Ishmael Huston-Jones reflects on writer Burt Supree

On BURT SUPREE

From Movement Research Performance Journal #6, spring / summer 1993, heroes and histories

[re-posted with permission from Ishmael Houston-Jones]

I hate moving. I hate making Solomon-like decisions of whether to toss or keep my mountains of magazines. I hate going through archeological digs through molehills of cash receipts. I hate trying to pack my files but finding it impossible not to read every item in each drawer. This has been my life for two months. While wallowing in this neurosis I came upon two ancient reviews by Burt Supree which, of course, I read. Burt’s keen observations about these two pieces made two and a half years apart tell a lot about my work as an artist and how it is informed by the times and frame of mind in which I live and create.

The first piece was Cowboys, Dreams, and Ladders a collaboration with Fred Holland that premiered at The Kitchen in February 1984. In Cowboys Fred and I used a collage of movement, text and visuals to explore and deconstruct the “western” myth through the eyes of two Afro-American “downtown” male performance artists. Trying to place our identities within and without this myth was key, and although we used familiar western iconography, (movie music and crickets on the soundtrack, tumble weed and cacti made of urban debris as sets), the idea of making a performance piece about “Black Cowboys” was often greeted by nervous or ironic giggles by our white peers. I worried that people would not get it. In his review Burt concluded that Fred and I “with the very potent intimacy of performers who have worked a lot together ... give Cowboys, Dreams, and Ladders the translucent depth of a world you’re not in 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.” In other words, he got it. He also wrote that he was able to find such easy empathy with our particular cowboy roles because “... it’s a cinch when they favor antic grace over stiffness of brutality.” I remember reading this review over breakfast at 103 feeling that I had found a critic friend who understood what it was I was trying to do.

The second review was of THEM a collaboration for six male dancers with writer Dennis Cooper and composer/musician Chris Cochrane performed at PS 122 in November 1986. Burt had seen an earlier work-in-progress version but found the completed piece “grimmer ... as if too many emotional and sensual options have been terminated since then.” And though he conceded that THEM wasn’t a piece about AIDS, “AIDS constricts its view and casts a considerable pall.” So again Burt’s critique was on the mark. By November 1986 I already had friends, ex-boyfriends, heroes who were dying of The Plague and making an upbeat work about the ways six men could possibly be together seemed impossible then. I remember feeling nervous the evening Burt came. I knew that his companion had died earlier that week and I was anxious about the nerves the piece tweaked. In the end he wrote a respectful review of a piece that I doubt he liked very much. He ended with what I took as a plea for Ishmael to lighten up (just a little bit) by writing – “Simple pleasures and affections are far away. In Houston-Jones’ outlook the bullying, clamorous, brusque, torn-up aspects of ... relationships are intrinsically knotted up with our passion and tenderness and need... (B)ut our rough human grace is overwhelmed by frustration and defeat.”

I hope that in the years since then, I have learned to regain some of that rough, human (and occasionally antic) grace.

I hate moving.

Ishmael Houston-Jones, 1993

Ishmael Houston-Jones has been living and making work in New York since 1979.