Ishmael Houston-Jones

CP

I wanted to start off by talking about when we met.

IHJ

Which I couldn't remember.

CP

Which I remember vividly because I was lucky enough to meet Ish when I was 17, at the American Dance Festival in 1991. I was a student and Ishmael was teaching an improvisation class. I signed up. In the morning there was an improv class and in the afternoon, a repertory class. And I remember the first day we were all sort of hanging out, waiting, and I think you were late.

IHJ

Probably.

CP

Because it was really early in the morning. And then all of a sudden the door slammed open and Ishmael and Almon Grimsted, your assistant, just sort of fell into the room. You were carrying motorcycle helmets. You had big boots on. You had your High Risk Group t-shirt on and a stopwatch to time us during our class.

IHJ

And someone thought I was taking you hostage, actually. [Laughs.]

CP

Really?

IHJ

Yeah. One of the students told me weeks later because we were replacing someone who had been there.

CP

Sally Silvers was the teacher for the first three weeks and then the second three weeks you came.

IHJ

One of the students confessed afterwards that she thought they were being taken hostage when we came in with our motorcycle helmets, and when I told everybody to get into a corner and close their eyes, because that was one of the first exercises—that they would move through the space with their eyes closed.

CP

That's so funny because my first thought was, “Okay, finally my people are here.” I had felt completely out of place at the American Dance Festival, living in this dorm, surrounded by all these ballerinas, and when Ishmael walked in, it was sort of love at first sight. I had done some improvisation before but the scores that you gave us, the way that we learned in both the morning improvisation class and in the afternoon class where we made a piece together, that we eventually performed with Prince's “If I Was Your Girlfriend” as the music, the performance scores that you gave us really changed the way I thought about improvisation and performance and what it could be.

IHJ

Right. Well, one of the secrets of my work is that I almost never set my choreography. 90% of my choreography is improvised. And the dirty secret of that is that I'm really lousy at memorizing dance moves. In technique classes when I was younger, I was always the person in the back trying to learn it as everybody else's playing across the floor. I was that person still trying to learn the combination as everybody else knew it already, so. I decided I liked moving, and I liked dancing. So I said, “Okay, I can improvise,” and there are ways of improvising and doing it badly. I didn't want to do that. So, I found techniques of making it strong and meaningful.

CP

And provocative and true. The two scores that stuck out in my memory were the first one, which we did in the morning, and it was to tell the story of how you got a scar without using any words. That was the first partnered one. And then the second one that was my favorite was a partner score where we had an option to do four things. I can only remember two or three of them. One was that you could kiss your partner, you could slap your partner, and then there was something going in and out of the ground. It was pushing your partner.

IHJ

Something like that.

CP

It blew me away, especially, because I was really into this one dancer in the class. [Laughs.] So, it gave me an opportunity to make out with this woman whom I probably wouldn’t have been able to make out with otherwise. But besides that, it felt illicit but also so urgent and so real. I've never slapped anyone in my life outside of that. There was this sort of controlled intimacy or controlled violence or controlled eroticism.

IHJ

Actually, I used that score again in an audition for THEM in 2018.

CP

Yeah. THEM was a collaboration that you did with Dennis Cooper originally in 1985 that incorporated Dennis's texts and Chris Cochrane did the music, and then later you mounted it as a full piece. Could you talk a little bit about the first incarnation of it?

IHJ

Going back to 1985, I was living in the East Village even then. I still haven't moved out. It's so sad. [laughs.] One day I was at PS 122 and Tim Miller, who was one of the NEA Four, was really excited because this guy Dennis Cooper was going to be moving to New York from the West Coast. And everybody was really excited that this writer is coming. I said, "Oh, yeah. Whatever." Later, Dennis gave a reading somewhere on the West Side. And I was stunned. I've never felt anyone's literature scare me so much. I was so frightened. He was reading from the book Tenderness of the Wolves. One of the sections is about a serial killer of young boys. And it's told in the voice of the killer, the boys and God,  and I just found it to be the most provocative thing.

So, then I did something that I never do. I went up to him and said, "Do you want to work with me?" And he said, "What do you do?" And I said, "I make dances." He said, "Sure." And we worked together, I think, on seven major pieces while he was in New York.

We did a twenty-five-minute version of THEM in 1985, and PS 122’s director, Mark Russell asked if I wanted to expand it to a full evening piece. Chris, Dennis, and I decided that in 1985 to do a piece made by three queer men, that was about a lot of queer horror stuff, just wouldn't be right with no acknowledgement that the AIDS epidemic was bearing down on all of us—our friends, our lovers, our compatriots, our enemies were dying around us. So, we decided that we needed to acknowledge that in the full evening length piece.

But, Dennis, I think rightfully so, didn't want to write about AIDS. We didn't want to make it an "AIDS piece." It was sort of up to me. And there were two things that happened in the full version. The first is that there was a sort of a dance at the end that's about checking lymph nodes. It's sort of this lymph node ballet of checking where the lymph nodes are, and it's improvised. But there is a score for the dancers. There were six dancers in it, all male-identified. And the other thing came from my friend, Richard Elovich. He had a nightmare—again, this is 1985, '86—that he would wake up and his own dead body would be in bed with him and he would throw his own dead body out but it would keep coming back in. And he told me about this nightmare. And I said, "Okay. I wanna use that."

So, I decided to use Richard's dream, but I decided to also incorporate my fear of dead things and the Christian mythology of the goat and the lamb. I wanted to have this scene where two guys in the previous scene were doing this push-pull thing on a mattress and I wanted to wrestle a dead thing. And I decided I wanted to wrestle a dead goat. Back in the '80s when the Meatpacking District in lower Manhattan was actually a meatpacking district you could get a dead goat. And I went there at four in the morning and bought a gutted goat carcass, took it back to my apartment in a taxi. [laughs.] It was in November. I lived on the Lower East Side in an overheated apartment. I tied it up and hung it out of my window.  And then walked it back to PS 122. This was the day of the dress rehearsal. So, I had been using a pillow in rehearsals up until then. But using the goat was kind of amazing and cathartic. It was a cross between fighting and making love to this dead animal. And I got the most negative review I've ever gotten in my entire life. There was a quote, "Then he comes out and fucks a dead pig."

CP

In which publication was that?

IHJ

In the New York Native, which was a gay publication.

CP

Oh, wow.

IHJ

People walked out in droves. Chris's music was also very hardcore. And Dennis's text was also very difficult for people. And then we remounted the piece in 2010 and then again in 2018 at Performance Space, New York, and people were throwing roses at us, which was really interesting. But that’s because of the difference in time and the distance between being in the middle of the AIDS epidemic and having drugs that have prolonged people's lives.

CP

I’m curious if  you were working with dancers in the remount who were so young that they hadn't really experienced that time?

IHJ

Yeah. Well,  we had to explain street cruising to these kids and the time to cruise before there were apps on phones. And the atmosphere of fear.

CP

Did you have a problem with the goat when you did it again?

IHJ

Oh, tons. People were praying for my soul. That was good. I like that. People praying for me is a good thing. But yes, there were different issues. In the first round, I had to have a conversation with someone from the Board of Health, because someone reported the piece to the Board of Health. And I had to talk to this guy, Bernie, about the work. So, I started telling him about all these symbiotic things—about Christian mythology, and the goat, and the lamb—which Bernie really didn't want to hear. But, anyway Bernie was gonna have to come down to the East Village, from wherever Bernie lived, which probably was not the East Village, and inspect this. It was Thanksgiving weekend, which was annoying. You could tell Bernie really didn't want to do this. So Bernie came and said the most incredible thing: "Mr. Jones, I'm gonna let you go this time. But Mr. Jones, take my advice and find another act." [Laughs.]

CP

You’ll never play this town again!

IHJ

With those dead animals. When we did it in, I think it was Utrecht, we couldn't get goats. So there were different versions with sheep and goats. Sheep were always skinned. The goats were always with fur. So we got a sheep in Utrecht, in the Netherlands. But in the EU, there's a thing about selling animals with their heads. Their heads have to be, they can't sell them with their heads on. So they told us, which is okay.

CP

It's so much worse.

IHJ

I know. So we got the sheep. The theater had sort of like slightly, like one little sinew of flesh connecting the head. But I had the dancer, obviously I wasn't gonna do it. Who was going to do it with sheep, sew the head back on. So.

CP

Wow. Since we were talking about the time jump that makes me think about the curatorial project that you did back in the '80s and then did again. Could you talk a little bit about that?

IHJ

In 1982, I approached the people at Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church. I sort of felt sort of apart from a lot of what is considered Black dance and Black concert dance, people in the Alvin Ailey lineage and trajectory. And there were other people who felt isolated like Blondell Cummings, Ralph Lemon, Bebe Miller. So, I asked Cynthia Hedstrom, who was the director at Danspace Project, if I could curate. I don't even think I used the word curate because it wasn't used in performance at that point. I must have asked if I could organize this series of dances. It was two weekends long and it was fairly successful. I performed, Fred Holland performed, Bebe, Ralph, others.

So, in 2012, the director at Danspace, Judy Hussie-Taylor, asked me if I wanted to revive that and rethink my thinking. She is very much into giving over her season to working artists as platform curators. And my thinking had changed. The way I viewed Black dances made by Black choreographers in the United States had broadened greatly. It included social dance, Africanist-derived social dance, breaking, krumping. Also artists like Okwui Okpokwasili, who was born in the Bronx but of Nigerian parents, and Nora Chipaumire, who's from Zimbabwe. In 1982, I knew no contemporary dancers from Africa, who're from Africa. So my own vision had also broadened a lot.

CP

And the whole idea of what was mainstream had changed too, so much from 1986. There was this differentiation between Ailey and then downtown dance. And then twenty, thirty  years later, all of that had been completely turned upside down.

IHJ

Yeah, and I'm in the process of trying to write a book interviewing young Black experimentalist choreographers now. I'm excited I'm meeting them. They're coming from very different styles, some from step dancing, some from praise dancing in churches. They’re  taking those idioms far away, which is exciting.

CP

Let’s talk about Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders.

IHJ

Yeah, that was '83. Fred Holland, who I knew from my days in Philadelphia, had worked with Meredith Monk. He had been doing some research in Black western towns. And we would tell our white contemporaries that we were working on a piece about Black cowboys and they would laugh, as if it were a joke, which it wasn't, because if you think about sort of the mythology of the westward taking of the land from indigenous people, a lot of that happened immediately after the Civil War, and many enslaved people who were freed actually went west. There were whole western towns that were almost totally inhabited by Black people. There were Black rodeos, and all of that. Fred was doing a lot of research on those. And we made an analogy between those worlds and our own world, and sort of the downtown dance scene.

We used to wear boots in our improvisation. I would wear my Doc Martens, and he would wear construction worker boots. But for this piece, we actually added metal spurs to the backs of our shoes, and we would do contact improvisation dancing with metal spurs. We never got cut, which I don't understand.

CP

The miracle of contact improvisation, because you probably never touched your feet together. And then where was that performed?

IHJ

At the Kitchen, which was in SoHo at the time.

CP

Did you continue working with Fred, or was that the only time that you ever...

IHJ

We did several pieces together. He was trained as a visual artist, and he went back to visual arts. But yeah, we were sort of involved in each other's work throughout.

CP

When you see new artists today, who are the people that are most exciting to you?

IHJ

There are a lot. Well, Okwui, who's not new, but Okwui is an amazing performer. People you might not know, like j. bouey.

CP

j. bouey, I do know.

IHJ

Jasmine Hearn. There's a whole crop of people, Malcolm-x Betts.

CP

And they're all working in New York?

IHJ

Not at all. And I just saw the work of Leslie Parker at Danspace Project last weekend. She's from Minneapolis, where she's doing, sort of using Africanist vocabulary, but in a very particular sort of postmodern way. It was amazing, with live musicians.

CP

Nice.

IHJ

And Jose E. Abad, who I worked with in Try. He has a group called The Rupture is Now in San Francisco.

CP

Recently you've been working with Keith Hennessy. Well, you also worked with Keith Hennessy in the '90s in a piece called Unsafe Unsuited, with Patrick Scully. And you wore suits.

IHJ

We started in suits. We didn't stay in suits for very long. Patrick had the idea for that. He got money from the Jerome Foundation in Minneapolis, where he's from, to do a piece with three queer men who had never worked together before,  but who worked in an improvisational form.

CP

So you hadn't met Keith at that point?

IHJ

We lived in different cities. I lived in New York, Patrick lived in Minneapolis, and Keith lived in San Francisco. And we would get together in the three cities and make something together, and it wound up being a pretty open improvisation, actually. And then there was a lot of language. I was a theater nerd in high school, so there's always been a lot of language in my work. And I write.

CP

I feel like it's so difficult to do text and performance together and have it work well.

IHJ

I like the rigor.

CP

I wonder how that fluidity came about. Can we talk about Without Hope?

IHJ

Yeah. It starts off with the list of Frida Kahlo’s injuries from the trolley accident. Just sort of using the cinder block as an illustration. And then I talk about her painting Without Hope making a parallel to my friend John Bernd who was dying in the 1980s and sort of using a cinder block as a funnel because that's the image in Frida Kahlo's painting.

CP

And John Bernd’s work is material you’ve recently remounted. How would you describe that project? Did you reconstruct his work?  Remake it?  Fantasize it?

IHJ

It was a fantasy. It's like a phantasm. John Bernd was someone I worked with in the '80s also who died in 1988 when he was 35, from AIDS complications. And he was prolific,  both as a choreographer and dancer, but also as a musician and visual artist. Around 2015, I was having a discussion with Judy at Dancespace Project and I found this zine, which we made in 1998, those of us who were John's caregivers put together drawings of his essays.

CP

The drawings are so simple and beautiful.

IHJ

Judy and I began talking about the loss of so many role models, muses, and mentors from a large group of people in the fifteen years before Protease drugs, before the drug cocktails were developed. And what that meant to the art that was being made at the time. And she asked me if I wanted to do a multi-week platform about that. So, I used that and it became “Lost and Found,” which is a title of John's pieces that I was in.

CP

And that was before the performance?

IHJ

The performance was part of it. It was part of the platform. It was like a two-month long platform. So there were film screenings and panel discussions and a memorial and zine making.

CP

And what was your process for creating  the actual movement for the performance of his past work?

IHJ

We auditioned seven young dancers in their late 20s-early 30s, which sort of corresponds to the age I was when I was in John's work. And we showed them as much video tape as we could of his work. And there's quite a bit from the New York Public Library. Also, John was just a prolific writer. Maryette Charlton, who I don't even remember how she did this, but she would come to all these shows. She was an older woman which means she's probably younger than I am now. [Laughs.] Would come to all of our shows at PS 122 or La Mama and just take all of our material and send it to the Harvard Library. So, John's papers were all there and all of his artifacts.

CP

That's such a boon.

IHJ

We had an intern, because the platform was well funded, who would go to Harvard and photograph all of his diaries and journals. The dancers read those. And then Miguel Gutierrez and I decided we didn't want to make a memorial piece. We didn't want to make an AIDS piece, we didn't want to make something that was portraying John's life. We wanted to do a fantasia about what his work would've become had he not died in 1988. So we used his material and reconfigured it. So we expanded it, we multiplied the roles and there was never any one person being John.

There was one particular scene that people would respond to very much from his piece Surviving Love and Death, which was made in 1981. This is the backstory: He had come to PS 122 on a Tuesday night when, Open Movement, the improv section would go on. He said he'd been to his dentist and his gums wouldn't stop bleeding and that he was going to go to the emergency room because he didn't know what was going on. Also, that year he had a very public breakup with the performance artist Tim Miller. They had done a piece called Live Boys, which after a year became Live Boys, I hate their guts. [laughs.] And they wound up burning or burying their pajamas that they wore as costumes in the last performance of it. So, he had this mysterious disease that he didn't know what it was, and he broke it up with Tim in a very public way. So, then he did this piece Surviving Love and Death and in it he makes a smoothie that has prednisone vitamins, watercress, beer, apple juice, and a note that he wrote. With the word scram on it. Tore it up and put it in the blender. Makes the blend, makes the drink, and drinks it. So, in the version that Miguel and I did, we had all seven people, but we used the exact text from that. And they make a smoothie and there's a sort of an incantation that John did, which begins “What to do, what to do, what to do. And I don't want to die.”

CP

The image that sticks with me from that performance is the bathing tableau. Where there's a tub of water and someone with a sponge is washing another dancer’s naked back.. That's just another example of an image that becomes almost a painterly tableau.

IHJ

Yeah. That came from his piece, Two o the Loose, with the choreographer Jennifer Monson. She was in it with John. It was maybe six months before he died; he was performing still. And so we recreated that with the dancers in 2016.

CP

Let’s talk about your writing for a little while.

IHJ

I've always been a writer. Actually, when I went to university I was an English major and I thought I would be either a journalist or a poet. I started dancing relatively late, I think when I was sixteen, and a junior in high school. But I was never serious about it. It was just something I did because I hated sports, but I liked moving.  But anyway, I moved in with Susan Lourie, in the basement of her house in Philadelphia. She was going to this company called Group Motion and I would go to the Friday night improvisations and dance around. It was very hippy, like lights and synthesizers and, sort of the precursor to raves without the drugs, so like, what's the point. And they asked me to be in the company, which is really bizarre. They liked the way I moved and I never considered doing it. I was twenty-one years old. I never thought of dance as an occupation actually.

CP

But writing was also happening?

IHJ

Yes. And writing is the work I began making. I almost always used language of some sort. And then working with Dennis was key. I think it sort of kicked up my writing. I find him to be such a scary writer and I wanna scare people too.

CP

You once said that you want to ask unanswerable questions.

IHJ

Yeah, because if I know the answer, what's the point? I like finding out what the dance scene would be if hundreds or thousands of people hadn't died at a certain point? Like what would've happened?

CP

What would it look like?

IHJ

What would've, what the world, what would the world of postmodern dance look like if so many people hadn't died in that fifteen year period? And does that even mean anything? And what does it mean to push against conventional Black dance if Black dance doesn't exist?

Q&A SECTION

Q1

I was taken with what you said about not liking sports as a kid, but knowing you liked to move. I would be curious to hear if you could describe what it was like to know at that age that you like to move and how that knowledge has carried forward through your career?  And was there any overlap with queerness?

IHJ

I didn't like things with balls. [Laughs.] Catching them, throwing them, the competitiveness, and the sort of heightened masculinity that sports implies. I was not quite a sissy, but I was not the heightened masculine sports athlete either. I remember after I saw West Side Story dancing in my living room and I broke a lamp in the ceiling. I would just put the vinyl record on and just sort of twirl around.

So, I knew there was something about dance. And since I was a theater kid, my friend Susan Lourie, who was Christine's teacher as well, tipped me off to the Harrisburg area Community Theater. I grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, by the way.  They were offering free dance classes for teenagers to sort of plug into their musicals, which I never did. I never did any of the musicals. But there were free classes twice a week in a church basement. And all of a sudden there was this thing. I was sweating and I was enjoying the movement. And there were no balls involved. So I was really happy. There was this joy of moving and there was music and drumming and stuff. I was just really engaged. I think I was unaware of the competitiveness that happens in dance classes. Men have this horrible advantage. Like, you can be really shitty, but if you're a guy, it’s fine because they're usually so few. You get pushed to the head of the class.

CP

That was sort of what I was alluding to with the ADF episode. I was 17 years old. I was really uncomfortable in my body. My body was a lot bigger than it is now, and wasn’t a typical dancer’s body. And I felt like the space that you afforded all of us was a way to finally embody myself and embody queerness. It’s this very difficult thing to quantify—the electric thrill of watching you move. I don't even want to try to put it into words.

IHJ

I remember when I was working on the revival of THEM, and there was one dancer, Felix, who was a beautiful dancer in a traditional way. And my one criticism I kept giving him in rehearsals was stop looking like a fucking dancer. He said, “What do you mean? I am a dancer.” And I said, no, stop looking like that, I don't want anybody to look like a dancer. Stop looking like a dancer in my piece. No.

CP

I think it's hard when people have classical training. Jennifer Monson used to say to me, “Stop trying to look pretty. That's actually drawing away from everything that we're trying to do. And it's making you a less interesting dancer.” Can we talk about Relatives for a second?

IHJ

Go ahead. [Laughs.]

CP

Okay, good. So there was a duet called Relatives that Ishmael did with his mother Pauline in 1989.

IHJ

It's probably the dumbest thing I ever did, but...

CP

It's such a sweet, but it's such a sweet piece. You carry her over your shoulder.

IHJ

I picked her up and carried her over my shoulder. My mother was not a performer. She's passed away since. But, she was a payroll auditor for the state of Pennsylvania.

CP

She volunteered to do it?

IHJ

Yeah. I didn't ask her. I probably couldn't do this now, but for that piece, I scattered mothballs in the dark. So before I entered the space, there was the smell of mothballs. So, I go into the audience, I throw her over my shoulder and we continue talking as I walk her around. And then I sit her in place, and tell her to time me for ten minutes while I dance. This was for a PBS series called Alive From Off-Center and it was filmed by the great Julie Dash.

CP

And so she timed you.

IHJ

And then started calling me by my birth name, which is Charles.

CP

Yeah. And the timing thing is also an important piece of this. When you teach, you use  a stopwatch. It gives everything a real immediacy.

IHJ

Yeah, well, I've seen a lot of bad improvisation. There's so much bad dance improvisation in the world and a lot of it has to do with time that improvisers tend to lose track of time, a lot.

CP

Yeah. That's true.

IHJ

Part of my teaching is to say, “Okay, this is gonna take 3 1/2 minutes.”

Q2

What has it been like for you to see improvisation become institutionalized? How has the structure changed, and then also in terms of the constraints that you give yourself?

IHJ

Oh, the institutionalization—it's a good and bad thing. There are courses on improvisation that are taught now. It's part of the canon in universities in terms of dance, which it wasn't so much. It was always the bad stepchild at the dance department back when I was young. There was ballet, there was modern, there was jazz. And then maybe once a week on an odd day there would be improv classes. It's a good thing that more people are better improvisers even though there’s not a lot of good improv teachers. It's sort of punk rock edge, which had me coming into an improv situation wearing my combat boots, doesn't happen anymore. It's become canonized in a way in which I find sort of stifling in terms of creativity and in terms of borders and boundaries. I encourage students to do things outdoors, in the hallways, and literally on the streets.

Q3

I appreciated when you said that it was the fact that Dennis Cooper words scared you, and made you want to work with him. And later in your conversation you said that you like to scare audiences. I wondered what it is about that sort of fearfulness that is so creatively potent for you?

IHJ

I do tend toward the dark side in my work. I want people to feel things. When I mentioned the most negative review I ever got, for THEM in 1986, I meant to say I also appreciated it because it was such a scathing review. I liked the fact that someone had such a reaction. And even though it was a negative reaction, I liked that someone would leave and not just be thinking about what they were having for dinner afterwards.

There's also just something about the heightened response. I like surprising people, which can be scary. I’m perhaps most of all interested in a sense of disorientation, and of not knowing. I like not knowing a lot.