Web Page for ISHMAEL HOUSTON-JONES

RANDOM FACTS

ISHMAEL HOUSTON-JONES, the Coordinator for the Lambent Fellowship in the Arts of TIDES Foundation, (lambentfellowships@tides.org); he is a choreographer, writer, dancer, actor, curator and performer who lives and works in New York City.
EMAIL TO: isaacsbro@aol.com
NEW Website: http://ishmaelhj.com/index.html

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(An earlier version of this Q & A appeared in the book "Out of Character.")


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BIRTH DATE / BIRTHPLACE: 8 June 1951, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, USA
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HONOR: Shared Bessie Award with Fred Holland in 1984.
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PIVOTAL PERFORMANCE: Toss up:
* 1."Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders" my favorite collaboration with Fred Holland, I got to ride a horse, meet a real cowboy in the Bronx and share half the Bessie Award check with Fred.
* 2. "THEM" an intense piece. My first collaboration with Dennis Cooper and Chris Cochrane. Got to dance with a dead goat.
* 3. "f/i/s/s/i/o/n/i/n/g" a solo that really synthesized my art and my politics at the time, plus pictures of me naked made the papers.
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FAVORITE PERFORMING EXPERIENCE: The prologue to "Knife/Tape/Rope" with Jonathan Walker. I was blind folded, tied up, and we danced to Kate Bush on the wrong speed.
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MOST TERRIFYING PERFORMING EXPERIENCE: OK, sticking my head inside that goat carcass in "THEM" was no picnic.
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FAVORITE PROP: Tie:
* The recurring cinder block.
OR
* Carrying my Mom over my shoulder in "Relatives."
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HOBBIES: I have 17+ videotapes of films by the French pornographer Jean Daniel Cadinot.
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READING LIST:
* "A Herd" and "Safe" by Dennis Cooper;
* "Close to the Knives" by David Wojnarowicz;
* "Chelsea Girls" by Eileen Myles;
* "Story of the Eye" by Georges Bataille;
* "Public Sex" by Pat Califia;
* "Into the Wild" and "Into Thin Air" by Jon Krakauer;
* "My Dead Face" by Travis Jeppeson;
* Straight To Hell #s 29 thru 61 ( #s 31,32,33,37,38,39,55,56 missing; hint, hint).
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EARLY 80'S BRUSHES WITH FUTURE FAME:
* 1. Worked in a SoHo restaurant, FOOD, alongside Joie Lee (Spike's sister) and Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth). Customers of note -- Robert Mapplethorpe, Duane Michals, David Byrne, Meryl Streep, Caroline Kennedy.
* 2. Had a substance fueled night in an Amsterdam hotel with a "graffiti" artist who later had a posthumous one man show at the Whitney.
* 3. Shared an apartment on the Lower East Side with the actor Steve Buscemi when he made his first film, "Parting Glances."
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FAVORITE MUSIC (in no particular order): Stereolab, Tricky, Magnetic Fields /6ths, Outkast, Fat Boy Slim, MIMI, Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn, Ween, Guided By Voices. Vintage Prince, Aretha, Nina Simone, and Cesaria Evora.
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FAVORITE (non-porn) FILMS
* "All About Eve,"
* "Julia,"
* "West Side Story,"
* "Midnight Cowboy,"
* "Naked Killer,"
* "Naked"
* "Bound,"
* "The Producers"
* "The Manchurian Candidate"
* and "Flesh," "Heat," and "Trash"
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QUOTE: "This is no dream, this is really happening," Rosemary, as she's being f***ed by the Devil.

BIO

SOME MAJOR WORKS
* In 2001 ISHMAEL HOUSTON-JONES was commissioned to create "Nowhere, Now Here" for Mordine and Company in Chicago.
* In 1998 HOUSTON-JONES' "Specimens" was commissioned for Headlong Dance Theater in Philadelphia.
* In 1997 he was the choreographer for Nayland Blake's "Hare Follies" as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Artists in Action Series.
* In 1990 he and writer Dennis Cooper presented "The Undead" at the Los Angeles Festival of the Arts.
* In 1989 he collaborated with filmmaker Julie Dash on the video "Relatives," which was aired nationally on the PBS series Alive From Off-Center.
* In 1984 Houston-Jones and Fred Holland shared a New York Dance and Performance "Bessie Award" for their "Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders."

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TOURING
ISHMAEL HOUSTON-JONES' improvised dance and text work has been performed in New York City at Performance Space 122; The Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church; The Brooklyn Academy of Music; The Kitchen; Dixon Place; The Knitting Factory; and Dance Theater Workshop.

Across the United States his work has been presented in Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Chicago, Memphis, Atlanta, Houston, San Antonio, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Boston, Anchorage, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon.

Internationally his work has toured in
EUROPE (The Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Scotland, and England);
CANADA (Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver);
AUSTRALIA (Sydney); and
LATIN AMERICA (Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba).

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COLLABORATIONS
In addition to those listed above, major collaborators have been:
* dancers Steven Craig, Stanya Kahn, Keith Hennessy and Patrick Scully;
* designers Huck Snyder and John DeFazio;
* photographer Robert Flynt;
* videographer Cathy Weis; and
* composers Chris Cochrane, Fast Forward, Dave Pavkovic, Tom Recchion, Leslie Ross and Guy Yarden.
* He has appeared in the work of John Bernd, Ping Chong, DANCENOISE, Terry Fox, Yvonne Meier, and in the films "Brother from Another Planet" by John Sayles and "Circle's Short Circuit" by Caspar Stracke.

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PUBLICATIONS
Houston-Jones' essays, fiction, interviews, and performance texts have been anthologized in the books:
* Aroused, edited by Karen Finley (Thunder's Mouth Press)
* Best Gay Erotica 2000 (Cleis Press)
* Best American Gay Fiction, volume 2 (Little Brown);
* Caught in the Act (Aperture);
* Conversations on Art & Performance (Johns Hopkins);
* Footnotes: Six Choreographers Inscribe the Page (G+B Arts); and
* Out of Character (Bantam).

His work has also been published in the magazines: Movement Research Journal; Contact Quarterly; Real Time; Mirage; FARM; I See Gays; and Porn Free.

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CURATING
* Ishmael Houston-Jones in currently the curator for the DraftWork Series at the Danspace Project
* He co-curated, with Yvonne Meier, the Festival of Swiss Dance at the Swiss Institute New York for New Europe �
* Houston-Jones was a guest curator for the Mad Alex reading series in 1998.
* He curated the Parallels Series of New Black Dance and the Dive-In Series at The Danspace Project in 1982

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TEACHING
ISHMAEL HOUSTON-JONES has been a guest teacher at the European Dance Development Center and the School for New Dance Development in Holland; La Escuela de Danza Nacional in Nicaragua; the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; the American Dance Festival at Duke University; New York University; Wesleyan University and at numerous Performing Arts Festivals worldwide.

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FUNDING
The work of ISHMAEL HOUSTON-JONES has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Ford Foundation, and Art Matters, Inc.

PRESS

THE MORE THAN VISUAL
by Eleanor Brickhill

ISHMAEL HOUSTON-JONES, "In the Dark," "Rougher," "Without Hope"
Ishmael Houston-Jones did not want us to see him at all, yelled to make the lights go out, sang a song in which he called a moth, "Here mothy, mothy, mothy." He calls our focus to his voice.

"In the Dark", Houston-Jones' first work, gives us the sound and effort of movement, boots crashing round on the floor, uneven breathing, his voice telling us about Darryl who could only criticise dance in purely visual terms. We can't see his body, but the amount of distortion in his voice and breath shows what sort of energy there is. We know where he is; we have images; there are things going on. Rather than invisibility, the work seems more and more to be about exploring what is revealed.

"Rougher" is really softer. Wearing a blindfold, he sees only by the direction of light and the shadow of his hands in front of his eyes. He randomly switches a hand-held light off and on, illuminating parts of his body: palm, calf, chest, under-arm. He swings it around, shifting the shadows, creating lines, setting up images of flesh, fleeting art. In a spotlight, we watch as he lifts his long shirt to reveal his crutch, a peculiarly vulnerable gesture.

In "Without Hope" a heavy concrete brick becomes a tool with which Houston-Jones vividly illustrates a series of horrific injuries suffered by some fragile human. He speaks clinically, an autopsy report, but the weight and roughness of the concrete is real and felt. Sometimes it pins him down; it is cradled, kissed, drunk from, dropped. Sometimes he lies over it, as supplicant or penitent we're not sure. Other no-win, no-choice stories: a New York law -- if someone is dying, then doctors may prolong that life by mechanical means. But then, removing that mechanism amounts to manslaughter.-- Frida Kahlo's text provides the title, "Without Hope." Her suffering, while sometimes thought to be self-inflicted, is still real, both subject and impetus for her work.

As a subject of scrutiny, a body that is just itself, flesh, nerves, hormones, is defenceless in a way, open to whatever description an audience provides. To be scrutinised, to come face to face with mass judgment, does not seem to be a choice that "people who do gigs for a living" can make. It is a heavy weight to bear if you know it can also destroy you. Lastly, we see his eyes for the first time, looking up, engaging. His gestures are protective, indicating exposed jugular, glands, areas of fragility. It is then we know that this body, substantial, weighty, but full of the delicacy of nerves, breath and blood, is a vulnerable thing, capable of immense complexity, but easily damaged. The reality of humanity is not something one has a choice about.
REAL TIME,
Sydney, Australia Spring 1999
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FALLEN ANGELS IN ENERGETIC THEATRICALITY
By Jennifer Dunning

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.

Copyright 1998 The New York Times
Saturday, December 12, 1998

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