ISHMAEL HOUSTON-JONES
A seminal talking dance was Douglas Dunn’s Nevada, which premiered in New York in 1973. In the after- show “discussion period,” when a choreographer customarily comments on his work, Dunn fitfully stood up and sat down in a chair while his taped voice read a piece that began: “Talking is talking. Dancing is dancing.” The tape recited all possible variations on these statements, including: “Not talking is not not dancing. Not dancing is not not talking.” And: “Dancing is talking. Talking is dancing.” When the tape ended, Dunn crawled onto the dance floor and started howling.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Dancers have derived many meanings from Dunn’s poem. Some dancers refuse to talk about their work, because “dancing is dancing, and talking is talking”; dancing and talking should remain separate. Other dancers began to include talking in their dances. Ishmael Houston-Jones is one of the second group: all of the solo dances and group improvisations in his concert at the School of the Art Institute’s Gallery 2 incorporated substantial amounts of talking.
Houston-Jones’s first solo, In the Dark, confronts the talking/dancing issue directly. Most of the dance takes place in complete darkness: we could hear but not see Houston-Jones as he tripped over objects onstage and blundered through the audience. Meanwhile he talked about how he created the dance for his roommate, an artist who could only see dance in visual terms. To confound his roommate, Houston-Jones created a dance that could not be seen. Houston-Jones also talked about how In the Dark has irritated dance critics, who could not see it, and how that gave him special pleasure. As he talked, Houston- Jones pulled back curtains from the performing area, and the ambient light from the street created a silhouette of him dancing, just visible in the semidarkness. The effect was stunning.
In Without Hope, the talking is poetic; talking and dancing support each other in communicating deeply felt grief. In the Dark sets talking, dancing, and seeing wittily against each other. Talking is used in some wonderful ways, but strangely, none of these works contained much dancing–talking seems to be crowding dancing out of Houston-Jones’s work.
