Ishmael Houston Jones: The Dancing Pig Farmer
Ishmael Houston-Jones’s creative life expresses itself in protest and art through dancing, curating, teaching, writing, choreography, and conversation. From an early age he was interested, concurrently, in anti-war activities and the embodiment of inequitable social experiences as it moved through his Black, Gay, working class body in America. He produced some of the most meaningful renegade live art works in the 20th century. In part, The rise of a new generation of interdisciplinary dance makers might have Ishmael Houston-Jones to thank for his redefinition of Contact Improvisation and his persistent commitment to working with other artists, cherishing their different perspectives, to make great work.
In an interview with Tara Aisha Willis he recalled protesting the Vietnam War in 1967 during a Quaker silent vigil. He described lifting the dress code at his high school through activism. He said, “In the middle of winter they [female students] had to wear skirts!” A year later young women no longer wore skirts and denim became the norm. Jones also started an underground newspaper and joined the Harrisburg Community Theater where he began his first dance lessons.
At 20 years old he dropped out of college and took off to Israel where he worked as a pig farmer and banana harvester on kibbutzes. Waking up at 4am everyday to wash, feed, or slaughter pigs he lived on 50 cents a day. When he learned that dance lessons were being taught at another Kibbutz on the Lebanese coast he migrated to a banana farm where he worked for three months. Later in life he recalls answering a student’s question about the nature of becoming an artist and he responded, “By becoming a pig farmer.” He also describes a feeling of empathy with contemporary migrant workers around the world having been one himself.
After a year of migrant farming in Israel he moved back to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where he sat in on dance classes at Temple University. He started a Gay men’s collective called “A Way of Improvising.” He studied Contact Improvisation with Nancy Stark Smith and Steve Paxton in the 70’s which became one of Houston-Smith’s go to generative methods of movement making and embodiment throughout his career.
Two early 80s works with Fred Holland entitled, “Untitled (Sometimes called Oogala),” and “Cowboys, Dreams, and Ladders,” represent Ishmael’s reliance on Contact Improvisation, collaboration, and narrative to reveal unseen queer realities of structurally imposed exclusion, neglect, and social stress in a dysfunctional political landscape. In “Untitled,” the duo wrote a set of rules that directly invert the typical characteristics of Contact Improvisation thus providing an intensely personal means of demanding that the pedagogy of contemporary dance be changed. In other words he stole the tools he needed for artmaking and redefined them. In a blurb from the original showing at the Kitchen in New York for “Cowboys, Dreams, and Ladders,” the piece is described as an “improvisational dance work inspired by rodeos held by black cowboys to teach drug awareness education for children in the Bronx, as well as the two dancers relationship to each other as black men in the avant-garde dance world.” He shared his first Bessie award with Fred Holland for “Cowboys, Dreams, and Ladders,” in 1985.
In one of his first collectives with Michael Biello, Dan Martin, Tonio Guerra, and Jeff McMahon called, “Two Men Dancing,” he invites both art makers and audiences to explore ideas of race, sex, class, and social interruption through experimental dance. In a video excerpt from the 1980 performance entitled, “What We're Made Of,” Houston-Jones, naked to the waist, he twirled around in a long draping skirt that he uses to both hide and reveal his body while mimicking a ballet dancer and expressing a playful sexuality.
In 1982 Houston-Jones played with ideas of history and family narrative by improvising with his mother in “Part 2: Relatives.” He carried her to a chair where she dyed hard-boiled eggs and told a story. In the performances sometimes she would make things up. He said, “Improvising with my mother unscripted is probably the scariest thing I’ve ever done.” He toured with his mother for the production and he described how uncomfortable it could get with him performing naked while she invented a family narrative.
In New York City during the 80s collaborative storytelling, contact improvisation, sound, video projection, animal carcasses, costumes, theatrical lighting, and various props became symbolic counterpoints to the insistent lethal reality of lives being lost during the AIDS/HIV crisis. In a viscerally moving piece entitled, “THEM,” Houston-Jones, Chris Cochrane, and Dennis Cooper created a canonical expression of desire and Gay sex in a society under threat of cultural extinction. “THEM,” was recreated in 2010 for which he won a second Bessie award.
In Parallels, a performance festival he curated in 1982, Houston-Smith said, “I chose the name Parallels for the series because while all the choreographers participating are Black and in some ways relate to the rich tradition of Afro‐American dance, each has chosen a form outside of that tradition and even outside the tradition of mainstream modern dance… this new generation of Black artists—who exist in the parallel worlds of Black America and of new dance—is producing work that is richly diverse.” Parallels was reinvented in 2012 in collaboration with Will Rawls focusing on choreographers from the African diaspora and postmodernism.
Today Ishmael Houston-Jones may be seen on a video chat discussing the nature of performance, his work during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the challenging reality of teaching students in real-time via a virtual portal. He has taught and performed internationally. He has received many awards and grants recognizing him as a prominent figure in Art History and a valuable resource to new generations of artists. You may wish to see what he is up to now at his website at https://www.ishmaelhouston-jones.com/. He teaches virtual classes through the MELT program for Movement Research at https://movementresearch.org/people/ishmael-houston-jones-1. He also teaches at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and at University of the Arts in Philadelphia.
ART WORK: An Evening with Ishmael Houston-Jones | The New School
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqG5Amu5E4o