Ishmael Houston-Jones

Ishmael Houston-Jones (born 1951) is a choreographer, author, performer, teacher, curator, and arts advocate known for his improvisational dance and language work.

His work has been performed in New York City, across the United States, in Europe, Canada, Australia and Latin America.

Charles Houston Jones, born 1951 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, was the only child of North Jones and Pauline Jones, née Houston.

He attended public primary and secondary school there and he attended his first dance class when he was 16 years old and a junior at William Penn High School.

The Harrisburg Community Theater offered free dance classes to teenagers, and as he was involved in theater in school he went.

This jazz-based show was his first experience performing dance.

He enrolled as an English/Drama major at Gannon College, (now Gannon University) in Erie, Pennsylvania in 1969.

There was no dance program and he only studied there for two years before he "accidentally" dropped out.

He was traveling the summer after his sophomore year of college with the intention of returning to school in the fall, but he found himself in Israel, and decided to stay there for a year.

He worked as a pig farmer for nine months at Kibbutz Lahav in the Negev Desert.

Then he worked for three months on a banana plantation at Kibbutz Adamit in the Galilee on the border with Lebanon.

Houston-Jones found 1971 to be a propitious time to be in Israel; it was the years between The Six-Day War and The Yom Kippur War and there was a calm atmosphere among the Israelis.

He had always been fascinated by collective socialist living situations, so the idea of being on a kibbutz intrigued him.

He had never done any kind of heavy farm work and while there he had to get up at 4 AM: feeding pigs, mating them and working in the slaughterhouse.

When he moved north to Adamit he worked harvesting bananas, and at the end of most days, he and his comrades would go skinny-dipping in the Mediterranean.

He would sometimes dance on the beach in the nude.

Houston-Jones was able to take just one dance class that entire year; the African-American choreographer and dancer Gene Hill Sagan was teaching on a nearby kibbutz.

It was around this time that he began to use Ishmael as his first name and hyphenated his parents' surnames, though he never legally changed either.

After returning to the US in 1972 Houston-Jones moved to Philadelphia.

He audited dance classes at Temple University with Helmut Gottschild and Eva Gholson.

He then got into the Wigman-based company Group Motion Media Theater with whom he danced for two years.

After leaving Group Motion he began studying improvisation and later performing with Terry Fox and the musician Jeff Cain under the name A Way of Improvising.

He also studied with Joan Kerr, Les Ditson, Contact Improvisation with John Gamble and "African" at Ile Ife, the Arthur Hall Afro American Dance Ensemble.

It was during this time that he formed a strong comradeship with the visual artist Fred Holland who he met through their mutual involvement with the Painted Bride Art Center.

Houston-Jones and Fox were Holland's first dance teachers.

Holland went on to make his own award-winning dance/theater works, some in collaboration with Houston-Jones.

Houston-Jones began making his own work in 1976.

That year, in collaboration with fellow ex-Group Motion dancer Michael Biello & musician Dan Martin, he formed the gay-men's performance collective Two Men Dancing.

This piece was begun during his last year in Philadelphia; after living there for seven years, he moved to New York on Thanksgiving Day, 1979.

This group made four evening-length works, most notably What We're Made Of in 1980.

Houston-Jones arrived in New York in the East Village, Manhattan in early 1980.

He did some Contact Improvisation performances at Danspace Project with Danny Lepkoff, with whom he had studied.

The East Village community at that time was infused with punk, new wave, drag, drugs and the mixing of a hipper, younger gay population with the modern dance and experimental theater milieux.

Houston-Jones, like many dancers at the time, was influenced by the gay/punk/club scene and also by break dancing, graffiti and rap music.

The first time Houston-Jones heard future collaborator Chris Cochrane play was at the club 8 BC. Dancers and choreographers would go to 8 BC, Limbo Lounge, the Pyramid Club, or King Tut's Wah-Wah Hut to see shows and also to perform.

There was a palpable excitement and eagerness to see what was happening at venues such as PS 122, The Kitchen, Dance Theater Workshop and Danspace Project at Saint Mark's Church.

There were smaller, grittier spaces as well like Dixon Place and Chandelier where something new was happening almost every night.

Houston-Jones and Fred Holland shared a 1984 New York Dance and Performance Bessie Award for their work Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders performed at The Kitchen and he shared another Bessie Award in 2011 with writer Dennis Cooper and composer Chris Cochrane for the 2010 revival of their 1985 collaboration, THEM.

THEM was performed at Performance Space 122 (PS 122), the American Realness Festival, Springdance in Utrecht, Tanz im August in Berlin, REDCAT in Los Angeles, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and at TAP, Theatre and Auditorium of Poitiers, France.

The 1985 premier performance of THEM at PS122 was part of New York's first AIDS benefit.