Relations Bebe Miller Ishmael Houston- Jones Ralph Lemon
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RELATIONS BEBE MILLER ISHMAEL HOUSTON- JONES RALPH LEMON 1 INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION Tara Aisha Willis 5 EXCERPTS FROM CURATOR’S Tara Aisha Willis STATEMENT FOR PLATFORM 2012: PARALLELS, DANSPACE PROJECT, NEW YORK Ishmael Houston-Jones 9 ISHMAEL Ralph Lemon 31 CAN YOU SEE HOW I SEE? REGARDING THE PERSISTENT ESSENTIAL FRICTION OF GESTURES, ATTENTION, AND MEMORY Bebe Miller Relations grew from a brief conversation with Ishmael Houston-Jones (b. 1951), both of us 35 BEBEISHRALPH exhausted and downing coffee while I described Claudia La Rocco what I felt was my then new curatorial responsibility: crafting how the MCA Stage 38 UNTITLED influences the performance “canon,” while staying Ralph Lemon true to my belief in finding other ways to declare our relationship to what precedes us. I asked 39 CONTRIBUTORS Ishmael for his thoughts on being asked frequently 42 CREDITS to perform his early works or speak about experimental and improvised dance in downtown New York in the late 1970s through the 1990s. Was it because he is one of the few black dance artists from that scene and we are in a moment INSERT MANIFESTO FROM UNTITLED DUET OR OO-GA-LA (1983) with ANNOTATION (2016) when history and the present are, rightfully, Fred Holland and Ishmael Houston-Jones being examined for unconsidered perspectives? 1 I told him that I see him as a forbearer of my front of an audience is completely new yet practices as a dancer and curator, among artists completely familiar territory. including Blondell Cummings (1944–2015), Fred Holland (1951–2016), Bill T. Jones (b. 1952), The specter of race in the United States appears Ralph Lemon (b. 1952), Bebe Miller (b. 1950), differently across their careers, and improvisation and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (b. 1950). Ishmael’s has been integral to their work from the response, like his improvisational performance beginning. Ishmael’s contribution to this booklet style, was indirect yet practical: “You know, describes the last time they all shared a stage— I’ve never actually performed with Ralph and though danced separately—during his 1982 Bebe. I’d love to do that.” series Parallels, which examined the intersection of “Black America” and “non-mainstream dance.” For Bebe, Ishmael, and Ralph, though the historical In his dance-archive Come home Charley Patton, and cultural contexts around their work Ralph Lemon writes of his body as a “distilled over the last forty years require attention, even history” or “memory map,” both in documenting intervention, more crucial is the present. So, his movement improvisations at sites charged what if the answers to my questions aren’t in with civil rights history and in the proscenium a history lesson but a performance? What if performance that toured to the MCA Stage in the only way to understand the past is by looking 2005.1 His practice became more improvisational at the artists’ bodies at work today: how in the late 1990s, around the time he began they conjure where they have been, continue to interrogating his personal dance history and create together, and invent their next moves. cultural context onstage.2 Ishmael performed in Improvisation is a strategy for performing and his underwear in the MCA’s elevator during a making dances at which they are experts summer solstice celebration in 1998. Organizers and one that can be trusted to bring out who of the festival of which the performance was they are and what they do—their tics and a part, Rebecca Rossen and Asimina Chremos, habits, their past work balanced on each flick described how “his nontechnical approach to dance of an arm with the immediacy of responding and ‘great methods for generating material’ to the moment. Though they have never danced profoundly changed their vision of performance,” as a trio before, since that first conversation especially in an improvisational exercise that with Ishmael we have described Relations as a pushed students to respond physically to divisive reunion. With shared history always just under questions: “Have you had an abortion?” the surface, their inventing a dance together in “Are you black?” “Are you gay?”3 Alvin Ailey’s 2 3 iconic choreography for Revelations made a big dance can be, what choices black artists can impression on Bebe in the early 1970s, but it make. We are not starting from scratch in the wasn’t her thing. “There was a sense of choice current dance landscape when we ask big that I wasn’t talking about,” she says of her questions by experimenting with dance, in part developing relationship to her white modern because these three have already been in dance background, “but I was definitely making conversation for a long time, along with many one.”4 Recently performing In a Rhythm (2017) others. Relations continues that conversation, in Chicago, she danced alongside her company, as Ishmael, Ralph, and Bebe navigate their craft, her influence on their movements most evident together. As Claudia La Rocco puts it in her in how she glided and hiccuped her limbs across contribution to this volume, may they close “the the stage, while Toni Morrison’s voice went in door on the expected thing” and find what is next. and out of earshot, debating with Charlie Rose 1 Nicholas Birns, “Ralph Lemon’s counter-memorials,” in Dance: Documents of Contemporary in 1990 about double standards for black authors. Art, ed. André Lepecki (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 204–5; Ralph Lemon, Come home Charley Patton (Middletown, CT; Wesleyan University Press, 2013), 207. 2 The Body Eclectic: Evolving Practices in Dance Training, ed. Melanie Bales and Rebecca Nettl-Fiol (Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2008), 221–22. We could mythologize them: Ishmael the punk, 3 Laura Molzahn, “Dance Notes: Keeping the Movable Beast Alive,” The Reader, June 11, 1998, chicagoreader.com/chicago/dance-notes-keeping-the-movable-beast-alive/Content?oid=896506. for whom labels like “black,” “queer,” or 4 The Body Eclectic, 225. “experimental dance” aren’t limits so much as malleable tools; Bebe the linguist, overlaying multiple articulations of her relationship to dance, culture, and society, and trusting what that intricacy unearths; Ralph the double agent, posing big, poetic questions while adroitly dodging answers in favor of something less nameable. EXCERPTS FROM CURATOR’S STATEMENT But the possibilities within these improvised FOR PLATFORM 2012: PARALLELS, performances on the MCA Stage hinge on the DANSPACE PROJECT, NEW YORK 1 intimacy, often at a distance, of their relationships with each other, not on those imagined figures. Ishmael Houston-Jones Among only a few choreographers of their generation and ilk who continue to make work, their relationship seems as much about mutual So it was in 1982 when I was Media Theater (a company newly arrived in New York led by two former members artistic influence as it is about friendship. I have from Philadelphia where I’d of the Mary Wigman looked to each of them as guideposts for what performed with Group Motion ensemble in Berlin) and studied 4 5 improvisation with Terry Fox, I did not consider folks from choreographers, with a few “I chose the name Parallels African at The Arthur Hall other parts of the Diaspora: variations, shows up in Sally for the series because while Afro American Dance Ensemble, not the Caribbean and no, Banes’ 1982 book Terpsichore all the choreographers modern (Horton) with Joan not Africa. in Sneakers. Apparently, in participating are Black and Kerr as well as contact a dance movement that began in some ways relate to the improvisation and one semester What was “beyond the in the impassioned defiant rich tradition of Afro-American of ballet. I asked Cynthia mainstream” was somewhat days of the 1960s and dance, each has chosen a Hedstrom, the director of trickier to define. The Judson proclaimed from the stage and form outside of that tradition Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Dance Theater (1962–64) is in manifestos that dance and even outside the tradition Church in-the-Bowery, if I usually cited as the watershed was a democratic form for of mainstream modern dance could curate a series composed moment in Dance History everyone, “everyone” was a . this new generation of of a group of “Black” when traditional concert rather limited concept. Black artists—who exist in the choreographers who were modern dance gave way to parallel worlds of Black working outside the a period of more experimental What I think I meant when I America and of new dance— Mainstream of Modern Dance. post-modern dance with approached Cynthia Hedstrom, is producing work that is All those definitions seemed Merce Cunningham seen as the was that as a Black dance richly diverse.” so simple to me then. To me intermediary figure. However, maker, I didn’t feel the same “Blacks” were the descendants most often in the history of spiritual connection with Alvin It’s been thirty years since of West Africans who were the Judson era the contributions Ailey that I did with, people Blondell Cummings, Fred brought to the Americas of Black experimentalists are doing contact improvisation Holland, Rrata Christine Jones, as slaves in the 17th, 18th, and either invisible or relegated to or folks dancing at the Ralph Lemon, Bebe Miller, 19th centuries. They may a footnote of the more “serious” Palladium and the Pyramid the late Harry Sheppard, Gus or may not have voluntarily post-modern choreographers. Clubs or b-boys and girls Solomons jr. and I performed intermarried with Native break dancing on cardboard on the first Parallels series Americans or less voluntarily . in the streets, or those bizarre at Danspace Project. It’s been interbred with the majority New Wave Drag performers twenty-five since Jawole population.