"THEM" returns to its East Village birthplace

Johnnie Mercer Cruise and Hentyle Yapp
dance in THEM at Performance Space New York.
(photo: Rachel Papo)

Michael Watkiss and Alvaro Gonzalez Dupuy
(photo: Rachel Papo)

THEM

Conceived, directed, and performed by:

Chris Cochrane (music/sound)
Dennis Cooper (text/spoken word performance)
Ishmael Houston-Jones (movement)

at Performance Space New York (East Village Series)

*****

Tilt in the direction of a memory, starting anywhere. With sound: a deepening drone. With light: splashed across a man's back and legs otherwise engulfed by semidarkness. With bodies: still, lining the margins, covered in shadows.

THEM (made at and for Performance Space 122, premiered in 1986, now revived for Performance Space New York) is a way of remembering the AIDS epidemic and the lives downtown artists led and lost. With Chris Cochrane's electric guitar--caustic shredding, blurting, pounding dissonance. With Dennis Cooper's text--direct and revealing, vulnerable, delivered from off to one side, with isolating distance and longing observation. With dancers, led and gathered by Ishmael Houston-Jones, who toss themselves across the space and at each other with fiery abandon, who occupy the expanse, crafting a world necessary for themselves and their kind. With rites of gesture and behavior. With exploration through touch. With play. With aggression. With a visceral sense of the overpowering, inescapable presence of death...and Death.

The theater at Performance Space New York has just the right degree of plain-and-grim to help this memory work. Houston-Jones's score has been improvised by each of his dancers; the current revival's vigorous cohort includes Alvaro Gonzalez Dupuy, Johnnie Cruise Mercer, Michael Parmelee, Jeremy Pheiffer, Kensaku Shinohara, Michael Watkiss, and Hentyle Yapp. (Mercer and Yapp are especially headstrong, cogent performers, alone or together.) A spare, functional design--here a simple white mattress; there a menacing plank of wood--makes human movements and energies pop in the space, setting the stage for the emergence of a nightmare buried deep in the work and the blaring sirens (invoking, at once, a speeding ambulance and a city under threat) with which Cochrane drags the work to its end.

THEM continues tonight (7:30pm) and Thursday (7pm) with a post-show talk with Visual AIDS on Thursday. For information and tickets, click here.

Performance Space New York
150 First Avenue, 4th Floor (between 9th and 10th Streets), Manhattan

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Your list of the 2017 Bessie recipients...and thanks!

RECIPIENTS OF 

THE 2017 NY DANCE AND PERFORMANCE (BESSIE) AWARDS

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar
Artistic Director, Urban Bush Women
(photo: Crush Boone)

A Lifetime Achievement in Dance Bessie Award
was given to Jawole Willa Jo Zollar
last evening at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts,
presented by dancer-choreographer Dianne McIntyre.

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT IN DANCE

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar

For forming Urban Bush Women in 1984 and bringing to the stage a complex, bold, and affirming vision of the African Diaspora. For transforming and diversifying the field by developing new ways of training, curating, connecting, and lifting up generations of choreographers of color. For a visionary life both on the stage and in the world.

OUTSTANDING SERVICE TO THE FIELD OF DANCE

Eva Yaa Asantewaa

For her capacity to reflect, contextualize, and discern dance work, providing an urgent and necessary voice for dance artists and their varied practices. For her work as writer, educator, mentor, and activist over many decades in print, radio, and online. For strengthening the city’s arts community as an important witness, an intentional healer, and a mindful presence.

OUTSTANDING PRODUCTION

Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer Bridgman|Packer Dance for Voyeur at the Sheen Center

For groundbreaking use of video in live performance, creating a space where virtual and actual movement merged. For inhabiting Edward Hopper’s imagery and taking the audience on an inventive journey of private spaces and ever-shifting viewpoints.

Antony Hamilton for Meeting at La MaMa with Performance Space 122, COIL 2017

For obsessive, precise choreography that synthesized two men’s movements with a circle of robots’ percussive tapping into a mesmerizing whole. For a work both abstract and profoundly human.

Ligia Lewis for minor matter at American Realness with Lumberyard Contemporary Performing Arts at Abrons Arts Center

For interrogating the social inscriptions on the black body within the frame of the black box. Moving with the logic of interdependence, three dancers push against the theater’s physical space transforming it into a visceral world pulsing with love and rage.

Taylor Mac for A 24-Decade History of Popular Music at St. Ann’s Warehouse with Pomegranate Arts

For an epic, tireless, and bold 24-hour performance that generated thought and action through the deep investigation of music's role in our common humanity. A carefully curated concert featuring 246 songs, extravagant visual transformations, and a community-creating ritual of hope.

Abdel Salaam for Healing Sevens with Forces of Nature Dance Theatre, Asase Yaa African American Dance Theatre, Illstyle & Peace Productions, and Dyane Harvey Salaam at DanceAfrica, BAM Howard Gilman Opera House

For the combined efforts of three stellar companies using West African, hip-hop, and modern dance forms to find new ways of storytelling, new ways to deliver healing truths. For exploring how multiple generations of a community can look within to resolve conflict and violence

OUTSTANDING REVIVAL

Ishmael Houston-Jones, Miguel Gutierrez, Nick Hallett, and Jennifer Monson for Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes From a Life and Other Works by John Bernd at Danspace Project’s Platform 2016: Lost and Found

For channeling the artistic vision of John Bernd, whose narrative, along with those so many others, was cut short by AIDS. For shepherding a young cast into communion with the spirit of the work. For responding to, reimagining, and restoring a missing chapter of our creative history.

OUTSTANDING PERFORMER

PeiJu Chien-Pott in Martha Graham’s Ekstasis, reimagined by Virginie Mécéne, Martha Graham Dance Company at The Joyce Theater

For bringing to life a lost Martha Graham solo from 1933, masterfully inhabiting the earthy, percussive, and fluid movements of pelvis and torso, and embodying the very essence of Graham’s ecstatic vision.

Anna Schön for Sustained Achievement in the work of Reggie Wilson’s Fist & Heel Performance Group

A bold presence and generous performer who moves with raw emotion and lightning speed while remaining sensitive to and connected with her fellow dancers. A deeply spiritual dancer who brings utter conviction to every performance.

Ensemble of the skeleton architecture, or the future of our worlds: Maria Bauman, Sidra Bell, Davalois Fearon, Marjani Forté-Saunders, Melanie Greene, Kayla Hamilton, Jasmine Hearn, Marguerite Hemmings, Nia Love, Paloma McGregor, Sydnie L. Mosley, Rakiya Orange, Grace Osborne, Leslie Parker, Angie Pittman, Samantha Speis, Charmaine Warren, Marýa Wethers, Ni’Ja Whitson, and others*

Curated by Eva Yaa Asantewaa for Danspace Project’s Platform 2016: Lost and Found

For a history-in-the-making performance that dismantled improvisational dance norms to create a robust, disruptive, and dynamic world. For a cast of individuals who used a full range of movement styles to take the audience from Dakar to Kingston, the Bronx to Bushwick, in a fluid dance of connection.

*Edisa Weeks and Tara Aisha Willis were also in the cast but are ineligible as they serve on the Bessie Selection Committee.

Daaimah Taalib-Din for Sustained Achievement with Forces of Nature Dance Theatre

A chameleon of dance styles from traditional African to contemporary African Diasporic forms. A dynamic presence in every work in which she dances, moving from highly stylized to smoothly nuanced with impeccable grace and technique.

OUTSTANDING MUSICAL COMPOSITION/SOUND DESIGN

Alisdair Macindoe for Meeting by Antony Hamilton at La MaMa with Performance Space 122, COIL 2017

For creating a complex percussive score using 64 tiny robots armed with tapping pencils. For adding the virtuosic rhythms of two dancers slapping hands and reciting numbers to create a unique soundscape that was both relentless and strangely satisfying.

OUTSTANDING VISUAL DESIGN

Taylor Mac (creator), Niegel Smith (director), Machine Dazzle (costume), Mimi Lien (set), John Torres (lights), Eric Avery (puppetry), Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (choreography) for A 24-Decade History of Popular Music at St. Ann’s Warehouse with Pomegranate Arts

For a thoroughly considered and painstakingly crafted visual experience revealed over 24-hours and 24-decades of American history. For a complex, complementary, and immersive mix of scenography, costumes, lighting, puppets, and crowd control which transformed a concert into a sublime engagement of all the senses.

Two awards were presented in July at the 2017 Bessie Awards press conference:

The 2017 Emerging Choreographer Award went to Will Rawls for creating astute, genre-eluding work that explores the relationship between movement and language and delves deeply into ideas of transmission, translation, and authorship; and for his multifaceted artistry as choreographer, writer, editor, and curator, expanding the presence of dance and performance.

This year’s Juried Bessie Award went to Abby Zbikowski for her rigorous and utterly unique development of an authentic movement vocabulary, employed in complex and demanding structures to create dances of great energy, intensity, surprise, and danger. The 2017 Bessies Jury was comprised of Kyle Abraham, Brenda Bufalino, and Beth Gill.

To view the livestream video, click here.

For more information on the Bessies, click here.

****** 

Congratulations to all the Bessie recipients and nominees. I am grateful for your commitment, your work, all you create and share to build and sustain this field.

My deepest thanks to Lucy Sexton and the Bessies Committee for the profound honor of receiving the 2017 Award for Outstanding Service to the Field of Dance. I could not be more moved by this recognition of my work and by the amazing, loving introduction byThomas F. DeFrantz. I suppose I will have to carry y'all a little bit longer, but the work is as joyful as it is necessary.

My deepest respect and love to the members of the new collective, Skeleton Architecture. Congratulations on the award we all knew you were destined to receive. As individual artists, each of you have already given so much to the art of dance. Your exceptional performance together at Danspace Project in 2016 wrote an exciting new chapter in all of these individual stories, now part of Bessies history. As a collective now, you will write your future...and ours. We cannot wait to see what you have to teach us!

Much love,Eva

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How about a little less Bill?

Actual listing for Bill Chats

from TimeOut.com, February 13, 2014:

Bill T. Jones sits across noted artists in a series of talks.

Last Sunday evening, I attended Bill Chats: When did the avant-garde become black?--a two-hour panel discussion hosted and moderated by Bill T. Jones at New York Live Arts. Since then, I've largely kept my own counsel as I sorted out thoughts that progressed from ambivalence to outright dismay.

From these "chats" to Jones's ambitious Live Ideas event series--last year, inspired by Oliver Sacks; this time by James Baldwin--it's clear that Jones intends to place his singular mark on the entity now known as New York Live Arts. He's steering it out into broader, deeper, more intellectually heady and political waters and aims to attract a sophisticated audience not necessarily affiliated with contemporary dance. I think good things can come of this for dance as well as for those smart newcomers to the art, although it has the potential to rattle and possibly alienate the more tightly focused folks in our dance community.

I do like this potential encounter and overlapping of worlds; it mirrors my own interests. I'm even more excited about the Baldwin programming for Live Ideas than I was about the Sacks series, but what I saw of Bill Chats worries me.

I'll step out in front of this and just say it: It's not a "chat" if you're hectoring your guests and some of your audience members. It's not a "chat" if you invite the following extraordinary panelists--

Ishmael Houston-Jones
Bebe Miller
Adrienne Edwards
Dianne McIntyre
Charmaine Warren
Ralph Lemon
Brenda Dixon Gottschild

--each of whom is a living archive and then get so caught up in your own button-pushing agenda, your own history, and your own sense of being stereotyped or slighted that you rarely take time to tap the considerable knowledge that your guests possess. That's a Murderer's Row of experience, scholarship and sensibilities just sitting around you, Mr. Jones, hardly utilized.

How useful is this self-declared role of "provocateur"--everything "said with a wink and a 'fuck you' smile," as Jones would have it--in the long run? Curtly dismissing Ralph Lemon's analysis in his opening statement--why? because there wasn't enough "feeling" in it?--was not cool and felt disrespectful. Suddenly putting John Jasperse on the spot, as a white choreographer sitting in the audience, really wasn't cool either. Cryptic shoutouts to the soon-departing Carla Peterson--"I'm doing it right now, Carla!"--sound just ill-tempered. These behaviors don't actually advance discussion of complex issues. They are merely showy and rude.

A chat is also not a performance. A performance is not a chat.

In other words, it is so not about you.

For future Bill Chats, please let the panelists breathe. Give them room to stretch and run. You cannot choreograph their voices, and you should not try.

We show up because we want to hear what they have to say.

Danspace Project to honor the late arts advocate Elizabeth H. Berger

Elizabeth Berger (1960-2013)

Danspace Project's Board of Directors 

invites you to

Elizabeth H. Berger Tribute

Monday, March 10, 7-8pm

Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church

131 East 10th Street at Second Avenue, Manhattan

Please join us at Danspace Project on March 10 at 7pm as we recognize the life of Elizabeth H. Berger (1960-2013) and her dedication to and love of the arts community. The tribute will celebrate her profound impact on the arts in New York City as a board member, advisor and lobbyist for numerous arts organizations, including more than a decade of service as a Danspace Project Board Member from 1990-2002, serving as Board President for eight of those years.

To honor Liz, the Danspace Project Board of Directors is establishing the Elizabeth H. Berger Fund, which will support choreographers and dancers as they create new work. We encourage you to remember Liz by contributing to this new fund.

The evening will feature tributes by family and friends and short performances by Ishmael Houston-Jones, John Kelly, and a screening of THREE (1998) directed by Isaac Julien with choreography by Ralph Lemon and Bebe Miller. A reception will follow.

To RSVP (if you have not already) and request more information, please contact Peggy Cheng at peggy@danspaceproject.org or 212-674-3838.

Bill T. Jones asks "When did the avant-garde become black?"

Bill T. Jones

Bill T. Jones 

and New York Live Arts

invite you to

Bill Chats

When did the avant-garde become black?

at New York Live Arts

Sunday, March 23, 5pm

In this talk, noted panelists including Ralph Lemon, Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Adrienne Edwards, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Diane McIntyre, Bebe Miller and Charmaine Warren will inquire as to when it became acceptable for a person who defines themselves as avant-garde to also say “I’m black.”

Admission: FREE

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
212-924-0077
(map/directions)

Bill Chats will be live streamed in collaboration with live streaming startup 2ndline.tv.

"I didn't mean it when I said...": Houston-Jones and Wexler at Abrons

Ishmael Houston-Jones and Emily Wexler
(photo by Ian Douglas)

Here's what they tell us:

Separated by a generation -- he’s in his 60s she in her 30s, and differing in gender and ethnicity – male, female; black, white, these two innovative dance artists have found common ground in their mutual belief that the pop love song is corrosive. That these songs damage any hope at finding true love with their sickening, cloying, and cheesy lyrics.

Dancers Ishmael Houston-Jones and Emily Wexler have made a collage of songs--from Mariah Carey's "We Belong Together" to a pretty British folk ballad by Kate Rusby to the narcotized version of "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin" by Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood. These numbers form an offbeat soundtrack for the dancers' episodic duet, 13 Love Songs:dot dot dot. The often flimsy lyrics--like the inclusion of the artists' demographics in the above promotional statement--seem almost besides the point.

A world premiere at American Realness 2014, 13 Love Songs:dot dot dot runs for one hour during which Houston-Jones and Wexler strip romantic love of its seductive disguises and get down to realness. Manic, desperate, childlike, gritty, aggressive, sticky, comic, addictive, ecstatic, visceral realness. Subjected to harsh light and throwing towering shadow. The animal body speaking in signs and howling its insides out.

In one segment, set to Pascal Rogé's recording of Satie's Gymnopédies, the dancers repeatedly attach to each other then melt, stretch and peel away, clearly remaining connected in a blend of sweat, smell and vibration. In another, Wexler reads from old diary entries about an unrequited crush--I'm guessing these are authentic ones she wrote in high school*--using a megaphone to liberate what was once folded away in privacy. "How pathetic, worthless and small I was," she says at one point. Maybe it's because we've all been there, done that, but the audience giggles at many of her words and even Wexler flashes a radiant grin as she says, "Why the hell are you still alive?"

As I see it here, the body is all. The body undermines and overwhelms words. The body is gutsy, often subversive and self-revealing. Both of these powerful dancers--"he's in his 60s she in her 30s"--give themselves over to everything.

And then they ask audience members to give themselves over, in love and worship, to the everything that is their own bodies. The concluding passage invites a fraction of the audience to come into the performing space to engage in a somatic meditation led by Wexler. Meanwhile, Houston-Jones constructs a shrine off to one side, complete with votive candles and several taped-up photo portraits. He sits in lotus pose before these faces, singing the refrain "You are everything and everything is you...." from The Stylistics hit song. Both approaches--Self vs. Other; be-in-the-present vs. live-in-memories--could be corny but, as finally presented here, don't feel corny; both of these created spaces appear genuine.

As I'm sure you're aware by now, Houston-Jones and Wexler and, by extension, Ben Pryor's American Realness festival, got an exceptionally harsh write-up in The New York Times. Obviously, I disagree with this critique of 13 Love Songs:dot dot dot and its artists as well as Michelle Boulé's WONDER (which I saw and reviewed here last May). I have not seen Adrienne Truscott's performance, but the short-sightedness and petulance of the entire review leads me to believe that I might well have missed something of value.

[*Since I posted this review, Wexler has told me that the diaries date back to 4th through 10th grade.]

For your entertainment, let me direct you to something Houston-Jones wrote and posted on Facebook yesterday morning. You will find it here.

Remaining performances of 13 Love Songs:dot dot dot are tonight at 7pm, Friday, January 17 at 5:30pm and Saturday, January 18 at 2:30pm. For schedule and ticketing information, click here.

For complete information about American Realness 2014 at Abrons Arts Center, click here.

Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People at BAM Next Wave Festival

A soft, glowing globe--like a goddess breast of white, translucent parachute cloth--looms over cramped performance space carved out by three angled thrusts of audience seating, their front edges cutting right into that surface in BAM Fisher's Fishman Space. Miguel Gutierrez hasn't given himself--or his dancers...or us, for that matter--much room to maneuver. And yet, during its 90 minutes, And lose the name of action aims to channel big, hefty other worlds and states of being and perception.

L-r: Luke George, Miguel Gutierrez, Ishmael Houston-Jones and K.J. Holmes (Photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Performed by Gutierrez with a stellar cast of collaborators--Michelle Boulé, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Luke George, Hilary Clark and K.J. Holmes--And lose the name of action takes its premise from the choreographer's interest in neuroscience and the senses and, in particular, what he sees as the absence, in any discourse on philosophy and innovations in neuroscience, of any mention of what dancers know about the body. On a deeply personal level, though, it is also influenced by his father's struggles with a neurological disorder.

His program notes for the piece (worth a read, if you get a copy) conclude,

Along the way, I became intrigued with seemingly irrational ideas from the paranormal field, with their focus on insubstantial bodies, and I created a link between this field and my experiences performing and watching dance, which itself constantly disappears and haunts, and the hallucinatory experience of watching my father and family undergo a change I could never have predicted and only barely understand now.

From the outset, even before the performance begins, something is in the air. A heavy, soapy scent, actually. I can't swear this is deliberate--not something an audience member was wearing--but Gutierrez is interested in the senses. And so...maybe. And there's a very low-level sound thing going on, too. Something chiming, some voice or voices barely detectable beneath the audience chatter and the usher's anxious seating instructions.

The piece, itself, goes on to wink and wobble and lurch so much that it sometimes dumps and spills us out of its disoriented/disorienting state as much as it envelopes us. The relatively brief audience participation in a kind of seance presided over by a smarmy Houston-Jones seems especially wink-y--and yet, also, genuinely intense with all the dancers chanting and stiffly splaying their limbs in spirit-infused rapture.

Gutierrez either contains or explodes energy, feeling, thought. Sequences of hand gestures are performed with great calm despite a sense of obsessive and/or sacred ritualization--playing a piano runs into typing runs into chopping runs into declaiming without words and bigger, formal, ritualistic movements in duets or groups. In inexplicable but interesting spotlit-moments, Houston-Jones makes like a ninja sprite and Boulé, like a drunken Isadora. Dancers spill into the space, flowing, flopping, sloshing, stuttering, stumbling, twirling, negotiating near collisions like suddenly agitated molecules. A voice mumbles a musical "Fuck you," so barely discernible that you check, again and again, to be sure that you're really hearing it. There's pregnant talk of "a gesture of bad faith." The space fills with mad Ophelias. A bearded guy (actor Paul Duncan) appears in a video that, depending on your seat, you can see or not see. Deck chairs on the Titanic get rearranged...okay, well, not the Titanic...or maybe...but the very special, restricted white chairs interspersed among the front audience rows and commandeered by dancers play a heavy role in all of this and take a good deal of the brunt.

With a soundscape often lulling us into an altered state (and possibly slumber), And lose the name of action can switch between graceful and graceless, sharply envisioned and disorganized (deliberately or not), ludicrous and alarming. I doubt that it will come to count among my favorite Gutierrez works, but it does remind me of my first--and abiding--impression of his work, that gut feeling that I'm in the middle of an earthquake.

With lighting by Lenore Doxsee, sound design by Neal Medlyn, video and writing by Boru O'Brien O'Connell, costumes by David Tabbert and dramaturgy by Juliana May

Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People perform And lose the name of action at BAM Fisher (Fishman Space) through Saturday, December 8 at 7:30pm and December 7 at 10pm.

Seating is limited. Sold out, although people on last night's waiting list were able to get in. So, give it a shot. For information, click here.

BAM Fisher (Fishman Space)
321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

Sex. Real. Good. Movement Research-style.

MOVEMENT RESEARCH FESTIVAL SPRING 2012
PUSH IT. REAL. GOOD. 

presents

Let's talk about sex

Friday, June 1, 6-7:30PM

Choreographers, erotica writers, and performance artists

talk about doin' it in the 21st Century. 

Diana Cage

Aimee Herman

John Jasperse

Ishmael Houston-Jones

Antonio Ramos

Lucy Sexton

Moderated by Jillian Peña, Dean of the School of Sex Research at Movement Research and Erin Markey, Assistant Dean

$5 ($4 with Day Pass)

Location:

The Center at West Park
West Park Presbyterian Church
165 West 86th Street (corner of Amsterdam Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

For more information on this and other festival activities, click here.

Taking the measure of "Parallels"

Parallels—a two-month series commissioned by Danspace and curated by Ishmael Houston-Jones—is arguably the most significant event of the current dance season.

To read more of my Dance Magazine review of Danspace Project's PLATFORM 2012: Parallels, click here.

A chat with photographer Ian Douglas

Will Rawls in Collected Fictions, Frontispieces (c)Ian Douglas

Photographer Ian Douglas

Click here for audio interview with Ian Douglas [14:54]

Since 2006, Ian Douglas has been actively photographing New York City's amazing contemporary dance and performance art scene, regularly working with artists like Ishmael Houston-Jones, Miguel Gutierrez, Yvonne Meyer and others. He is the photographer-in-residence for Danspace Project and Movement Research, and has photographed for the New York Times, New York Live Arts/Dance Theater Workshop and more. Douglas's work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art Forum, Dance Magazine and various publications throughout New York City and the world.

Click here for Ian Douglas's Web site.

Scroll down for more samples of his work for Parallels.

Ishmael Houston-Jones, Parallels curator (c)Ian Douglas

Dancer-choreographer Nora Chipaumire (c)Ian Douglas

Click here for information on purchasing the Parallels catalogue and other Danspace Project catalogues.

Of related interest

Movement Research Studies Project presents Photography and the Performance Journal, a discussion with photographers Dona Ann McAdams, Anja Hitzenberger and Miana Jun, moderated by Ursula Eagly.

Tuesday, March 20 at 6:15pm -- Free admission

More information at Movement Research

Gibney Dance Center
5th Floor, Studio 1

890 Broadway, Manhattan

(map/directions)

Ishmael Houston-Jones launches "Parallels"

Audio: 2:56

Here's a brief report on last night's launch of Parallels, the latest Danspace Project platform. The series opened with a fascinating evening of conversation featuring Parallels curator--dancer-choreographer Ishmael Houston-Jones--with Kenya-born artist Wangechi Mutu and Thomas J. Lax at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

For complete information about Danspace Project and Parallels, click here.

I really do loveDANCEmore!

...and I'm learning to love learning to loveDANCEmore, a performance journal out of Salt Lake City, edited by dancer-choreographer Ashley Anderson.

Thanks to Ishmael Houston-Jones for alerting me to this publication and to Anderson for selecting one of my more pugnacius blog posts ("Why I no longer consider myself a dance sniffer") for inclusion in the Fall 2011 "everyone's a critic" issue.

I've started working my way through a few back issues, and I really like the engaged, thoughtful discourse on contemporary dance and performance. You'll find the loveDANCEmore blog here, and you can contact Anderson here to learn more about the print journal and, hey, maybe send a few dollars its way.

Happy Thanksgiving!

"THEM" and us

I saw them once. I don’t know when or who they were because they were too far away. -- Dennis Cooper in THEM

PS 122's revival of THEM--a dance/text/music piece created during the early era of AIDS--feels not only fresh but necessary today. With a title that suggests observation and finger-pointing from a distance, this work brings to mind that saying about where your other four fingers are pointing. While its text, quietly recited live by writer Dennis Cooper, reflects memory the way a river's surface plays at capturing the moon, its physical and imaginal energy could not be more in-your-face, more disturbing in real time, in distracted, fearful, denial-bound America.

The hour-long piece premiered at PS 122 in 1986 with a performance team including its primary creators--Cooper, Chris Cochrane (music) and Ishmael Houston-Jones (direction and choreographic score for improvisation). For the reconstructed work, developed in residency at The New Museum, the trio are joined by very talented lighting designer Joe Levasseur and a new team of young dancers--Joey Cannizzaro, Felix Cruz, Niall Noel, Jeremy Pheiffer, Jacob Slominski, Arturo Vidich and Enrico D. Wey. All shoulder great responsibility here with a challenge that demands and takes everything an artist has to give. They give it.

Cruising, anonymous sex, rough sex, gay bashing, anxiety, illness, mortality--the specificity of these things, and of those tumbling, grappling, "tangled guys" invoked by Cooper, are there for anyone to see. The uncommon beauty of THEM is also its terror. Awkward, expansive, often explosive individual and interactive movement throws light onto an aspect of American maleness--whether sourced in biology or in society--that rules. Desire rules: Watch how every aggressive part of a dancer's body gets its way, its voice, humbling the heavy, listless head which merely follows, helplessly and blissfully, in momentum. 

Dramatic lighting carves the various scenarios out of the midnight darkness of a space bound on two sides by packed-solid audience seating. While the hip PS 122 crowd--generally "downtown" artists all--might not be unnerved by most of what occurs in THEM, there are at least two scenes that would fail to rattle only the dead. The first occurs when the tense undercurrent simmering in the air suddenly bursts into violence. The second links back to the work's opening image--Vidich led forward and blindfolded by Houston-Jones--and involves the entanglement, and surely the identification, of the young dancer with the bloody carcass of a goat.

This one scene--not brief enough, I'm sure, for most observers--acts like an implosion, as if everything preceding it has collapsed into horror. Here we have the ancient rite, the casting out or slaughtering of the scapegoat, the one bearing our sins and woes. As long as the goat stays well away (or is dead), we are purified. We can breathe easily, live safely, all troubles gone. We still practice this rite today. We just do it in ways that keep our hands clean and smelling sweet.

THEM concludes tonight with 8pm and 10pm performances. I'd be surprised if tickets were still available, but give it a shot here. It's worth it.

THEM

Performance Space 122

150 First Avenue (at Ninth Street), Manhattan

What "Matters" most

Dark Matters at Montclair and THEM at PS122
by Andy Horwitz, Culturebot, October 24, 2010

Sexton ushers in new Bessies era

The Bessie Awards Are Overhauled
by Gia Kourlas, The New York Times, September 10, 2010

Investigating improv

Studies Project Inter-Generational Exchange in Improvisational Practice

Sunday June 13, 5:30 pm

at La MaMa E.T.C.
74A East 4th St.
(between 2nd and 3rd Avenues)

FREE

This Studies Project, in partnership with La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival
(June 8-27), will uncover lineages of improvisational practices. Curators Yvonne Meier and Ishmael Houston-Jones will instigate a discussion amongst pioneers of improvisation in dance, as well as contemporary artists who are practicing investigations within the larger context of improvisation. The event will also include dancing to a score developed by Yvonne Meier and Ishmael Houston-Jones.

Panelists: Paul Langland, Daniel Lepkoff, Jennifer Monson

Moderator: Danielle Goldman

Dancers: Maggie Bennett, Daniel Clifton, Jonathan Kinzel, Daniel Lepkoff, Paul Langland, Melanie Maar, Jennifer Monson, Yina Ng, Arturo Vidich and Anthony Whitehurst

Initiated by Nicky Paraiso, Co-Curator, La MaMa E.T.C.

A craving for Popkin

Since one of my dearest friends performs in Lionel Popkin's There Is An Elephant In This Dance--brought in from the West Coast and opened, last evening, at Danspace Project--I won't write a review. But I can urge you to go to see this delectable, dreamy, poetic, luminous thing, continuing tonight and Saturday at 8:30. Expect the unexpected!

Performances by Popkin and Carolyn Hall, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Peggy Piacenza. Original music by Robert Een, performed by Een with percussionist Hearn Gadbois and singer Valecia Phillips. Costumes by Jean Landry. Lighting by Kathy Kaufmann. Video by Kyle Ruddick and Cari Ann Shim Sham*. All deserve a shout-out!

Information and tickets or 866-811-4111

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.

The return of DraftWork

Danspace Project announces the return of DraftWork

This free, low-tech, afternoon series curated by Ishmael Houston-Jones is designed to give artists an opportunity to show work-in-progress. Following the performance there is an informal discussion and reception.

Applications deadlines:

August 22 for Winter 2009 (January-March)
November 21 for Spring 2009 (April-June)

Click here for further information and the application form (PDF file).