Jonah Bokaer and Judith Sanchez Ruiz in “Untitled Corner.”

As a founder of two area performance spaces, Chez Bushwick and Center for Performance Research, and administrator of a $150,000 Rockefeller Foundation arts grant, it is easy to overlook Jonah Bokaer the choreographer.

Do so and you will be missing one of the more extraordinary live dance performances in the city this summer.

Bokaer is one of the choreographers involved in a collaborative performance with Daniel Arsham and Judith Sanchez Ruiz that takes place in Lower Manhattan as part of the River to River Festival. Their performance, “Untitled Corner” is a site-specific work that explores the loss of memory and the expansion of space.

Bokaer’s group was chosen to participate in the festival in March, one of four commissioned choreographers this year, and he happily invited Arsham, a visual artist whom he was worked with since 2007, on board to help design the performance.

“He creates unusual spaces, warping, contorting the normal language of architecture,” said Bokaer. He does this in a number of ways, bending walls, wrinkling surfaces in unexpected ways, and creating illusions with light and scenography.”

They began researching sites in downtown Manhattan before coming upon a valley in between four skyscrapers, not far from the Canyon of Heroes and the World Trade Center. On the western edge of the plaza, Arsham has placed an 8-foot tall plaster cube on a corner of the makeshift. Over the course of the 40-minute show, the wall erodes and melts as the dancers break through and gracefully emerge in a duet.

“One of the topics we’ve been addressing is memory loss and pattern recognition in the choreography,” said Bokaer. “Physically it’s very demanding. I wouldn’t say I’m responding in the moment, but one thing we are responding to, is that it’s not a simple thing to make artwork in that area, with the World Trade towers 4 blocks away. Though we’re not making work about that, it’s a complicated thing to break walls in Lower Manhattan.”

Those expecting to see the robotic, jerky movements of Merce Cunningham, whose company Bokaer has performed with for many years, will come upon something else. Bokaer extends the modernist orthodoxy with a tightly choreographed work that has him and his partner moving in precise lines throughout the stage in a dance that is both melancholy but sustaining. Their bodies lean on each other while standing and they embrace throughout, their clothes caked in white ash from the plaster chips that have crumbled near the box.

It can be difficult to read their emotions from their faces, as the dancers move quickly from one position to another, from one corner of the stage to another, before pausing to embrace, touch the ground and hold hands as one partner spins around the other.

“A moving body is expressive on its own,” said Bokaer. “I use my face in response to what the rest of my body is doing and experiencing in space during a performance. The dance is 60% set material, and 40% scored by movement conditions which change every time, and are composed by Judith and I, together, in the moment.”

Near the end of the performance, Bokaer and Sanchez climb back into the plaster cube they have broken through, she head-first and he feet-first, so it looks like they are a part of one body. They disappear into the cube and the crowd applauds.

Jonah Bokaer’s “Untitled Corner” can be seen Wednesday at 12:30 PM and Friday at 7 PM at One Chase Manhattan Plaza. For more information, visit http://www.rivertorivernyc.com.