Dance New Amsterdam unleashes a double bill of in-your-face theatre. In “The Myths and Trials of
Calamity Jane and the Son of the Queen of the Amazons,”Ishmael Houston-Jones, one of the most
genial survivors of the eighties avant-garde, conflates the story of the American frontierswoman with that of Phaedra, the
besotted Greek stepmother. Witness Relocation, the physically intrepid company led by the misleadingly named
Dan Safer, stages incapacitating fear and mass hysteria in “The Panic Show.” Houston-Jones
and Safer also team up for an intergenerational duet, “This Ring of Fire.” (280 Broadway, at Chambers
St. 212-625-8369. Nov. 19-21 at 8 and Nov. 22 at 3.)
Matching Wits and Bodies (and Drinking Beer in Between)
By
Claudia La Rocco November 21, 2009
New York Times
Here’s a
thought: what if the artists on future split bills were required to collaborate? If they couldn’t come up with something
at least as interesting as what Ishmael Houston-Jones and Dan Safer managed on Thursday
night at Dance New Amsterdam, bye-bye split bill. Just think of all the odd-couple pairings the dance world would be spared.
“This Ring of Fire,” created and performed by Mr. Houston-Jones and Mr. Safer,
had its premiere as the conclusion of their shared evening, “Splice: Panic Journals.” It was built around
a set of structured improvisations. Mr. Houston-Jones is a master of these, having built a delicious career out of winging
it. But Mr. Safer kept up, using flustered moments to his advantage.
“Live theater, folks,” he said
with a strained grin, exhaling after Mr. Houston-Jones hit him in a delicate spot during one tussling section.
Both
men, by this point, were stripped down to colorful ruffled panties, boots and suit jackets, taking turns being blindfolded
and following the other’s often malicious orders. Variations of Johnny Cash’s “Ring
of Fire” played as they matched wits and bodies, revealing a tough-edged vulnerability beneath the swirling, beer-guzzling
bravado. Let’s hope a Part 2 comes soon.
And more, please, also of “The Myth and Trials
of Calamity Jane and the Son of the Queen of the Amazons,” by Mr. Houston-Jones. This 15-minute dance-theater
duet with Ashley Anderson also uses improvisation and also includes beer swigging, and after one viewing
you feel as if you’d barely begun to catch the subtle interplay of words and movements.
Mr. Houston-Jones
began by reading a conflated, mythic narrative off his mobile device as the statuesque Ms. Anderson, a cowboy hat strung around
her neck, strode about the stage. She was in a white dress and black boots, he in white underclothes, his black socks held
up by garters.
Later, more fully dressed, he did a manic, sad, beautiful little dance, thrusting out his lips and
limbs as she read the clinical chart of a 58-year-old man who had suffered a seizure. They traded movement phrases, alternately
having to follow the other’s lead. (Ms. Anderson was not kind to her older choreographer.)
More beer. Songs
by Nancy Sinatra, the Magnetic Fields, Johnny and June Carter Cash, and the sense of a complicated
relationship between heroic fictions and private, painful truths.
Mr. Houston-Jones knows how to keep secrets in
his dances, to not give everything away. There is not quite enough such space in Mr. Safer’s piece “The
Panic Show (or, I’m Too Close To This Monster),” which he directed and choreographed with members
of his fine company, Witness Relocation. Mr. Safer is a smart, playful artist, and his best works marry a
muscular physicality with absurdly heightened theatrical situations. Here, his cast is terrified of everything: social encounters,
escalators, Jodie Foster (who had her own “Panic Room,” a 2002 movie). As they detailed their woes, offering one
another scant comfort, Mr. Safer interjected bursts of rough-and-tumble partnering, noises and lighting shifts. But it all
began to seem cluttered, in need of breathing room. The show, in the end, did all the hyperventilating.
SPECIMENS
DANCE
REVIEW; Fallen Angels In Energetic Theatricality By JENNIFER
DUNNING Published: December 12, 1998 New York Times
Ishmael Houston-Jones deals with angels in Specimens, performed on Thursday night at P.S. 122,
but not the kind featured on holiday greeting cards. Instead, the five dancers in the new full-evening piece are of the fallen
sort, or so it seemed, flung by Mr. Houston-Jones into a shadowy, irrational world.
Program notes suggest that
Specimens was inspired by thoughts on the body and disease. The piece, which is set to a collage of intermittent
music by groups and composers ranging from Led Zeppelin to Chopin, does open with a blindfolded
Mr. Houston-Jones sitting on a tiny wooden chair in near-darkness and fitfully examining part of his body with a light.
Specimens then shifts to self-scrutiny that is, for the most part, more emotional than physical. But there
isn't a scrap of confessionalism here. Once Mr. Houston-Jones murmurs his mysterious creatures into life and disappears, the
evening is largely an explosion of fast-moving, strangely logical high-energy dance and muttered text that is thoroughly satisfying
theater.
The young performers (David Brick, Stanya Kahn, Andrew Simonet, Amy Smith and Paule
Turner) are individually authoritative, perhaps because they are choreographers and performance artists in their
own right, but they work well together as a group. Gifted actors and movers, they created the piece with Mr. Houston-Jones.
For once, group collaboration has yielded a theatrical whole.
Mr. Houston-Jones clearly has a strong, sure sense
of theater. He uses every inch of atmospheric bare stage space, studded with odd props that function as stolidly as the lost
middle-class world that his dark angels once inhabited and remember here. Mark O'Maley designed the quietly
dramatic lighting. David R. Gammons was the assistant director.
Specimens will be performed
through tomorrow at P.S. 122, 150 First Avenue, at Ninth Street, East Village.
ISHMAEL HOUSTON-JONES' SPECIMENS at Christ Church, Philadelphia
Miriam Seidel
May 1998 The
Philadelphia Inquirer
Nakedness doesn't just mean taking your clothes off. As Ishmael Houston-Jones
demonstrates in his new performance work, Specimens, emotional nakedness can be as revealing, and involve the same
issues of voyeurism and intimacy, as the physical kind. The New York-based Houston-Jones created this piece in collaboration
with his performers: the dancers of Headlong Dance Theater, Stanya Kahn and Paule
Turner, Duchess--all powerful choreographers themselves.
There was plenty of skin to be seen, too, starting
with Houston-Jones himself in underwear and heels. Blindfolded, he moved in reaction to sounds, and examined his body with
a dangling construction light, establishing a double sense of interrogation and self-interrogation.
This sense
continued with the entrance of the dancers, also blindfolded and wearing only underwear at this point, into the smallish,
high-ceilinged Christ Church performance space. Standing directly in front of the audience, each embraced in turn by Houston-Jones,
they spoke of what seemed like uncomfortable, revealing memories or images. Houston-Jones began this project with a visit
to Philadelphia's Mutter Museum, and a feeling of being challenged to take in difficult realities (like the Mutter's medical
curiosities) entered the piece here.
That feeling of late-night, unblinking confrontation with your deepest fears
or worst memories continued through a high-energy pastiche of scenes, bearing the mark of their birth out of intense improvisation.
In one Headlong moment, two members verbally and physically hammered at the third, Andrew Simonet. Soon after,
Paule Turner writhed on the floor, extruding harsh vocalizations, then released into beautifully extreme, tensely spastic
and arcing movements.
Movement-wise, you might call this Extreme Dancing. A later duet between Turner and Stanya
Kahn, to the astringent wails of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, generated a similar, full-out movement heat. Simonet
and David Brick executed some violent floor-slides and rolls, and toward the end, the men did some lifting
and partnering that felt like a wrestling match.
Costuming, or rather a flyaway rush of costume changes--the donning
and doffing of business suits, tap shorts, dresses and aprons, knee pads and other athletic gear, from a pile in the corner--became
a central part of the developing theme of self-revelation. No single item of clothing, it seemed, could be relied on for a
dramatic identity; all gender roles were up for grabs.
This sense of pre-millennial disintegration crystallized
in an apocalyptic verbal duet between Turner and Amy Smith, with references to Oprah and toxic disaster,
dust and purple sky. Meanwhile Kahn provided a slapstick counterpoint, pants around her ankles and loudly proclaiming her
safety. (A recent emigrant from San Francisco to New York, Kahn compels attention and is a good comic, too.)
The
touch of actual nudity at the end seemed a footnote, a deliberate contrast to the many variants of self-exposure that Houston-Jones
had by then set in motion, in this over-packed, hyperkinetic museum of hard revelations.
Fearless Discovery: Ishmael Houston-Jonesreturns to Philadelphia for intense collaboration in Specimens.
by Jonathan David Jackson
June 11–18, 1998
Philadelphia City Paper
"I try to get them to create things
that they would not do if they were working alone. I try to get them to surprise themselves."
Andrew
Simonet is on the spot.
"Have you ever been penetrated?" a voice demands.
"Are you telling the truth now?" asks another.
Simonet only
has time to reply, "I can imagine that!" He knows that he must keep his eyes closed and keep moving, and the questions
are being fired at him so fast, he can barely get even those few words out.
No, it's not a
scene from a WWII prisoner-of-war drama—it's a rehearsal exercise. Simonet, a member of Headlong Dance Theater,
is being interrogated by performance artist Stanya Kahn and choreographer Ishmael Houston-Jones,
and this inquisition is just one of the intense improv techniques being employed by Houston-Jones in the development of Specimens,
a collaborative movement-based theater work premiering this weekend at the Christ Church Neighborhood House in Old City.
Houston-Jones, a nationally known dancer, choreographer, writer and actor, is here under the auspices
of Arranged Introductions, the Tyler School of Art program that coordinates a wide variety of projects by
local and national avant-garde artists, often in unlikely Philadelphia locales. Co-producers Carlota Schoolman
and Mary Griffin felt from the start that Houston-Jones would be an ideal choice. Says Schoolman, "I
knew right away how carefully Ishmael works, that all of the people involved would bond from the project."
Judging
from rehearsals like the one described above, there's been a whole lot of bonding going on in the creation of Specimens.
Developed from May to June, the piece has allowed Houston-Jones and his collaborators—New York-based Kahn, Philadelphians
Simonet, David Brick and Amy Smith (all from Headlong), and Paule Turner—to
explore the limits of intimacy, trust and personal revelation.
"What my work seeks to
do is often to have people find new things in themselves, about their identity as people, as artists, as creators," notes
Houston-Jones. "I try to get them to create things that they would not do if they were working alone. I try to get them
to surprise themselves." With Arranged Introductions' help, he carefully selected the collaborators in Specimens
knowing that, like him, they would value a complex improvisational working method that merged autobiographical text and movement.
Even the title of the work (inspired by a tour to Philadelphia's Mütter Museum of medical curiosities) conveys a sense
of seemingly divergent elements ("specimens") coming together for a critical experiment.
Specimens
marks a kind of homecoming for Houston-Jones. Born and raised in Harrisburg, PA, he has used movement and text to explore
issues of personal identity for the last 25 years. In 1972, he came to Philadelphia on his way to New York City. He ended
up staying here for nearly seven years, studying and performing with many key artists in the developing Philadelphia performing
arts scene. "I was in Group Motion for two years… and I formed a sort of loose confederation
with Terry Fox [now performance curator at the Painted Bride]… [I] taught at Terry's studio on Church
Street in Old City (before anybody lived in the area)… I joined a hidden artists' community here."
Houston-Jones'
stay in Philadelphia allowed him to expand his creativity beyond traditional theater. "In college I had been doing theater,
but I was always drawn to the physicality of movement more than acting. So when I came here I took classes at Temple with
Eva Gholson and Hellmut Gottschild."
From these seminal experiences
in Philadelphia, Houston-Jones discovered many of his values as a performing artist. He notes that even in the 1970s he was
committed to visceral, emotionally charged live performance that probed the vagaries of improvisation and collaboration.
Houston-Jones continues to refine his creativity as a choreographer, performer, writer and director.
His last project, Unsafe, Unsuited, was a collaboration with two openly gay performers, Patrick Scully
and Keith Hennessy, which Houston-Jones described as "three queer men who [had] a basis in improvisation
making something together."
As for Specimens, Houston-Jones will most likely be the
only collaborator who does not appear in the work. "I like working with people in equal roles. I am interested in projects
where I am directing from the outside and not just performing. And I've never been one to try to put my choreographic stamp
on people."
At a rehearsal on May 30 at the Headlong Dance Studios, it became clear that—more
than anything else—the work was about the special capabilities and vulnerabilities of the collaborators. By distinguishing
truth from fact in the creative process, Houston-Jones pushed the five performers to unearth the emotional essence of their
individual experiences: "I call the work 'autobiographical fiction.' I want the kernel of what people reveal to be true,
but I am not really interested in facts. I get really bored when people start telling me details of their lives; when they
think that's profound because they're telling a factual truth—when actually an emotional truth which may not be based
in fact at all can have a much more profound effect."
During Specimen's creative process,
the collaborators used various improvisational techniques: structuring movement phrases, establishing interactions, generating
autobiographical text. The most radical technique—the non-stop interrogation (which was actually more hilarious than
disturbing)—involved creating space for personal revelations. For Houston-Jones, this kind of performance preparation
not only forces the collaborators to think fast on their feet; it also tests the boundaries of trust. After many interrogations—some
while dancing, some while seated in chairs—it was clear that the collaborators had established a strong rapport.
And when the group ran a section of the work, the depth of physical intimacy between the performers
was electric. One sequence of movement—full of head rolls, frantic falls and slides on the ground—served as an
organizing landmark for the spontaneous duets, trios and solos.
The solos were like danced
testimonies. At one point, while the robust, daring Stanya Kahn paraded around with masking tape strapped around her bare
breasts and Andrew Simonet methodically changed his clothes in full view, David Brick (a big, terrific dancer) told a strange
story of traveling down a lost road to find someone very dear to him. While he sighed and heaved, he inched closer in his
chair to Paule Turner and Amy Smith while the couple shared a moment of quiet connection. They rocked against each other,
sharing weight. As Kahn's pacing reached a fever pitch and Simonet finally stood dressed, Brick's story came to an end and
he entered the couples' personal space just as Turner pulled up Smith's arms high above her head and let her body fall in
a heap to the ground. All the traces of tenderness, secret longing and fearless discovery converged.
Specimens,
Christ Church Neighborhood House, 20 North American St. (above Market betw. 2nd & 3rd), Thurs.-Sat. June 11-13, 8 p.m.,
782-2714.
Dance, Music Reviews: Houston-Jones, Meier at Sushi
by JANICE STEINBERG
January 11, 1993
Kos Angeles Times
SAN DIEGO — Dances by Yvonne Meier and Ishmael Houston-Jones,
which opened the Danse Fraiche series at Sushi Performance and Visual Art on Thursday, were risk-taking and courageous.
"Tell Me,"
a collaboration by the two New York artists, was the largest work in the program. An electrifying 35-minute endurance contest,
it began with Meier and Houston-Jones staking out distinct territories, even taking turns on stage.
Although they danced separately, each continually
maintained awareness of the other. When they at last made contact, the effect was explosive.
To a suite of songs by 3 Teens Kill
4--No Motive, Meier and Houston-Jones collapsed together, reached for each other, moved apart. With the timing of
a basketball player executing a perfect no-look pass, she leaped at him and he caught her.
Remarkably, the dancers sustained a high sense
of danger. In one section, both catapulted across the space on intersecting diagonals, at first barely missing each other.
After the inevitable crash, Meier dove at, somersaulted over and propelled herself off of Houston-Jones, who pushed her away.
Each time she landed, gasping audibly, she picked herself up and returned for more.
"Tell Me" not only spoke to the
wounded state of relationships. It was a work about the dancers' physical courage.
"JB/Frankfurt/84," Houston-Jones'
solo, was less a performance than a grieving ritual. Delicately but fiercely, he moved inside a circle of nine tall votive
candles, his raw, wailing vocalizations hinting at words.
He swooped around the edge of the circle, coming so close to the lit candles that one held one's
breath. He gathered the candles together. One at a time, he held them aloft and let the hot wax run down his forearm.
Meier invited the audience to sit on stage for her "Bucket
Solo" from "Pommes Frites," but it was a dicey proposition. This hilarious dance involved Meier
stomping in and pouring out the contents of four buckets of water, which then spread toward people seated on the floor.
When dancers talk during their dances, they don't talk like anyone else. For them, talking doesn't have the
dominant place it does in everyday conversation. Talking is just another movement, to be performed and balanced with the others.
A seminal talking dance was Douglas
Dunn'sNevada, which premiered in New York in 1973. In the after- show "discussion period," when
a choreographer customarily comments on his work, Dunn fitfully stood up and sat down in a chair while his taped voice read
a piece that began: "Talking is talking. Dancing is dancing." The tape recited all possible variations on these
statements, including: "Not talking is not not dancing. Not dancing is not not talking." And: "Dancing is talking.
Talking is dancing." When the tape ended, Dunn crawled onto the dance floor and started howling.
Dancers have derived many meanings from Dunn's poem. Some
dancers refuse to talk about their work, because "dancing is dancing, and talking is talking"; dancing and talking
should remain separate. Other dancers began to include talking in their dances. Ishmael Houston-Jones is
one of the second group: all of the solo dances and group improvisations in his concert at the School of the Art Institute's
Gallery 2 incorporated substantial amounts of talking.
Houston-Jones taught a week-long workshop for Chicago artists and dancers, and the workshop
students (Dina Ashmann, Joanne Bauer, Anna Braun, Lydia Charaf, Diana Froley, Claudine LoMonaco, Kathleen Maltese,
Dennis Olsen, Rebecca Rossen, D. Travers Scott, Art Stone, and Jodi Tucci) performed a group improvisation,
Just Not Jim, in which the performers tried, individually and in groups, to capture and keep the audience's interest.
The performers worked well together, each performer taking the spotlight and releasing it without rancor. Sometimes movement
was used, as when two performers embraced while two others alternately embraced and slapped each other in the face. Talking
played an important role: one performer (Maltese) started to talk to an audience member, another (Rossen) gave capsule descriptions
of audience members. Though they held my interest for the entire 30 minutes of the piece, I came to feel like an experimental
animal, being tested to see what would generate interest. Of course artists have to learn what's interesting to others, but
to focus on that alone seems greedy, as if the performer were demanding something from the audience.
In his two solos, Houston-Jones always gave something of
himself. In a video, Relatives, Houston-Jones gave us his family: he danced in front of his mother's house in Mississippi
while his mother talked about how she and his father met.
Houston-Jones's dancing is loose-limbed, with swinging arms and legs creating momentum
for quick turns. His dancing looks naive and low-key, without pyrotechnics; but its fluidity shows years of training. It seems
a recent style, incubated in New York and seen in Chicago in Timothy Buckley's work. Because Houston-Jones
is compact and muscular, on him the movement style looks sweet.
Houston-Jones's first solo, In the Dark, confronts the talking/dancing issue
directly. Most of the dance takes place in complete darkness: we could hear but not see Houston-Jones as he tripped over objects
onstage and blundered through the audience. Meanwhile he talked about how he created the dance for his roommate, an artist
who could only see dance in visual terms. To confound his roommate, Houston-Jones created a dance that could not be seen.
Houston-Jones also talked about how In the Dark has irritated dance critics, who could not see it, and how that gave him special
pleasure. As he talked, Houston- Jones pulled back curtains from the performing area, and the ambient light from the street
created a silhouette of him dancing, just visible in the semidarkness. The effect was stunning.
Houston-Jones may have talked pompously about freeing dance
from the tyranny of the visual, but he also created visual effects. And in his talking, he laughed at his own pomposity. The
layers of trickery in the dance, of doing one thing while pretending to do another, created a web of illusion and humor.
After In the Dark Houston-Jones
read an amateurish short story "about a black man living on an island, where everyone is dropping dead." Though
he said the story wasn't autobiographical, its implicit allusion to AIDS decimating the dance community in New York set the
stage for his last solo.
At
the start of Without Hope, Houston-Jones kisses the edge of a cinder block he cradles in his arms. He kisses it as
a lover would, alternating tender kisses with hopeless ones. He starts to talk, telling stories about physical and emotional
mutilation. In one, a biologist follows a sick female elephant to see where her grave will be. All of the male elephants in
the herd copulate with the female elephant, to try to make her feel better. It's easy to imagine gay men who are dying from
AIDS trying to comfort each other with sex; the bitter irony that sex caused their suffering makes their great pain into mutilating
pain; not even the simple animal comfort of sex is available to them.
Then Houston-Jones begins to dance, embracing the cinder block. Several times he falls
to the floor, cradling the cinder block, or dances with it at arm's length. The cinder block seems to be a damaged lover,
someone who cannot respond. Or perhaps the cinder block is his own despair, as lovers and friends die around him. Houston-Jones's
physical danger in dancing with a 20-pound cinder block is a metaphor for the emotional danger of wrestling with a cement
heart. When the dance is over, Houston-Jones lets the cinder block fall to the floor as he staggers away, looking as if he's
wrestled with the Angel of Death. I staggered out of Gallery 2 myself, incoherent as I tried to absorb the dance's bleak intensity.
In Without Hope, the talking is poetic; talking
and dancing support each other in communicating deeply felt grief. In the Dark sets talking, dancing, and seeing
wittily against each other. Talking is used in some wonderful ways, but strangely, none of these works contained much dancing--talking
seems to be crowding dancing out of Houston-Jones's work.
Performance artists often say
that their works violate genre expectations--just relax and enjoy it, they advise, don't try to put it in a box. Sure enough,
the five artists of P.S. 122 Field Trips, a traveling performance-art variety show from New York City, are
described in the program as "combining and testing the limits of traditional art disciplines."
I can understand doing it; what I can't understand is why
certain artists behave as if it's never been done before. Artists worth their salt, particularly in this century, push boundaries;
that's just a given. But the act of testing formal boundaries does not in itself make an artist good. It's rarely radical
form that offends or excites--it's radical content. The artists of Field Trips attempt a radical content of sorts, by creating
onstage personas that are solipsistic, ironic, and vaguely infantile. But Samuel Beckett did that 50 years ago.
The need to establish a persona
fits nicely with the old-fashioned variety-show theme of Field Trips (its producer compares it not only to vaudeville but
to the Ed Sullivan Show). The variety-show act is a little like the toddler who shouts "Look at me!" and proceeds
to perform a little jig or a song: he has to be cute; talent is secondary. But the adult vaudevillian isn't likely to be so
unself-conscious--chances are he or she will come up with a persona, which is probably based on some aspects of his or her
actual personality.
…
Ishmael Houston-Jones
is a dancer whose two works for Field Trips focus on death: "DEAD" is funny, and the solo from "The
End of Everything," which seems to be a parable about AIDS, is not. "DEAD" has an elegantly simple
premise: the names of dead people--some famous, some not--are read in voice-over, and as each name is read Houston-Jones falls
to the floor, then gets up for the next name. Occasionally he throws in some fleeting gesture as he falls that captures something
about the dead person's life or death. Joe Louis hits himself; Jack Benny crosses his arms in their trademark position; Charlie
Chaplin dies with his feet splayed; Natalie Wood paddles her hands before she goes under.
"DEAD" is funny, but it's also horrifying.
The most tiring feat for dancers is not leaping but getting up from the floor, and Houston-Jones begins to show the strain.
It's a moving evocation of human limits: death is infinite, or nearly so--the tape could go on forever--and man is finite.
Moreover as Houston-Jones ages this will be a piece that when performed will mark his own approach to death. But wouldn't
you know it, "DEAD" has its own self-centeredness: it was created in 1981 to celebrate Houston-Jones's
30th birthday, and the catalog was restricted to people who had died during his own lifetime.
…
Houston-Jones' High-risk Dancing
By
CRAIG BROMBERG
December 09, 1986|
Kos Angeles Times
NEW YORK — Some performers
talk about taking risks through their work; others simply take them. Ishmael Houston-Jones, who brings his
improvised dances to Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) Thursday through Saturday, is definitely in the latter camp.
Sometimes
the risks are personal, as when Houston-Jones, a solid-looking black man, improvises, stark naked and blindfolded, to the
twang of country and Western ballads (in "f/i/s/s/i/o/n/i/n/g"). Or when--fully clothed--he dances circles
around his mother while she gives an improvisational spiel about her son: a son she still calls "Chuck," Houston-Jones'
given name ("Relatives").
But sometimes the risks are political, as when he went to Nicaragua for a month
in 1984 to give dance classes to young children--and, often, teen-age militiamen. Ever since, his anger and confusion about
the Nicaraguan conflict have been central to his work. (Excerpts from his "Nicaragua Journals" will be
included in the LACE program.)
"It's the connections that keep me concerned," the 32-year-old Houston-Jones said recently.
"I didn't come back (from Nicaragua) and just forget. I hear about a bus blowing up and it's not some abstract newsprint
bus, but a bus that this woman I knew and had coffee with could have been on.
"I think having my mother on stage is scarier
than being in Managua," he admitted with a laugh. "After all, she is not a performer and she can say anything she
wants--and sometimes it hurts. I trust her that she wouldn't say anything really off the wall," he said, his voice trailing
off, "but then you never really know."
His first trip to Nicaragua in 1983 was to attend a state-sponsored theater
conference. "I'm not sure if I ever was totally committed to the Sandinista cause," he said. "Initially, it
was my own sort of instinctive lefty leanings that told me something was wrong, that the United States shouldn't interfere
with the internal affairs of another government."
Certain things became clarified by Houston-Jones' visit; others became more
complex. "I realized that some people we had met were propaganda people and that we were being given lines," he
recalled. "It just wasn't on a human-to-human level." A second monthlong trip to the strife-torn nation followed,
nine months later.
"I just got air fare together, showed up sight unseen, taught contact improvisation
classes for a month," he said. "I think the goals of the Sandinistas are in favor of the people. The conflict arises
in terms of their insensitivity to different political methodologies, to hearing different voices of dissent--in short, control."
In performance, twirling around himself like a wound-up
spring, improvising speech as well as movement, Houston-Jones stresses that high-risk dancing can be a valid mode of political
activity. "In a very naive and almost Pollyana-ish way, I really feel the dancing helps to bridge the gap between the
two countries," he said.
DANCE: BLACK CHOREOGRAPHERS' 'PARALLELS'
By ANNA KISSELGOFF October 30, 1982 New York Times
''Parallels,'' a series of concerts by black choreographers, made its debut Thursday night in St. Mark's Church under the
auspices of the Danspace Project with works by Rrata Christine Jones, Blondell Cummings and Ishmael
Houston-Jones.
Mr. Houston-Jones explains in a program note that ''Parallels'' is the series title ''because
while all the choreographers participating are black and in some ways relate to the rich tradition of Afro-American dance,
each has chosen a form outside of that tradition and even outside the tradition of mainstream modern dance.''
The
area in which these choreographers see themselves is that of experimental dance. On the first program, however, Miss Jones
seemed on a totally different wave length than Miss Cummings, whose tightly organized imagery was completely modernist in
feeling, and Mr. Houston-Jones, a younger artist, who takes off from recent experiments in mixing pure movement and verbal
images.
…
Mr. Houston-Jones's excerpt from Relatives was a warmhearted delight. The
sense of dissociated humor permeating the piece began with the choreographer scattering mothballs in the dark and then dancing
a stamping spinning solo in the dark as well. When the lights came up, he offered a fragmented account of his family tree
and carried his mother, Pauline Jones, onto the floor. Mrs. Jones was as full of deep whimsy as her son,
whose original name was Charles and then Chuck. Their collage - her reminiscences and his shadow-boxing lunges and natural-movement
dancing - never became unglued.
Sights of Spring
Dance / Tobi Tobias
April 4, 1983
New
York Magazine
Babble: First Impressions of the White Man, which drew overflow crowds to the Schönberg Theater, is the collaborative work of two black choreographers,
Fred Holland and Ishmael Houston-Jones. Equal parts dance, theater, and polemic, it suggests
that in the confrontation of different races or cultures, each one of us is a self-appointed anthropologist, a benighted investigator.
In its opening segment, a white man in a loose overcoat,
hat pulled down, paces on the periphery of a pool of light that illuminates two more drab overcoats hanging from the flies.
Pictures that might have come from an old National Geographic – of tribe members and explorers – flash
onto the back wall as a pair of taped voices recites words frontward and backward, the reversals making occasional, accidental
sense.
The observer
continues his watch, half hidden in gloom, as Holland and Houston-Jones perform, their voices, on tape, clinically plotting
their actions. Their movement escalates from simple positioning to the tender grappling of contact improvisation to violence.
At first the violence seems to come from the outside—from drugs, from random gunshots; then the men don the empty overcoats
and, in a stream of blood-red light, try to kill each other. An early comment on the tape, which at first was the casual exchange
of two avant-garde performance artists, takes on a lethal irony: “Do you think enough has happened yet?” What
do you think hasn’t happened?”
In the third vignette, a rapt woman in street clothes stands on a chair, making deliberate gestures to a man watching
intently at her feet. He seems to understand her signs—indeed responds to them ardently—but we cannot decipher
a single one. In the fourth episode, a black man takes plaster life masks of two white sunbathers while a black couple, in
blackface, one a man masquerading as a woman, calmly drink coffee from an elegant service. In the fifth, the stage is completely
darkened and the lights blaze out onto the house, making the audience both performers and accused. The closing passage is
a litany. An assortment of voices recite the names of the dead – figures from entertainment, politics, family –
as the entire cast, in somber, shapeless clothes wanders about the stage, falling and rising and falling again.
None of these tactics is new, nor is the message. It’s
the force and clarity of intent and the striking images that give the piece its value. Babble is probably not the
best work this team will ever make, but it leaves you curious to see what they’ll do next.
Review/Dance; From Field Trips, a Mix Of Styles and Standpoints
By JENNIFER DUNNING
August 25, 1988
New York Times
It was ''tune up'' time at
Performance Space 122 on Monday night when dancers and performance artists participating in the organization's annual Field
Trips did an engaging preview performance of the show that will be seen, from Sept. 5 to Oct. 8, by audiences in San Diego,
Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Milwaukee and Syracuse. The aim of the program is to present a variety of styles and
perspectives, and it certainly has this year.
[Excerpted]
Ishmael Houston-Jones seems intent, these days, on throwing himself
to the ground as bruisingly as possible. In ''Dead,'' his falls and rises are performed to his recitation
of the names of people who have died, from political dictators to movie stars and friends. The solo eerily suggests that there
is as much continuity to death as to life. ''The End of Everything'' is an almost too potent evocation
of slow death, here enacted by a young homosexual dwindling in a tropical society riddled with plague and revolution. Much
of that evocative quality comes from a strong, uncredited script for the solo, which is set to music by Chris Cochrane.
THEM Men
With Men
Burt
Supree December 22, 1984 The Village Voice
Ishmael
Houston-Jones’s Them has become a much grimmer piece since the chunk I saw at “Dancing for Our
Lives,” last January’s AIDS benefit program at P.S. 122. I remember it as aggressive and vital, but the current
version seems more stiff-lipped, hardened, fatalistic, as if too many emotional and sensual options have been terminated since
then. Them is framed by cruel bursts of sounds from composer Chris Cochrane’s harsh guitar
and poet Dennis Cooper’s short descriptions of suicides and sudden death at the beginning and, at the
end, Houston-Jones’s body lying center stage under a sheet. The other dancers stand isolated, as if in front of mirrors,
touching themselves in the armpits, beside the public bone, along the neck, where the lymph nodes are located. Two of them,
grabbing or caressing, remorselessly gather or wrestle the others backwards into their arms. If only AIDS took its victims
so swiftly - with just a few moments between the trance of fear and the final breath. Donald Fleming, alone,
I think, is left as the lights dim, still touching himself, with one arm caught in a vague wave goodbye.
Them
isn’t a piece about AIDS, but AIDS constricts its view and casts a considerable pall. It’s a loosely organized
work about some ways men are with men - physically, sexually, emotionally. Its violence is pretty overt and oddly impersonal
- one guy goes after another with a stick of wood; Donald Fleming, in a frenzy of anger, smashes at a mattress till he’s
exhausted. There’s a more genial boisterousness, too, the kind of rough-housing that arises out of more sensitive,
half-embarrassing encounters. But the tenderness in the piece is cool, subdued, closemouthed.
Cooper gives us
low-key recitations of sexual brief encounters and verbal glimpses of the once-cruisy world. But the images are deeply tinged
with disappointment or the sense of seeing from a great emotional distance. Fleming and Houston-Jones improvise together
with a supple angularity. Their coolly swinging limbs reach long and straight, but their bodies tend to buckle. They lean
and push lightly into each other, easing past in a series of near misses; the their play gets rougher, jumping, bumping, and
pushing, whirling, flying into the air to be caught roughly or not at all.
Barry Crooks - carrying
a stick of wood like a gay basher - bats coins against the wall to Cooper’s recitation of deaths. All six dancers are
up and jumping fast, dodging, grappling, horsing around. Some of the danced episodes are gentler, with half-caressing, half-embracing
moves. Fleming carries Houston-Jones over his hip. David Zambrano and Daniel McIntosh
jump and fall all over each other. There’s an intricate and subtle physicality in the way Fleming and Julyen
Hamilton nearly mold themselves together.
Plain sensual encounters involve more ambivalence, defiance,
sullenness. Fleming and Zambrano cruise past each other, slightly dazed, just looking, just checking each other out. They
get more restless, glittery-eyes, and run past the other through the depth of the space before crashing in each other’s
arms smack against the wall. Hamilton holds McIntosh against a door-like wooden panel that’s leaning against a pillar.
Half-caressing, they push and struggle as one, then the other, gets the upper hand There’s no knowing if the upper
hand is what either really wants.
In one of the simplest and most evocative sections, Hamilton repeatedly knocks
Fleming backwards onto a mattress that with each tumble slides further across the space. He helps him up and bats him back
with a light shove, and dives over him as if to pin him. With the power vested in one partner,and both sharing a thoughtful,
puzzled kind of belligerence and acceptance, the episode seems like a kind of slow interrogation of the self, a questioning
of the components of one’s own desire of one’s own desire.
Simple pleasures and affections are far
away. In Houston-Jones’s outlook, the bullying, clamorous, brusque, torn-up aspects of even the most ephemeral relationships
are inextricably knotted up with our passion and tenderness and need. In Them, he grants those snarls their full
measure of peculiar dignity, but his feeling for our rough human grace is overwhelmed by frustration and defeat.
At P.S. 122 (November 21 to 30).
''Adolfo und Maria or 'Duh Guvnuh's Dancin' Gal,' '' performed
DANCE: HOUSTON-JONES
By JENNIFER DUNNING Published: April
30, 1986 New York Times
THE performance artist Ishmael Houston-Jones's Adolfo und Maria or 'Duh
Guvnuh's Dancin' Gal,' performed on Sunday night at the St. Mark's Church Danspace, is a theater-dance piece with
all the bold, crude vigor of poster art. Huck Snyder's cabaret set is a standout. Black dancing girls and
minstrels start out from the painted proscenium of the gaudy stage within the dance space, with equally vivid side curtains
that are pulled out as this ingeniously staged evening progresses. Doug Henderson and Guy Yarden have composed a slyly witty
score that cleverly incorporates musical styles from several periods, including occasional traditional song. And Mr. Houston-Jones
is a strong performer with a rich and resonant voice.
He has taken on a lot in this piece, whose setting is Berlin
in 1936, where Das Neger Kabaret is presenting a ''variety show, 'olio' and 'Adolfo und Maria,' a comico-tragico-melodramatico
opry,'' as the program notes inform us. This was the year, the notes add, when Hitler was host to the Olympics in Berlin and
when Mary Wigman was invited to create the finale of the International Dance Tournament. Jesse Owens won four gold medals
at the Olympics, but could find no work at home. And that year Anne Frank attended the Montessori School in Amsterdam, where
her family had fled.
The evening opens evocatively with a suggestion of a lonely Jesse Owens. And then we move
into the cabaret, which introduces the minstrels in blackface who cavort throughout the rest of the evening in various guises.
There are some powerfully theatrical elements here. One occurs in the variety-show segment, with a well-played vaudeville
routine taken from Forbes Milliken's 1928 ''It Was Dis Way, Judge.'' John Kelly is outstanding as the dim-witted
prisoner, in a cast that also includes John B. Walker as the judge, Trinket Monsod as the
sheriff and Irving Gregory as a cop.
Billy Swindler and Marleen Menard
offer a biting cabaret song that introduces the central ''Adolfo und Maria'' scene, enacted by Mr. Houston-Jones as Hitler
and Mr. Kelly as Mary Wigman. Mr. Houston-Jones is chilling and magnificent as he lecherously assaults her and forces her
to dance for him. Suddenly, the evening becomes a disquisition on the vulnerability of the artist in society. But this Mary
Wigman is a prop figure waiting, it seems, to be misused. And in this scene the flaw in this often scattershot piece becomes
evident. Is Mr. Houston-Jones saying that blacks and Jews are as vulnerable as artists? His choice of the often-enforced capering
of the black minstrel show as his medium is an interesting one. But Mr. Houston-Jones never gets to the heart of his subject
in a way that is as immediate, clear and striking as his performance and the set and music for ''Adolfo und Maria.''
Cowboys,
Dreams and Ladders
The Tenderfoot Gang
Burt Supree March
13, 1984 The Village Voice
Ishmael Houston-Jones and Fred Holland’s Cowboys,
Dreams and Ladders at the Kitchen had that amiable roominess that allows viewers to hook into what they like and let
whatever doesn’t especially grab them slide by. It’s so easy, especially when the performers have such affability
and charm. Collage is perhaps too formal a description for a conversational and apparently casual piece like Cowboys,
which mingles child and grown-up imaginings (not so dissimilar) of cowboys and the frontier, with cozy, incidental humor of
the everyday sort, with film of Urban Western Rodeo founder Carlos Foster speaking on a hard-to-hear tape,
and with jumping and crawling, sliding and scrambling, grabbing and hanging-on movement for Houston-Jones and Holland, who
set up one tangle after another with each other. And Yvonne Meier who slices into the pieces in a diagonal
beam of light somewhere past the middle of it, then settles iin to complain about the deprivations of a cowgirl - she’s
got to wear a skirt, she doesn’t get to wear cowboy boots, she doesn’t get a rifle...
Holland has arranged
the physical, visual setup at the Kitchen to be rather elegant and spacious. Its areas seems to expand in sections going
into the distance. The two pillars in the space divide the fore and middle-ground. A screen of clear plastic sheets - upon
which projections of bleary clouds, for instance, or a red crescent moon appear - shields the back of the space. But through
the plastic we can see two cowboys drinking and playing cards during much of the piece, and through doors in the wall behind
the screen, we see a cowboy, no, a cowperson, hanging. Throughout the room various objects are arranged or scattered: cutout
cacti, ladders, a child’s phonograph (maybe it’s not a child’s, but it’s small and the sound is lousy),
something that looks like a tumbleweed made of barbed wire, but which I later think is made of grapevine, a chest, a wooden
stepladder, a detour sawhorse topped with a yellow blinker, a refrigerator carton lying on its side. A cowboy sits sleeping
with his hat tipped over his eyes. The phonograph plays “Turkey in the Straw,” “Streets of Laredo,”
Lone Ranger music....
The refrigerator box crashes over. A man with rattling spurs and a rifle walks out, saunters
over, and changes the record. Is it Glenn Ford? No, it’s Holland. He pulls a tied-up body out of the carton, drags
it across the floor, turns down the volume on the phonograph. He starts telling us about going to the toy store to buy a
little wind up cowboy and Indian on horseback: the cowboy scratches along in a semi-straight line, the Indian drifts into
a circle. Holland keeps winding them up and setting them on the floor, gabbing about returning them to the toy store. The
Indian can’t ride straight. “Maybe it’s my attitude,” sats Holland. Houston-Jones, meantime, is the
tied-up fellow squirming and struggling around on the floor. “At this point, I’m supposed to untie Ishmael,”
confides Holland, but he;s more interested in trying the toys one more time. “I’m supposed to do it now,”
he repeats in a bit, “but I’m going to play a record.” When he finally does release Houston-Jones, he doesn’t
make it easy. He throws a knife into the floor. Houston-Jones, facing back, works his way to the upright blade. But just
as he gets close, Holland says, “This is where he earns it,” and pulls him back to where he started. Eventually,
H-J inches back to the knife, and cuts his bonds to the beat of the music.
We’ve seen ourselves in all the
cowboy roles, molded them to suit our own imaginations. But it’s a cinch to feel affection for other people’s
versions, particularly when they favor antic grace over stiffness or brutality.
There are no secrets. Everything’s
laid out. “Up a hair with the crickets,” says H-J and the sound is augmented. We’re all friends here and
we’re all capable of going along with a fantasy. Next, there’s gunfight practice with a pointed finger, then
with a gun. H-J sticks it through his belt loop. On Main Street he’d be dead 63 times before he’d get it out.
H-J gets shot, and falls quivering in semi-endless death throes with a coda for one foot vibrating hard against the
floor. Then they dive to the floor for their guns in beautiful, eloquent, ridiculous slow-motion. Once is not enough. Holland
is always fastest. He keep shooting H-J but H-J doesn’t die and keeps n coming. Holland whacks him with the rifle.
H-J chokes Holland against the rifle barrel. Then Holland dives over Houston-Jones to start a jumping, falling, crashing,
skittering-all-over fight.
While Holland runs around with his lariat, Houston-Jones chats about the research for
the piece. Going to the Dance Collection at the Library and Museum of the Performing Arts and looking at a video of Oklahoma,
along with “a leather freak watching anything by Nureyev and a bunch of college kids watching Pilobolus.” They
were looking for videotapes of a black rodeo in Boley, Oklahoma. Instead, they learned that most Western movement for dance
has to be done in second position plie to suggest riding a horse. We hear about H-J’s experience trying to ride Foster’s
horse, Santiago, while Holland fusses nervously, doing little side-to-side stepping shuffling moves. Seems the horse wasn’t
in any mood to take on amateurs.
Then Meier enters - coiling, snapping, dipping to banjo music, within her narrowly
defined pth of light. She speeds up, twisting and falling and kicking and whipping ever which way.
The beam fades,
and H-J and Holland and Meier tune themselves together and apart in slow, swiveling moves. The music of “The Man Who
Shot Liberty Valance” punches them into stronger and more dynamic movement - jumping, kicking, free-form crashing, with
lots of rolling over and pretend dying. “Where’s my spurs?” complains Meier, afterwards. “Where’s
my hat?” “How come I got no gun?” she grumbles in her German-accented English “This is a sexist number,”
she decides. Then, lying on her bak in the dark, she slowly sings “Red River Valley” in German. Even I can understand
it. A little girl walks around lighting candles at tiny crechelike stable-altars. A boy further away runs a small electric
train around the usual oval track. H-J and Holland are making softly curling, dying movements. The lights in the altars
gleam. Carlos Foster, on tape, is saying something very important about authority.
Authority? It’s a word
from another world. Lulled and tickled, I hardly know what it means. The warm personalities of the performers, their comfort
within the loose structure of the dance, the merging of amusing, occasional details with the fancies of fictional history,
the agreeable absence of anything rally personal or touchy combined with the very potent intimacy of performers who’ve
worked a lot together - all these gives Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders the translucent depth of a world you’re
not n a hurry to leave. And, like diving to see the creatures of the reef, you’ve got to come up slowly when the air
runs out.
At the Kitchen (February 23 to 26).
DANCE: NEW 'COWBOYS' IN IMPROVISED WEST
By Jennifer Dunning Published: February
26, 1984 New York Times
Ishmael Houston-Jones and Fred Holland had an idea of great
potential interest in their new Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders, performed Thursday at the Kitchen, where it will play
through tonight. The improvisational theater-dance piece would explore images of the West, from real- life cowboys to childhood
dreams. An added interest would be that those cowboys, like Mr. Houston-Jones and Mr. Holland, were black. But the 50- minute
work never added up to more than the sum of its scattered individual parts.
Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders
opened with a rambling unclear monologue from Mr. Holland about buying wind-up toys. Behind a scrim at the back, two men play
cards and a body hangs, a ladder next to it. A bound and gagged Mr. Houston-Jones lies near Mr. Holland, who has pulled him
out of an empty refrigerator packing box. Mr. Houston-Jones cuts himself loose. The two practice quick draws, play records
and diving-for- the-gun games. There's a mock punchup that turns more real later on. And a little girl wanders in with a lighted
toy horse.
A black cowboy rides a white horse in a film by Mr. Holland, with commentary that provides tantalizingly
meager information about an Oklahoma town settled by blacks. Mr. Holland imitates a horse, invoking the name of Carlos
A. Foster, founder of the Urban Western Rodeo program in the Bronx, to whom the piece is dedicated. The little girl
returns to light candles and read by flashlight in the refrigerator box, and a little boy plays at the back with an electric
train. The personable Yvonne Meier sings ''Red River Valley'' in German. Then night falls on the littered
landscape, and the piece ends.
Embedded in all this is a funny brief monologue on watching videotapes at the Lincoln
Center Dance Collection, delivered by Mr. Houston- Jones, who has a wonderfully warm, rich speaking voice. Miss Meier's terse
execution of a little post-Tharpian solo has its moments. And a slow-motion duet - half battle, half caress - serves as a
reminder of how good Mr. Houston-Jones and Mr. Holland are at contact or gymnastic- dance improvisation.
