Ishmael Houston-Jones (born 1951) is a choreographer, author, performer, teacher, curator, and arts advocate known for his improvisational dance and language work. His work has been performed in New York City, across the United States, in Europe, Canada, Australia and Latin America. Houston-Jones and Fred Holland shared a 1984 New York Dance and Performance Bessie Award for their work Cowboys, Dreams and LaddersArchiveGrid : Cowboys, dreams, and ladders [videorecording] / [created by] Ishmael Houston-Jones and Fred Holland performed at The Kitchen and he shared another Bessie Award in 2011 with writer Dennis Cooper and composer Chris Cochrane for the 2010 revival of their 1985 collaboration, THEM. THEM was performed at Performance Space 122 (PS 122), the American Realness Festival, Springdance in Utrecht, Tanz im August in Berlin, REDCAT in Los Angeles, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and at TAP, Theatre and Auditorium of Poitiers, France. The 1985 premier performance of THEM at PS122 was part of New York's first AIDS benefit.
Life and career
Early years
Charles Houston Jones, born 1951 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, was the only child of North Jones and Pauline Jones, née Houston. He attended public primary and secondary school there and he attended his first dance class when he was 16 years old and a junior at William Penn High School. The Harrisburg Community Theater offered free dance classes to teenagers, and as he was involved in theater in school he went. This jazz-based show was his first experience performing dance. He enrolled as an English/Drama major at Gannon College, (now Gannon University) in Erie, Pennsylvania in 1969. There was no dance program and he only studied there for two years before he "accidentally" dropped out. He was traveling the summer after his sophomore year of college with the intention of returning to school in the fall, but he found himself in Israel, and decided to stay there for a year. He worked as a pig farmer for nine months at Kibbutz Lahav in the Negev Desert. Then he worked for three months on a banana plantation at Kibbutz Adamit in the Galilee on the border with Lebanon. Houston-Jones found 1971 to be a propitious time to be in Israel; it was the years between The Six-Day War and The Yom Kippur War and there was a calm atmosphere among the Israelis. He had always been fascinated by collective socialist living situations, so the idea of being on a kibbutz intrigued him. He had never done any kind of heavy farm work and while there he had to get up at 4 AM: feeding pigs, mating them and working in the slaughterhouse. When he moved north to Adamit he worked harvesting bananas, and at the end of most days, he and his comrades would go skinny-dipping in the Mediterranean. He would sometimes dance on the beach in the nude. Houston-Jones was able to take just one dance class that entire year; the African-American choreographer and dancer Gene Hill Sagan was teaching on a nearby kibbutz. It was around this time that he began to use Ishmael as his first name and hyphenated his parents' surnames, though he never legally changed either.
Philadelphia
After returning to the US in 1972 Houston-Jones moved to Philadelphia. He audited dance classes at Temple University with Helmut Gottschild and Eva Gholson. He then got into the Wigman-based company Group Motion Media TheaterAbout | Group Motion Dance with whom he danced for two years. After leaving Group Motion he began studying improvisation and later performing with Terry Fox and the musician Jeff Cain under the name A Way of Improvising. He also studied with Joan Kerr, Les Ditson, Contact Improvisation with John Gamble and "African" at Ile Ife, the Arthur Hall Afro American Dance Ensemble .The Arthur Hall Collection and Ile Ife Films, Inc It was during this time that he formed a strong comradeship with the visual artist Fred Holland who he met through their mutual involvement with the Painted Bride Art Center. Houston-Jones and Fox were Holland's first dance teachers. Holland went on to make his own award-winning dance/theater works, some in collaboration with Houston-Jones. Houston-Jones began making his own work in 1976. That year, in collaboration with fellow ex-Group Motion dancer Michael Biello & musician Dan Martin, he formed the gay-men's performance collective Two Men Dancing. This group made four evening-length works, most notably What We're Made Of in 1980. This piece was begun during his last year in Philadelphia; after living there for seven years, he moved to New York on Thanksgiving Day, 1979.
New York
Houston-Jones arrived in New York's East Village in early 1980. He did some Contact Improvisation performances at Danspace Project with Danny Lepkoff, with whom he had studied. The East Village community at that time was infused with punk, new wave, drag, drugs and the mixing of a hipper, younger gay population with the modern dance and experimental theater milieux. Houston-Jones, like many dancers at the time, was influenced by the gay/punk/club scene and also by break dancing, graffiti and rap music. The first time Houston-Jones heard future collaborator Chris Cochrane play was at the club 8 BC. Dancers and choreographers would go to 8 BC, Limbo Lounge, the Pyramid Club, or King Tut's Wah-Wah Hut to see shows and also to perform. There was a palpable excitement and eagerness to see what was happening at venues such as PS 122, The Kitchen, Dance Theater Workshop and Danspace Project at Saint Mark's Church. There were smaller, grittier spaces as well like Dixon Placemission/history and Chandelier where something new was happening almost every night. With the exception of the Wah-Wah Hut and Chandelier, Houston Jones performed at all of these venues. It was during this time that Houston-Jones first heard Dennis Cooper read from his book The Tenderness of the Wolves, and knew that he wanted to work with him. At around this time, the pall of AIDS began to hover over the dance world. People in the dance and performance art communities were becoming sick and dying. Dance contemporaries of Houston-Jones (John Bernd, Arnie Zane, Harry Sheppard, et al.) died at this time. Houston-Jones volunteered with the organization God's Love We Deliver, and brought meals to people who were left homebound by the disease.
Also during the early 1980s Houston-Jones traveled twice to Nicaragua. He was there while the Sandinista government was at war with the US-funded Contras. For two weeks in 1983 he was part of a North American delegation at a theater festival and as a guest of the state. He was chauffeured in buses, housed in a hotel, fed in restaurants and generally pampered. The following year, 1984, he returned on his own, staying in a family's rented room and getting around on his own, which he found extremely difficult. He had met some people on his first trip who had arranged for him to teach at the University of Central America, Managua. He taught contact improvisation to Sandinista soldiers. Students would show up in their fatigues, wearing leotards underneath. They would change and prop their rifles against the wall. He was in Nicaragua only over a month but after this second visit he became much more engaged with progressive politics and social issues. It was from these experiences, plus losses due to AIDS, and Reaganomics that his work began to shift and pieces like f/i/s/s/i/o/n/i/n/g, Radio Managua and THEM were created. He also made several collaborative pieces, some with Fred Holland and later with the writer Dennis Cooper. He collaborated with several musician/composers who came from the punk and club scenes, most notably, Chris Cochrane from the bands No Safety and Suck Pretty. During this time he was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts and other agencies and he traveled several times to Europe and Venezuela to perform and to teach.
Professional work
Other significant choreography by Ishmael Houston-Jones includes: 13 Love Songs: dot dot dot, Houston-Jones' collaboration with Emily Wexler which premiered at American Realness in 2014. No Where /Now Here was commissioned for Mordine and Company in Chicago in spring 2001 and Specimens was commissioned for Headlong Dance Theater in Philadelphia in 1998. In 1997 Houston-Jones was the choreographer for Nayland Blake's Hare Follies at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. From 1995 to 2000 Houston-Jones was part of the improvisational trio Unsafe / Unsuited with Keith Hennessy and Patrick Scully .Unsafe Unsuited – YouTube In 1990 he and Dennis Cooper presented The Undead at the Los Angeles Festival of the Arts. In 1989 Houston-Jones collaborated with filmmaker Julie Dash on the video Relatives, which featured a performance by his mother, Pauline H. Jones and was aired nationally on the PBS series Alive From Off-Center (Alive TV). Houston-Jones has collaborated with composers King Britt, Chris Cochrane, Fast Forward, Dave Pavkovik, Chris Peck, Tom Recchion, Leslie Ross and Guy Yarden. He was also a longtime collaborator of Blondell Cummings.
In addition to his own choreography, Houston-Jones has performed in the work of John Bernd, Ping Chong, Dancenoise, Terry Fox, Beth Gill, Miguel Gutierrez (choreographer), Lionel Popkin, Mike Taylor, and Yvonne Meier. He has a small role, (Dancer) in the John Sayles 1984 film The Brother from Another Planet. and he appears in Caspar Strache's 1998 film Circle's Short CircuitCircle's Short Circuit (1998) – IMDb and The Situation Room, 2004,Ticket Sales - Art Basal Weekend: THE SITUATION ROOM #2 at Miami Beach Cinematheque on 12/4/2005 8:30 PM directed by Steve Staso.
Recent
In the early 2000s Houston-Jones made a deliberate decision to stop making dance pieces. He felt that he didn't know what he wanted to say and that he didn't want to just make work just for the sake of making work. He was committed to performing in other people's pieces (Yvonne Meier, Lionel Popkin, and others), but he didn't feel he had anything new to offer of his own. He did, during this time, make pieces with students at Alfred University, the New School, and at the American Dance Festival. He concentrated on teaching, writing, and serving on the boards of several not-for-profit dance organizations: (Headlong Dance Theater,ABOUT | headlong dance theater Danspace Project, Movement Research, and Ashley Anderson Dances .about |)
Then in 2009, after not making professional dance pieces for eight years, Houston-Jones made The Myth and Trials of Calamity Jane and the Son of the Queen of the Amazons in collaboration with Ashley Anderson and This Ring of Fire in collaboration with Daniel Safer both at Dance New Amsterdam, (DNA). Also in 2009 he was asked to revive three of his works from the 1980s: What We're Made Of (1980), DEAD (1981), and THEM (1986). All three revivals were completed and performed in 2010. The re-imagined THEM has since toured to four cities in Europe and to Los Angeles. His most recent piece, 13 Love Songs: dot dot dot, a collaboration with Emily Wexler premiered in January 2014 at the American Realness Festival in New York and toured to the American Dance Festival in North Carolina.
Publications
As an author Ishmael Houston-Jones' essays, fiction, interviews, and performance texts have been anthologized in the books:
• Dance, Documents of Contemporary Art, (White Chapel gallery, 2012); • Conversations on Art and Performance, (Johns Hopkins, 1999); • Footnotes: Six Choreographers Inscribe the Page, (G+B Arts, 1998); • Caught in the Act: A Look at Contemporary Multi-Media Performance, (Aperture, 1996); • Aroused, A Collection of Erotic Writing, (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2001); • Best Gay Erotica 2000, (Cleis Press, 2000); • Best American Gay Fiction, volume 2, (Little Brown, 1997); • and Out of Character: Rants, Raves and Monologues from Today's Top Performance Artists, (Bantam, 1996).