage is one way (a subtle but powerful one) in which performance can stand as a quiet protest: a refusal to view the world through the expected lens.

He wasn’t the only choreographer struggling with the very particular nature of Hangar B: the war in Iraq, the presidential election, the increasingly tortured notion of patriotism in this country. You name it, the site brings these issues to mind, from the large American flag hanging at its center to the existence of a small fighter jet that is the model of the plane John McCain was flying when he was shot down in Vietnam.

In fact, this particular aircraft is the site designated for the choreographer Stephen Koplowitz by Dancing in the Street’s artistic director Joanna Haigood. Koplowitz has a long history with site-specific work. He also has a history with Vietnam; his father was a spy there, and at first the welter of associations that greeted him upon seeing the plane was too much:

This sense of discovery and adventure that Koplowitz describes is what Haigood hopes for every time she chooses a location. She herself is a site-specific choreographer, and her intuitive grasp of how artists - and audiences - might occupy a particular space is part of what makes A Dance Charette so special.

There are a lot of site-specific offerings in New York, but few come close to this series. And few sites can come close to Hangar B. As one of the volunteers, Susan Gross, put it, “It’s one of Brooklyn’s most hidden treasures. It’s filled with history. Each plane tells a story. They’re priceless. But the men who work on them are priceless, too.”