Saturday, March 26, 2011 – 1:00pm
Dancing Text / Texting Dance
In this workshop we will use several improvisation strategies to open a free flow of immediate, spontaneous, and automatic writing, speaking, and dancing. We will use the resultant dance and text to construct impromptu group pieces as well as a means toward broadening self-expression in solo work.
Ishmael Houston-Jones’ improvised dance and language work has been performed in NYC, across the US, and in Europe, Australia, and Latin America. He has taught many movement, improvisation, and writing workshops, notably at the EDDC (The Netherlands), American Dance Festival, Seattle Festival of Alternative Dance and Improvisation (SFADI), and San Francisco Festival of Improvisation. More info at http://ishmaelhj.com.
Artists
Ishmael Houston-Joneshttp://ishmaelhj.comIshmael Houston-Jones is a Choreographer, Author, Performer, Teacher, and Arts Consultant.Ishmael Houston-Jones’ improvised dance and text work has been performed in New York City, across the United States, in Europe, Canada, Australia and Latin America.
Ishmael Houston-Jones’ Nowhere, 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 he was the choreographer for Nayland Blake’sHare Follies at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. From 1995-2000 he was part of the improvised trio “Unsafe/ Unsuited” with Keith Hennessy and Patrick Scully. 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 (Alive TV).
In 1984 Houston-Jones and Fred Holland shared a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie Award” for their Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders.
COLLABORATORS
In addition to those listed above, major collaborators have been
• dancers Steven Craig and Stanya Kahn;• directors Peter Brosius and Daniel Safer;• designers Huck Snyder and John DeFazio;
• photographer Robert Flynt;
• videographer Cathy Weis,
• and composers Chris Cochrane, Fast Forward, Dave Pavkovik, Chris Peck, Tom Recchion, Leslie Ross and Guy Yarden.
• He has appeared in the work of John Bernd, Ping Chong, DANCENOISE, Terry Fox, Beth Gill, Lionel Popkin, Mike Taylor, Yvonne Meier, and in the films Brother from Another Planet by John Sayles and Circle’s Short Circuit by Caspar Strache.
He is a member of the Brooklyn Adult Recorder Choir.
PUBLICATIONS
Houston-Jones’ essays, fiction, interviews, and performance texts have been anthologized in the books:
• 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).
• He is a subject of the chapter “Speech as Act” in the book Dances that Describe Themselves by Susan Leigh Foster (Wesleyan University Press, 2002).• and the chapter “Crossing the Great Divides” in the book Taken by Surprise by Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere, (Wesleyan University Press, 2003).
• His work has also been published in the magazines: Movement Research Journal; Contact Quarterly; Real Time; Mirage, FARM; and Porn Free.