CHRIS COCHRANE / DENNIS COOPER / ISHMAEL HOUSTON-JONES
THEM *2011 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award Winning Production
THEM is currently available for national and international touring. Please contact Ben Pryor for more information.
Conceived by Chris Cochrane, Dennis Cooper and Ishmael Houston-Jones Directed by Ishmael Houston-Jones Choreography improvised by the performers after a score by Houston-Jones Music by Chris Cochrane Text by Dennis Cooper Lighting by Joe Levasseur Advisor to the Production Jonathan Walker Performed by Joey Cannizzaro, Felix Cruz, Niall Noel, Jeremy Pheiffer, Jacob Slominski, Arturo Vidich and Enrico D. Wey Management: Ben Pryor / tbspMGMT ABOUT THE WORK THEM is an intensely physical interdisciplinary work that presents an unblinking look into the lives of young (gay) men. Conceived and directed by Ishmael Houston-Jones THEM features early texts by famed writer/provocateur Dennis Cooper, and a cacophonous live electric guitar sound score by Chris Cochrane. Houston-Jones’ choreography, while rooted in improvisation develops the themes of connections that never quite happen, grappling and wrestling that seem inconsequential and ineffective, and support that disappears.
PRESS “poetic and disturbing, backed by the full force of its history without being diminished by it.” - Claudia La Rocco for THE NEW YORK TIMES
“The re-creation of “THEM” is, among other things, a beautiful and powerful act of cultural transmission. Three older gay male artists look back at a creatively turbulent era of embattled sexuality, while a freshly energized band of younger men attest to the vitality of these images. And both pay tribute, silently, to the men who didn’t survive.“ - Don Shewey for CULTUREVULTURE.NET
UPCOMING PERFORMANCES TanzImAugust, Berlin, Germany August 15 & 16, 2012 TAP-Poitiers, Poitiers, France April 10 & 11, 2013
PAST PERFORMANCES Centre Pompidou, Paris, France February 27 & 29, 2012 Springdance, Utrecht, The Netherlands April 22 & 23, 2011 AMERICAN REALNESS, New York, USA January 8-10, 2011 Performance Space 122, New York, USA October 20-30, 2010
FUNDING CREDITS The creation of THEM was supported in part by Performance Space 122’s TestPerformanceTest and developed through the RE:NEW RE:PLAY residency series at the New Museum with additional residency support from the Abrons Arts Center. Additional support for THEM has been provided by Tides Foundation and Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
Photo: Ian Douglas
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(Overture)* – Chris fining whatever it was they were doing is all I can do now. To sit here and see them again, no matter how cold that looks. It wasn’t.
?I7MJ>;CED9;$ I don’t know when or who they were Opening Duet* - Chris because they were too far away. But I remember certain things, like what they wore, which wasn’t anything special – pants, shirts, regular colors – Dead Friends* – Dennis (Chris plays under) stuff I’ve seen thousands of times since. I wanted them to know something. I cupped my hands around my Cass Romanski, 23, and his fiancée made dinner at his family home mouth and thought about yelling out. But they wouldn’t have heard me. in Arcadia. After his parents had gone to bed, they argued over the date Besides, I didn’t belong there. So I sat on a rock and watched them. For of their forthcoming marriage. He became hysterical, went into the next some reason it still matters years later. room, locked the door, and shot himself in the head. I thought about love. I think I confused what they did with it. But my belief made the day great. I think I decided to make that my goal – to be Mervyn Fox, 56, spent the night in the pool house at his estranged like them. I put such incredible faith in the future that I sobbed a little I wife’s home in Altadena. He’d looked ill for several weeks. He read part of think. Aldous Huxley’s The Devils, swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills, and lay I can’t believe I once felt what I’m talking about. Those tangled guys down on his bed. have become an abstraction, a gesture, a recreation. I wish I had taken Bunker Spreckles, 28, was at a party. He thought he’d come down off a photo of them. Then I could rip it up, because I’m tired of dreaming the heroin he’d shot earlier that evening. He excused himself from his of what they implied every night f my life, or whenever I close my eyes, friends, walked out to his car and shot up twice as much. whichever comes first. I thought it mattered. It does and it doesn’t. Robert Benton, 45, was having trouble with his lover, John Koenig. They’re very beautiful back there, but put all that feeling in motion now, They argued and Koenig left. Benton’s oldest friend, Annetta Fox, came then try to get it to explode in your face. It can’t. It’s not built to do that. by and tried to comfort him. They drank a bottle of champagne together, 7KJ KHEL?: ? 9 > But they’re still there, no matter how I misremember them. And rede- then she went home. Soon after she left, he shot himself in the chest. An- ? I > 7 C ; B >EKIJ ED#@ED;I @79 E8I?EC?DIA? 9 >H?I9 E 9 >H7D; @E;O9 7DD?PP7HE netta said at that moment her car jerked sharply to the left. I met Craig Steinman, 14, on Napili Beach on the island of Maui, He came to my house in Monrovia one evening and we watched television. Mattress Bash* John Wells, 25, was loading his surfboard into his van alongside Pacific Hawaii. We started hanging out together and taking acid. One afternoon He said he had to be back at his parents’ house by 11 PM; it was 9:15. Coast Highway in Huntington Beach. It was a clear spring day. A speeding we were at his house when he got a letter from a girl he was in love with I said, “I guess we should get busy then.” He said, “I’ve never had sex “A Knock At My Bedroom Door Wakes Me Up”* – Dennis car struck him, throwing him thirty feet in the air. who had moved to Oregon. He started looking at me strangely and said, before, I’m afraid.” I said, “Don’t worry about it.” He put his arms around Annetta Fox, 55, entered the hospital for bronchitis. It was discovered “Dennis, hug me like you hug your girlfriends.” I said, “Forget it.” He my waist and lay his head on my shoulder like we were slow dancing. A knock at my bedroom door woke me up. Honey, your father and I she had lung cancer. They removed one lung. A month later at home, she said “I’m going to sit on your lap.” I didn’t say anything so he did, felt my I met Joe Hardy, 15, in a glitter rock club on the Sunset Strip in 1974. are going to Church; I wish you’d join us. She knocked twice more then I stood up from a chair to go to the bathroom and her legs gave out. She hard-on underneath, closed his eyes, and kissed me. We talked about music, first there, then in his bedroom. We knelt on the heard her high heels click-clack-click down the hall. It was music to my was rushed to the hospital, where it was discovered the cancer had spread I met Robert Douglas, 18, at Arcadia High School in gym class. floor smoking grass and looking through pictures of him as a child. “You ears and far more evocative than a light patter of rain is supposed to be. throughout her body. We were both reading David Harris’ ‘Goliath’. I became obsessed with were always a knockout,” I said. He looked surprised. “Are you gay?” he I wish I was that young again. There’s a particular photo I’m thinking of. David Sellers, 17, met an older man at a bar and went home with him. him, and we grew to be close friends. Two years later in his bedroom in said. I nodded. “What a coincidence,” he said. After a few moments of I look 7 or something. I think it was my birthday. I’m posed with blurred, They had sex. The man gave him some money. Afterwards he walked to Monterey Park he asked me if I was in love with him. I said “Yeah, no grinning at one another I leaned over and kissed him, “Take that,” I said. suntanned boys on 3 sides of a card tabled so piled with gifts it looked a nearby phone booth and called his roommate to ask for a ride home. surprise, right?” He said, “No.” So I said, “And?” He said, “Come here.” I met John, ?, on Santa Monica Blvd in West Hollywood when a friend like an aerial view of Disneyland. The future was bright and my face Midway through the conversation, a blood vessel in his brain burst. I met David Sellers, 15, through my friend Julian Andes. We 3 drank a and I decided to split the cost of a hustler. We drove him back to my showed it. I’ve never seen myself happier. But, in a consequent shot of bottle of Jack Daniels besides his parents’ pool. We were laughing when friend’s apartment on the Sunset Strip. We smoked 2 joints and it being me crossed legged on the lawn amid the now naked toys, my grin looks Blood Vessel/Tag*– Chris David suddenly leered at me and walked off a short distance. Julian said, my turn first I said, “Do you want to go into the bedroom?” He looked out more like the G.I. Joe doll’s I was pretending to strangle. I mean totally “Go on and take him if you want him.” I followed David out and stood the window and said “Great view.”… forced and faked up. I guess I grew more disappointed over the years, Bedded Friends* – Dennis (Chris underneath until last name) beside him looking at the rose garden. I put my hand on his shoulder. He (Chris drowns this last one out with music) … once toys were tossed in the dumpster and boys bodies stretched out smiled at me and said, “Bull’s eye.” before me instead. I remember looking down at each one in turn, both I met Julian Andes, 19, in line to buy tickets for the Yes Concert at I met Kevin Croydon, 19, in a hustler bar on the upper east side of Circle Duets (Touch/Don’t Touch)* – Chris, of us covered with sweat and cum and thinking, “What did I ever see in The Forum. I saw him again 2 days later in line to buy tickets for the Manhattan. He went back in a cab with me to my hotel. He closed the you?” I thought of those paintings of angels I’d seen in photos of old Lou Reed concert at the Santa Monica Civic. We talked, had lunch at a curtains and sat down on the bed. I said, “What do you like to do?” He Masturbation* – Chris church ceilings. I thought of boys snapping each other with wet towels in Denny’s Coffee Shop, and drove to his apartment. Inside, after 3 beers said, “Oh I don’t know. I like to fuck about once a year.” I said, “Well, the gym lockers at school. I thought of the porn picture some sophomore he pointed towards his bedroom. “Do you want to go in there?” he said. let’s play it by ear.” He lay back on the bed and laughed. Fag Bash* – Chris (long sustained note) had flashed me. Being young, I had many obvious lines of thought. Now “Yeah, OK,” I said. I met Frederick Blaine, 21, through an ad in the Advocate newspaper. I think how those things are so far away. That’s what makes them ideal: which time he s somewhere else regaling a person I don t know. There s this direct kind of jagged path to him, if I want to take it. I used to dream of situations like this. A group of guys; me among them. Guys so near you reach out your arms, you just put out your arms and come back with this beautiful thing, this guy. But now I sorry, it wasn t you I was aiming myself at. I m going to stroll around now and keep my eyes out for you know what. Hi. Remember me. Remember when you were stupid and love was profound, and you couldn t even conceive of a face much less a body fantastic enough to put it with? That was cool. We were such shits, and I was so stoned or naïve or whatever I sat on this rock in the middle of nowhere, I did, and there was this whole bunch of guys just like now, but they were fucking, and I hadn t seen people fuck before. I was completely amazed. I thought -- I am going to grow up to expressly to do something like that. Because they seemed Oh I ve told this tale before. WORD You know the scoop and now we re here, right? And off limits. Still, see that guy falling down over there? I want him. I m tired. No, I m just ASSOCIATION tired. I don t know where he went. See that guy? Wait, I see him. He s WITH... the one trying to stay on his feet. No, the other one. I think he s ready for something like me in his life, don t you think? Here goes nothing. I take a few steps. Hi. My name is this or that. And I look in his eyes and think, where ve I seen that before? They seem wary. You want to go out, leave this place, find another place? Anywhere. You know this neighbor- hood better than I do. Somewhere where nobody’ll talk about us. Gee, let ;DH?9 E: M;O me think, hmm … I do know this hole in the ground. I think “perfect.” I know we can disappear there. At the same time I hate the idea so much not seeing the brush strokes or feeling the towels’ sting or hearing the I get another drink, and so does he, and by the time we stumble out … camera man bark out the orders to guys who would otherwise just lie I want to lie down, preferably with him but if I have to knock somebody around in a daze all day. I waited until my mother’s footsteps thinned out down to get what I want I will. I put my arms out … I’m sorry I have to do BASEMENT 8B79A8EJJECJ7HJ and a door slammed somewhere else in the house. When I was sure was this. N AKED >ED;O totally alone, I thought back, I pushed down the blankets, I jerked off. Goat* – Chris 3-D @?<
Ishmael Houston-Jones 09.26.10
The New York–based choreographer Ishmael Houston-Jones has been a leader and educator in the field of contemporary dance for over thirty years. This year, the New Museum and Performance Space 122 are co-producing the twenty-fifth anniversary version of Them, a controversial work that Houston-Jones made in collaboration with the musician Chris Cochrane and the writer Dennis Cooper. On September 30 and October 3, 7, and 10, audiences can view rehearsals for Them at the New Museum as part of a project called Them and Now. From Ishmael Houston-Jones with Chris Cochrane and Dennis Cooper, Them, 1985/ 2010. Performance view, PS 122, New York, 1985. Clockwise, form left to right: October 21–30, PS 122 will present an Chris Cochrane, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Jonathan Walker, Donald Fleming (floor). updated version of Them. Here Houston- Jones discusses the work’s origins. photo by Dona Ann McAdams
THE FIRST TIME I heard about Chris Cochrane was also the first time I saw him play, at a club called 8BC in a destroyed building on Eighth Street between Avenues B and C. They had liquor there, but it was more of an arty club. I thought his music was incredible. It wasn’t so much punk rock but it was punk-influenced. There was a lot of musicianship.
When I first met Dennis Cooper he was reading at some club on the Westside. There was a buzz about him before his arrival in New York; people were really excited. I didn’t know him at all. He’d been publishing Little Caesar out in LA and there was a performance place called Beyond the Baroque out there that he was the leader of. When I heard him read, I was shocked that literature could upset me so much. It was something from Tenderness of the Wolves. And after I said, “Do you want to work with me?” And he said, “Sure,” even though he didn’t know who I was.
That was probably 1985, and at the time there was a whole community around PS 122. It was artist- run in those days. I would go to the Kitchen in SoHo, but PS 122 was in my neighborhood and it was sort of a clubhouse. The art and dance worlds then weren’t as geographically spread out, nor were they quite as professionalized. (Dancers today have much greater facility, I’ve noticed.) It was very downtown Manhattan–centric. We never went to Brooklyn. Now the scene is very dispersed. To see edgy or interesting stuff you really have to travel. It’s not terrible. It’s a different mode of relating, and thus a different kind of community today.
“Them” comes out of a long tradition of my one-word titles. I think it’s actually the name of a 1950s horror film about giant ants, which has nothing to do with the piece. The first line Dennis reads is, “I saw them once. I don’t know when, or who, they were.” Them evolved over time. There was a short version in 1985 at PS 122, essentially a work-in-progress. It was Chris, Dennis, myself, dancer Donald Fleming, and the actor Jonathan Walker, and the institution’s director, Mark Russell, asked us if we wanted to expand it. www.tbspMGMT.com
Like many of my dance works, Them is a highly scored improvisation. The movements are not illustrative of any of the other elements: The music, the dance, and the text happen along three parallel tracks. Near the end there’s this looping section where two guys are on a mattress. They push each other up then push each other down. After that they disappear and a dancer, who used to be me, is brought out by a figure in black and thrown blindfolded onto a mattress and an animal carcass is thrown on top of him and there’s this wrestling scene and then it ends.
The mattress and animal carcass were a sort of acknowledgment of AIDS. People were dying— friends, people we knew. There was panic. The carcass on the mattress came from a dream my friend had. In it he woke up and he was lying next to his own dead body; he would try to throw it out of bed, but it kept coming back on top of him. It’s also about my fear of death. I still can’t change a mousetrap. I’m really squeamish around dead things.
There was a time when the meatpacking district used to be an actual meatpacking district. There were buildings filled with animal carcasses. I remember I had my mind set on having a goat, and I went around to all these places and none of them had one. There was this place that had mostly pigs, but there was one goat, really beautiful, with all its fur still on. I couldn’t go back to get it until 4 AM, so I brought one of my dancers with me and we put it in a bag—it looked like a body. We took it in a cab back to my place on Suffolk Street. At the time the building was really hot and I tied it with an electric cord and hung it out the window overnight. The next day I put it around my shoulders and carried it to PS 122, just in time for the dress rehearsal. We’re not sure where we’re going to get the goat this time around.
— As told to David Velasco
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Ishmael Houston-Jones The ’80s are back with Them. By Gia Kourlas
This fall, Ishmael Houston-Jones will revive a work, right before our eyes. Them, which celebrated its premiere in 1986, features text by Dennis Cooper, music by Chris Cochrane, six male dancers and a dead goat (yay, right?). Though he stopped actively making work in the early 2000s, Houston-Jones—a choreographer, teacher, curator, writer, performer and improviser—has been a force in the New York dance world for more than 30 years. The historic reconstruction will be unveiled in October at P.S. 122, but in the meantime, there are several opportunities to soak up the ’80s. Parts of the production’s rehearsal process are open to the public at the New Museum (“Them Today”); the museum series also offers “Them and Now,” which sheds more light on the collaborators, beginning with a discussion, “ ‘Winging It’ in High Heels and a Blindfold,” on Friday 24. Recently Houston-Jones spoke about the project.
Were you pursuing this reconstruction? Not really. Vallejo [Gantner, artistic director of P.S. 122] approached me. Because they’re redoing the theater at P.S., they’re bringing back some of what they’re calling seminal works from the past before they start reconstruction. Of the pieces I’ve done at P.S. 122, it was the first collaboration with Dennis Cooper and it was the first time I worked with Chris Cochrane. It was a real turning point. I am wondering how particularly the AIDS theme has changed in the 25 years since the piece was made. It wasn’t specifically an AIDS piece, but it was referenced.
Could you describe it? The dance portion is a series of structured improvisations built around Dennis’s text and Chris’s music. They’re not meant to be illustrative, but evocative of what’s going on both in the words and in the music. The text is a kinder, gentler Dennis Cooper—it’s funny because he wasn’t that old, but it was sort of looking back at a male youth in awe of what his life used to be. He was in his thirties when he was writing it. In 1985, I was about 35.
How did you end up working with those collaborators? I remember meeting Dennis and hearing him read for the first time, and I was blown away by the power of his words. I just went up to him and said, “Do you want to work together?” He was totally open to that. And a similar thing happened with Chris. I was taken by his music, but also by his posture. He was sort of hunched over the guitar making these incredible sounds. Then I thought, What if the three of us put something together? It was very sort of Mickey Rooney–Judy Garland, let’s-put-on-a-show kind of thing. I think the text drives the piece a lot just in terms of imagery; definitely the text drove the dance more than the dance drove the text. Dennis read it live. We’re not sure how it’s going to happen here because he is living in Paris now and I don’t know if we can get him here for the whole time. We’re thinking possibly a voiceover? But in the original piece he spoke.
Were you improvising to the text? Not to the text. We sort of set them up like parallel tracks, so I knew what the text was going to be and I set up situations. The opening duet is done just to music. In the 1986 version, Dennis reads the opening text and the guys are sort of in tableaux—there’s not a lot of dancing, and the next section is a music-dance section and then it flips. There are times when Dennis is reading and there is movement happening—usually more static movement. The more expansive movement is done with music.
How many dancers were there? Six. We’re hoping for that [this time]. There’s not a lot of money involved; there will be five or six, and I would prefer it to be six. There’s one figure, who’s the outsider figure and becomes the death figure in the later version.
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On your blog (ishmaelhj.com), you refer to your most terrifying performing experience as happening in it: “Sticking my head inside that goat carcass in Them was no picnic.” Will it be repeated? We’re hoping it will. [Laughs] If I can’t get anybody else to do it, I might make a cameo, but I’m not sure. I don’t want to be in the piece. The theme of the piece was gay male youth, and I’m definitely no longer a youth. I really wasn’t even when the piece was made, but I really am not now.
Have you opened your rehearsals to the public before? Not in a real formal way, so it’ll be interesting. It’s an hour at each rehearsal, not the whole rehearsal. I think it’s interesting to get a different sort of feedback—even if don’t ask, you can see how people are taking the temperature of the room. I’ve invited people into rehearsals and I think it ramps up the ante. It makes it less ethereal and nebulous—especially in improv. This is also a performance.
What are you after in terms of dancers? I’m looking for a variety of physical types. Also people who can improvise and people who can leave their technique behind; people who don’t necessarily look like dancer- dancers. There is a lot of ensemble work and they’re doing somewhat intimate things with each other. They’re being physically close, working in contact, wrestling, throwing each other around and they’re sort of figuring that out so it’s not so much relying on pyrotechnics of technique but an innate sensitivity of what’s going on around them. And a sense of self.
Is this to be a true reconstruction? I think it’ll be really hard to do a faithful reconstruction just because it’s so improvised. Dennis and I haven’t talked so much about the text. I know Chris has different ideas about what he wants to do with the music. And a lot of the movement depends on the people doing it, so that’s going to change out of necessity. I’ll see. The props: There’s the goat, a mattress and a door frame that people can wrestle against.
What is the significance of the goat? It came from Christian mythology. Do you know Richard Elovich? He was an actor-performer friend of ours who did things around P.S. 122, and he had this dream. He told me that he woke up and he was lying in bed next to his own dead body and he kept trying to throw his own dead body out of bed, but he couldn’t do it. And that was the choreography of the goat dance—you’re on this mattress with this thing that you’re trying to get rid of, but you can’t. I was blindfolded and wearing a hospital-like gown. I don’t want to emphasize it so much because it literally is 45 seconds of the piece—it’s a vision. There was also something else: The summer before this piece, an older woman from the neighborhood got hit by a car and was killed right in front of P.S. 122. I was around that day—I didn’t see it happen, but I was around that day and her body was lying there. The police were investigating, and it was a hot summer day and she was covered.
How much will you talk to the new cast about not just the piece but the time in which it was made? Quite a bit. And I’ll be curious to see how things have changed in terms of mentality. It’s so funny. I’m old. I’m doing reconstructions now. I did this thing in Philadelphia last winter; it was a piece from 1981, which is very different from any piece I would do now, but it was for four men and we had a lot of interesting conversations about how the lives of young men have changed from then to now and how they haven’t.
How have they changed? There’s a whole section of the piece, which is very cheesy, of street cruising, and we had to explain the concept to them—this whole idea of hooking up on the street doesn’t exist, at least in that way. Now, they do it on computers. That piece [What We’re Made Of], in ’81, was pre-AIDS, which made a huge difference. Homophobia is very much the same—this idea of exposure, of something bad happening just because of who you are.
Was that a primer for this? Kind of. So different though.
How does it make you feel to bring back older works? To see them? I think it’s funny. This is across the board, even with strictly choreographed pieces: You really can’t ever remake pieces. That is something I’ve been meaning to write about myself, especially in improvisation: What does it mean to reconstruct? What does it mean to redo something? How can you have something that was made in a specific www.tbspMGMT.com time and place with specific bodies and personalities? Can you ever really redo it? So far, setting up the situation and just letting it exist has been my plan of attack.
Talk to me about that time and that place surrounding the creation of Them. Well, P.S. 122 was very different. Them was very much located in that building, in that room. I think that’s another reason why I wanted to do it. It was much of a feeling of community around the space—it wasn’t like a theater so much, but a bunch of people. Again, it was very Judy Garland–Mickey Rooney, people putting on shows. There wasn’t very much equipment and the work coming out of there was really interesting and of a community. Very few pieces were imported that didn’t have some direct connection to the people who were hanging around doing stuff there. That was part of it. It was very East Village mid ’80s. Punk, new wave, the gay scene mixed with the dancey-dance scene as well. It was interesting. There were definitely dancers who were interested in punk music; the club scene was going on and people who I knew from the dance world would go to Limbo Lounge and the Wah-Wah Hut and see shows. I remember Neil Greenberg performing at the Wah-Wah Hut, which was pretty amazing because the stage was as big as this table.
So the club scene was in the mix. Definitely. That was the time. And using Chris as a musician—Karole [Armitage] did it with Rhys [Chatham]. Using somebody from a band was an idea that was around at that time. I think [critic] Burt [Supree] said something about the pall of AIDS sort of hovering around the piece, even though it never gets directly addressed. And I think it was very true: People we knew were dying, not just sick but actually really dying. A lot. So there was a sense of urgency that I don’t feel so much now—from anti nukes, to wars in Central America. People were in opposition. People were invested more than they are now at least visibly, vocally invested—it came out of that time. And around that time I was volunteering for God’s Love We Deliver, so I was delivering food and I had just gotten back from Nicaragua not too long before that. I was down there during the civil war. Teaching soldiers contact improvisation—I don’t know what I was thinking.
Let’s digress for a second. [Laughs] I went down the first time I think in ’83 for two weeks as part of a theater festival—I was a guest of the government and there were a bunch of us North Americans. Then, the following year I went down on my own. I had met some people and was teaching at the University of Central America, Managua. Saying that I was teaching soldiers is a little bit disingenuous because everybody was a soldier then. People would show up in their fatigues and change out of them and prop their rifles against the wall and have on leotards underneath. It was kind of a scary time and it was kind of exciting too. I was just down there for a couple of months. The first time when I was down there for the festival, we were guests of the Sandinistas, so we were being driven around in buses and sort of pampered and taken out to dinners. The second time I was staying with a family who rented out a room and getting around on my own which was really difficult. I felt like people were much more engaged politically and with social issues than they are now. Them came out of that feeling even though it’s not a didactic political piece; it’s very much more poetic and abstract, but it comes out of that feeling of urgency, that there was a reason for doing it. That will be interesting—to see how that translates to a different generation of performer.
When did you start dancing? The first dance class was as a junior in high school. It was stagey. It was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where I grew up and the community theater was offering free dance classes to teenagers and my friend Susan Lourie, who I’m still friends with and is on the dance faculty of Wesleyan now, said, “Do you want to come down and take class?” I said, “Sure.” I was involved in theater in high school. It was jazzy, modern. I loved it. But I went to college as an English major to a school that didn’t have a dance program in Erie, Pennsylvania, which is Gannon College, which is now Gannon University. I lasted there two years and dropped out.
Did you move? To Israel. Where I lived for a year.
What were you doing there? Hanging out. Working. I was traveling around the world after my sophomore year of college with the intention of coming back and then I wound up in Israel—breaking my parents’ hearts and dropping out of college and staying for a year. I was a pig farmer for nine months and then I worked in a banana plantation.
www.tbspMGMT.com My God. It was a really interesting time in ’71—between the two big wars. It as a really good feeling and not so scary and I had always been a closet socialist—as a 19-year-old from Harrisburg could be. I had never done any kind of heavy farm work in my life and getting up at 4am and feeding pigs and mating them and working in a slaughterhouse—it was really cool. After that, I moved to Philadelphia. The same Susan was going to Temple and I moved into her house, where there was an extra room. I started auditing classes there and then I got into a company, Group Motion Media Theater, which still exists actually. I danced with them for two years and then started doing my own work. I was in Philly for seven years. I moved here in ’79.
What made you decide to move to New York? I always wanted to live in New York. I mythologized it a lot. When I moved to Philadelphia I think it was the first baby step to moving to a big city. And I was sort of happy that I didn’t move here when I was just 20—I might have gotten swallowed up. Philadelphia was easier, and I was finding my own voice there. When I came here, I had an identity and an aesthetic that I was working with; it could have worked here too but I think it was easier finding that there. And then it was time to leave and I stayed one critical year too long. [Laughs] It’s like I’d made the decision and stayed; I worked with Terry Fox. We did a lot of improv together.
Did you know people here? I sort of did. I’d been coming up and taking contact classes with Danny Lepkoff and seeing my shrink, which was sort of interesting. My shrink in Philadelphia thought I should be seeing a movement therapist because I was not very talkative and I couldn’t find one there and I started working with a woman here.
You produced work throughout the ’80s and ’90s. When and why did you stop? In the early 2000s. It was a conscious decision. I just felt like I didn’t know what I wanted to say and I didn’t want to be one of these people who just makes work just to make work. I was committed to performing in other people’s work if I got asked but I didn’t feel I had anything new to put out there, that I felt compelled to make. Rather than just do work to make work—and I’ve never wanted to have a company and I don’t have a company—I made that decision. I think it’s the right one.
Why have you started again now? Well, now I’m doing revivals [Laughs].
But you’re making a new piece at the New School, where you teach, right? I’ve actually done pieces with students at other places too. The piece I’m doing at the New School will probably be a variation on what I did at Alfred University last winter, so I’ve been working with students. And last year I did a piece at DNA and that was the first newish thing. I like working with students. It’s sort of an extension of teaching. Working with students on performance is a way of teaching that accomplishes something that just teaching doesn’t. I like the fact that they’re open. And if they’re open—a lot of young people aren’t open—I must amend that. [Laughs]
Is it because they have so much information? Or that they’re hungry for information. Or—this is going to sound bad—they have wrong information against my role as the corrupter. I see that a lot at ADF [American Dance Festival]. People come from wherever and whatever state; essentially I’m teaching improvisation, and they’ve been taught this one way that improvisation is this one thing and it’s usually something awful. What I did actually and Donna Faye [Burchfield] asked me to develop a curriculum for teaching improvisation. I had different people coming in, so it’s not just me. Especially with improvisation—there are just so many different avenues of approach, so I brought Yvonne Meier in and David Brick of Philadelphia, Keith Hennessey, Curt Haworth. Different people coming in to give different information, which was really good. I think a lot of young people, and I am going to contradict myself, aren’t that open. They’ve been taught. A lot of them go through studios. I never did that so I’m always curious when they speak with this ownership, “I went to my studio” which means the place where they studied. It’s sort of breaking a multitude of bad habits. My role of a corrupter comes in.
When did you know you had that? I think early on. [Laughs] I think that rules are made to be broken.
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Dance Listings for Oct. 15‐21
★ Ishmael Houston‐Jones (Thursday) Today Mr. Houston‐Jones is one of the respected elders (however mischievous) of New York’s progressive dance scene. Back in 1986, when he made “Them” with Chris Cochrane and Dennis Cooper, this men‐with‐men piece, in part a response to the AIDS crisis, almost got Performance Space 122 shut down. This reconstruction, a partnership between the theater and the New Museum, is an all‐too‐rare attempt to take a look back at recent dance history. (Through Oct. 30.) ‐ Claudia La Rocco
Performance Space 122 150 First Avenue, at Ninth Street, East Village $20; $15 for students and 65+ ps122.org
Arabesques and Pirouettes on Parade By CLAUDIA LA ROCCO Published: September 10, 2010
ISHMAEL HOUSTON‐JONES In 1986, Mr. Houston‐Jones almost got Performance Space 122 shut down over “Them,” a rough and raw exploration of men with men during the height of the AIDS crisis. Now, as P.S. 122 celebrates its 30th anniversary as one of the flashpoints of contemporary American culture, it is representing “Them,” which features live text (by Dennis Cooper) and music (Chris Cochrane). Mr. Houston‐Jones is reviving the work during an extended residency at the New Museum, where there will be a series of open rehearsals and public discussions.
Oct. 21‐Oct. 30 150 First Avenue, East Village; (212) 352‐3101 ps122.org
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DANCE REVIEW A Look Back to a Time of Feral Play and Fear
By CLAUDIA LA ROCCO Published: October 29, 2010
New York has always been a city that favors big, splashy events and institutions. In such a world a small, scruffy theater like Performance Space 122 and the artists it has presented for the last 30 years are often overlooked.
This is a mistake. P.S. 122 is one of New York’s most important and vital cultural centers, a living repository of an indelible artistic history without which we would be vastly poorer.
On Wednesday night a moment from this history returned: “Them,” a work conceived by the composer Chris Cochrane, the writer Dennis Cooper and the choreographer Ishmael Houston-Jones, who also directed the all-male effort (with seven younger performers). “Them” had its premiere at P.S. 122 in 1986, when the city was in the grip of the AIDS crisis. As Burt Supree wrote in a Village Voice review that year, “ ‘Them’ isn’t a piece about AIDS, but AIDS constricts its view and casts a considerable pall.”
In 2010 this grip has eased somewhat, but it is still very much present. “Them,” likewise, reads differently now. But it does not feel like a reconstruction. It is poetic and disturbing, backed by the full force of its history without being diminished by it.
As Mr. Supree went on to write, “Them” is a meditation on “some ways men are with men.” These men, and their ways, come and go onstage in waves of bodies, held by Mr. Cochrane’s muscular, sexy guitar playing and Mr. Cooper’s quiet, elegant reading.
“I thought about love,” Mr. Cooper told us. “I think I confused what they did with it.”
Mr. Cochrane and Mr. Cooper are present throughout, situated at corners of the black rectangular theater like anchors, often barely illuminated by Joe Levasseur’s spare, low lighting. But Mr. Houston-Jones appears only in the beginning, embracing and blindfolding a man (Arturo Vidich) whose full face we never see, and offering a too-brief solo that is something of an overture: a hinging, fluid dance that seethes with an almost feral desire.
Everyone from Michael Jackson to Trisha Brown glints in his youthful frame. But there’s nothing derivative here; if you could just watch him for long enough, it seems, you’d understand all the impossible, conflicting things we need to be fully alive.
Mr. Houston-Jones is a master improviser (the movement here is improvisational), and the collaborators achieve a certain balance of heft and import. The 2010 cast is full of compelling dancers, but they have different information in their bodies; they’re at once less sophisticated and more technically honed, and this sometimes makes them too careful with the awkwardly beautiful grappling phrases.
I missed having older bodies onstage, and this is perhaps to the point. Mr. Cooper’s words are in part a litany of loss, and the younger men can seem like innocent phantoms. They stalk around sulkily. They play at stickball, and at being tough. Mostly they play at consuming each other and themselves, hurling and buckling their bodies as if trying to escape their skins and melt into one another.
But there’s no escape. Mr. Vidich, still blindfolded, ends up on a thin mattress wrestling with the carcass of a goat, its throat slit. The smell of the dead animal, meaty and thick, is almost unbearable. Blood smears the white fabric. It’s horrible to watch. It’s also somehow beautiful and, despite the uncomfortable ethical questions, necessary: The us witnessing the them.
“Them” runs through Saturday at Performance Space 122, 150 First Avenue, at Ninth Street, East Village; (212) 352-3101; ps122.org.
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DANCE BEST OF 2010
8. Ishmael Houston-Jones, Chris Cochrane, and Dennis Cooper, THEM (New Museum, New York, September 24–October 14, 2010; Performance Space 122, New York, October 21–30, 2010) From now on, whenever a dancer wrestles with a dead goat onstage, you can remember to blame Ishmael Houston-Jones, who gave everyone license to wrestle with a dead goat with THEM in 1986. Unabashedly gay and gritty, this cathartic restaging gave everyone something to talk about.
- David Velasco
DANCE THE BEST (AND WORST) OF 2010
The best…
Ishmael Houston-Jones The choreographer returned to P.S. 122 with musician Chris Cochrane and writer Dennis Cooper to stage the revival of Them, a profound, theatrical snapshot of life in New York City in the 1980s.
- Gia Kourlas
VIBRANT SCENE’S 20TH CENTURY BASE
I think of oft-overlooked innovators from the 1980s, like Ishmael Houston-Jones, whose “Them,” restaged in October at Performance Space 122, was one of the most powerful works I’ve seen in years.
- Claudia La Rocco
THE YEAR ACCORDING TO PAPERMAG The Best of Downtown Theater
Best Revival: A tie between Ishmael Houston-Jones' Them and John Kelly' s Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte
- Tom Murrin
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PRAISE FOR THEM Chris Cochrane / Dennis Cooper / Ishmael Houston-Jones
“And today, they’re restaging what made pretty much everyone’s best-of lists last year: THEM, the Ishmael Houston-Jones/Chris Cochran/Dennis Cooper piece that debuted in 1985 as a provocation and has aged, like a fine single-malt scotch, into a masterpiece.” - Jeremy M. Barker, CULTUREBOT
“…THEM, the Chris Cochrane, Ishmael Houston-Jones, and Dennis Cooper piece that blew everyone’s minds a couple months ago when it was re-staged after 25 years.” - Andy Horwitz, CULTUREBOT
“I was lucky enough to see Ishmael Houston-Jones’s “Them” when the 1986 work was revived at Performance Space 122 in October. It’s back as a co-presentation of Coil and American Realness, and I might just have to see it again. Works this good — this necessary — don’t come around very often, let alone twice in one year.” - Claudia La Rocco, THE NEW YORK TIMES
“a powerfully disturbing take on the relationships of young gay men” - Claudia La Rocco, ARTFORUM
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THEM By Don Shewey Published: October 2011
A re-creation of a show first presented at Performance Space 122 in 1985, “THEM” is a portrait of gay male youth in words (by novelist Dennis Cooper), sound (guitarist Chris Cochrane), and movement (devised by Ishmael Houston-Jones in collaboration with his cast of seven). It’s not any kind of rainbow-flag celebration of gay life, but a dark and honest evocation of the complicated interplay of fear, longing, tenderness, and hostility that young men experience in their grappling toward intimacy. A performance piece born out of a very particular East Village aesthetic, “THEM” is not a play by any Photo by Ian Douglas means. It’s more of a dance, but a dance centered not on steps but on actions that represent without exactly illustrating the stories that Cooper reads, standing in a corner of the bare space speaking into a handheld microphone. But it is as much an elegy and an alarm.
While Cooper is best-known for novels and stories populated by blank stoned post-adolescents having numb sex and nihilistic encounters with older men who idealize and exploit them, he started out as a poet unafraid to mix the simplicity of rock lyrics with explicit homoerotic imagery. The title of this performance refers to a group of casually dressed men he observes having sex, perhaps in a park in Los Angeles. “I thought about love. I think I confused what they did with it. But my belief made the day great.” His simple, evocative prose serves as interludes between the dozen or so discrete dance sections, which proceed sometimes in silence, sometimes to the keening, screeching soundtrack Cochrane creates hunched over his guitar and amp at the back of the stage.
Much of the dancing is a variation on contact improvisation, capitalizing on that form’s erotic implications — come closer/get off of me, connection built through tension. In both his solo and group work, Houston-Jones has often created physical scores that look brutal, verging on sadomasochistic. The duets look as much like wrestling or fighting as dancing or loving. There’s a lot of falling and crashing, like figures in Robert Longo’s famous paintings from the early 1980s. One man (Niall Noel) pushes another (Jacob Siominski) down onto a mattress, kneels over him, turns his head, picks him up, they do it again and again. A curly-haired lad (Jeremy Pheiffer) bats pennies with a 2x4 while Cooper reads a list of gruesome police-blotter-like reports of deaths, many of them suicides. Two men (Noel and Enrico D. Wey) walk back and forth, bumping up against one another in a dance of ambivalent cruising, with looks on their faces of indifference masking fearfulness and yearning. Each of the dancers gets a chance to shine. Wey has a particularly riveting solo.
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AIDS haunts the piece as an unspoken subtext. Joey Cannizarro slams his 2x4 on the mattress while behind him two other men pull up their shirts revealing bare backs. A spoken passage by Cooper about a desultory pick-up in a rock club sets up the most infamous dance in the show: a blindfolded dancer in white briefs and a dress shirt on backwards (Arturo Vidich) is led onstage with a dead goat (stinking to high heaven), with which he performs a short brutish pas de deux on the mattress — a stylized image that mashes together grungy sex encounter and dance of death. In the climactic group dance, each performer picks up a sequence of gestures that seem enigmatic until you recognize that they’re checking their necks, their armpits, their groins for swollen lymph nodes. By the end, Pheiffer has become a kind of stand-in for Cooper’s narrator. He repeats the first speech and then goes around to each of the men checking their glands for disease. Some of them fall. Only a few are left standing.
The re-creation of “THEM” is, among other things, a beautiful and powerful act of cultural transmission. Three older gay male artists look back at a creatively turbulent era of embattled sexuality, while a freshly energized band of younger men attest to the vitality of these images. And both pay tribute, silently, to the men who didn’t survive.
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Dark Matters at Montclair and THEM at PS122 by Andy Horwitz Posted on 24 October 2010
Saturday night found me riding the bus out to Montclair with a bunch of dance kids from Juilliard. Apparently some of the dancers in Crystal Pite’s company Kidd Pivot were Juilliard alums and the kids had been encouraged to check out the show. Being surrounded by all these blithe – and lithe – young people on a bus through the wilds of New Jersey gave me ample cause to reflect. As we drove through the malls of New Jersey, with their endlessly repeated chain stores, I listened to the kids talk about their favorite fast food and compare their different regional variations on well-known national brands. I thought about how fast the spread of Big Box Store America has been, how vast the monoculture has become and how easy it has become to just be detached. I looked at the news on my phone – always on! – and read about the outrages of America’s wars, about the ascendance of the Tea Party, about all kinds of shocking things, I turned off my phone and listened to the kids talk about fast food and I thought about Ishmael Houston-Jones’ THEM at PS122.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I went to see the show. I’ve known Ish for a long time but have only rarely seen him dance – in fact I met him at a reading series and at first didn’t know he was a choreographer, just a writer. I’ve read Dennis Cooper of course and I’ve known about Chris Cochrane – so I had some basic aesthetic framework in mind. In my imagination it was going to be a loosely constructed evening of spoken word and guitar noise with improvisational movement filling things out. I was up for anything but I wasn’t prepared for the focused, powerful, moving, urgent evening that followed. The lead artists may have been revisiting work from the 80′s but THEM is anything but nostalgic. It uses the frame of the 80′s piece to tap into a sense of creative and political urgency that transcends time, that speaks as freshly and clearly today as it must have when it was first performed. Yes, the politics have changed and there is probably less of a sense of sheer danger and outrage, but in this day and age where are artists are so reluctant to actually risk something emotionally – it was riveting and energizing to feel what it is like when the performers actually mean it. The cast – Joey Cannizzaro, Felix Cruz, Jeremy Pheiffer, Niall Noel, Jacob Slominski, Arturo Vidich, Enrico D. Wey – are all great improvisers and impressive movers. Ishmael appears in the beginning of the show and again in a captivating solo. Dennis Cooper’s stories, read intermittently between dance sequences, set a tone of dark tenderness laced with fear and regret. Chris Cochrane’s music is edgy and vital and foreboding. The evening is filled with powerful images that suggest the aggressive, dangerous cruise-y world of queer life in the 80′s and the underlying sense of being under attack both by a conservative society and by a vicious, unyielding plague. But the most haunting image is the final tableau – after all that we’ve been through, complete with a beating with a 2X4 and wrestling with a dead goat – of the men arrayed around the stage, feeling their necks and crotches, self-examining their lymph nodes, feeling for signs of the disease that is devastating their world. We may have come a long way since the early days of AIDS – now it is a “manageable” disease, so they say – but maybe we’ve gone backwards in some ways, in losing our ability to be outraged, in losing our ability to be passionate and compassionate and connected. THEM speaks to us of a horrible moment in the 80′s when NYC was in crisis and no-one seemed to be doing anything. But it speaks with a clarity and urgency that calls us all to action – whatever our current battles may be.
Meanwhile, back on the bus to Montclair, I’m listening to today’s youth compare the relative merits of Pizza Hut vs. Domino’s and wondering what is in store for me at the Kasser with Kidd Pivot Frankfurt RM‘s DARK MATTERS. I didn’t really know anything going into the show (do you detect a pattern here?)- I decided to go www.tbspMGMT.com
because I had seen the video online and I knew it had played at the Walker not too long ago, so I was curious. What I got was an interesting hybrid – part narrative puppet show (the first half) and part extraordinary contemporary dance (the second half) that was enjoyable, if a little puzzling in its pairing.
DARK MATTERS is the concept that holds the whole thing together and it refers both to the scientific idea of “dark matter” – and to the dark matters of the heart and experience. The first half of the evening is a relatively literal-minded puppet show in which a creator makes a puppet that comes to life. The puppet is – as these creatures are wont to be – mischievous and impish, it begins to tear at the very fabric of the world around the creator and threatens to bring the whole thing toppling down. The puppet won’t let the creator leave the house or do anything on his own – he takes over the creator’s life to the point where the creator threatens to unmake the puppet. As we all know from the Chucky movies, it’s always a bad idea to take on a supernatural puppet, and the creator meets an unpleasant demise on the wrong end of some scissors. The whole tale is conveyed in a relatively light-hearted way with some slapstick bits on the part of the puppeteers – who are also the dancers. Eventually the set in its entirety is destroyed and there is an eery tableau, like a war zone, of the ground covered in debris with the puppeteer/dancers buried beneath the rubble. One surviving puppeteer unearths another and dumps the dark, limp body on a pile of debris with a thump: end Act One.
After intermission the show changes entirely and the themes and ideas from the first half are re-explored by the performers, who by this time have shed their puppet-handler blacks and re-emerged in more dancer-y costumes. The second half is a beautifully danced and wonderfully constructed contemporary ballet. A lone puppeteer/dancer in black lurks and pops up occasionally on the edges, reminding us that darkness – and chaos – is always lurking. The sequence of dances only loosely references the first half and in the absence of a set the sound score by Owen Belton becomes more prominent. Constructed not only of music but the sounds of handicraft – the swishing of fabrics, crumpling of paper, the clacking of scissors – we get the feeling of a hand at work, and it obliquely raises the question of who is the puppet and who the puppeteer? The choreography is dynamic and multilayered, performed with energy and precision. The dancers manipulate each other’s bodies in ways that remind us of the puppet/creator relationship, but not too overtly. It is beautiful to watch and as much as I appreciate having the two halves of the show in juxtaposition, I feel like it was strong enough to stand on its own.
Finally, the sole black-clad dancer reappears, sheds her clothing and is joined onstage by the dancer/creator from the first half. They do a duet in which they recapitulate the narrative (kind of) and it ends with her holding his body in her lap, sewing into his chest and drawing a connective thread upward. Its as if she was reconnecting him to some primal source, he rises up a little until they’re both seated and embrace. (At least that’s how I remember it.) It was a haunting image, peaceful and dark at the same time.
It was fascinating to see these two shows, THEM and DARK MATTERS, so closely together. THEM was an immediate, visceral and disturbing experience, it was rough and kind of “‘punk rock”, much more urgent and timely. DARK MATTERS was more abstract and a lot more “refined” – it was related to an idea of darkness that was more cerebral and distanced and as such left room for meditation and reflection. I enjoyed them both but they elicited very different reactions. THEM moved me with its passion and immediacy, DARK MATTERS – especially the second half – impressed me with its rigor and the beauty of the movement. Still it is interesting to see and feel the difference between art made when your life is on the line and art made about ideas. I’m not privileging one over the other – but I do think I’ve seen a lot of art about ideas in the past few years and not too many that combined punk rock passion with high art conceptualism.
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On the bus on the way back from Montclair I had an interesting conversation with the production coordinator for the Kasser. She had been at Crystal Pite’s pre-show conversation on Friday and so I got a little bit of background after the fact. She said that one of the questions that Ms. Pite asked herself before she started a piece was “why does this have to be told in/through dance?” which is an interesting question. What is it in the embodied presence – without words -that offers us a specific experience of being that cannot be found any other way? DARK MATTERS was an abstracted exploration of control, free will and manipulation - the bodies in motion offered us an opportunity to reflect on ideas. In the case of THEM the bodies themselves were the canvas on which the story was told – they were bedroom and battleground, they were transcendent and they were weak.
Riding home I thought about all those young Juilliard dancers on the bus. I was glad that they had gotten to see DARK MATTERS – it probably showed them a kind of work that they weren’t often exposed to. But I felt like they needed to see THEM – to see dance that wasn’t just technically impressive but also was deeply personal and expressive and politically relevant.
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How Far Have We Really Come? by Jeremy M. Barker Published 22 October 2010
Last month, on the last Saturday I was in Portland, Oregon, I went out to a gay bar downtown in the Pearl District with the older of my two younger brothers. Just shy of his 25th birthday, he told me about two years ago that he was “bisexual, but currently only interested in men,” which, within a matter of months, transitioned into just being gay. Over time, he did the long, slow coming out process, until finally this year, after attending his first Pride events, he decided to finally come out to the rest of the family, who basically responded with a feigned sigh and a “Yeah, we’ve gathered, and no, obviously we don’t care.”
Still, if his coming out went better than that of many other young gay men’s, trying to figure out living as a gay man has overall been a bit trickier. Growing up and living till recently in the exurban area between Beaverton and Hillsboro on the outskirts of the city, there was no gay culture and more than a fair bit of homophobia. He only got to really discover himself on the weekends, taking an hour-long light rail ride into the city on Saturday nights to hang out in the gay bars downtown, where, as he explained, he tried to find other young men he had common interests with, while dodging being hit on by older men chasing after a young one night stand. Pretty much like how it goes at a straight club, in other words, except that outside, when he left at night, he had to watch out for drunken groups of aggro guys out to gay bash. Being some six feet tall and about as fit as he was when he was a varsity wrestler in high school, he was better off than a good number of his counterparts. Five on one isn’t a fair fight, as happened once, but for a different guy (or facing a different, more heavily armed five) it could have turned out far worse.
The night we went out, we started at a fairly classy gay bar, all white modern upholstery and brushed stainless steel, distinctly unlike the dives that surrounded the old Gay Triangle in downtown in the Eighties and early Nineties before downtown was fully gentrified and the gay community concluded that it wasn’t interested in turning a tiny area of dismal hook-up bars into a “historic” gay district. We were waiting in line for drinks when my brother was accosted by a friend of his of whom I’d been told stories. Only 21, he too was from the far suburbs. Much more flaming, with a fondness for a bit of rouge and eyeliner, as well as brightly colored plastic jewelry, and wearing a tight, silvery-white coat with a fuzzy hooded collar, he lived with his grandmother (his parents were less understanding, or at least less forgiving) and had no job. Like my brother used to, he took the train in on the weekends, often with only a few dollars on his person, and worked his way through the night.
He was banned from several bars and clubs for constantly begging drinks–sometimes downright aggressively, according to my brother, particularly if his mark was drunk–off the same sort of older gay men who’d hit on my brother. And every time he went out, he faced a choice: Portland’s MAX light rail isn’t the New York subway, and it doesn’t run all night. In these days of budget cuts, in fact, it stops running shortly after midnight, as I discovered to my disappointment and the detriment of my bank account a few $30 cab rides later. So, this kid either heads home early, or stays out late, where he can haunt one of the few all-age, all- night dance clubs, or give in and head home with one of the older men he flirted drinks off of, which was, according to my brother, a not uncommon occurrence.
Welcome to today’s suburban hustler.
This was one of the things I found myself thinking about last night at PS 122, while watching the re-staging of the Ishmael Houston-Jones/Dennis Cooper/Chris Cochrane dance piece Them which debuted nearly 25 years www.tbspMGMT.com
ago in the same space. It was one of those works you see that you are not remotely prepared for, that, going in, you have no idea how it will hit you.
What’s weird about Them is that it’s so compelling even though I, at least, didn’t find it shocking–even the infamous scene with the dead goat–so much as heartbreaking. Chock it up to how it’s aged. We’ve come a long way in 25 years, and this isn’t the sort of story we tell much anymore, in part because from today’s perspective, Them, with its stories of self-destructive sexual behavior, violence, and exploitation, seems almost to confirm the anti-gay conservative fantasy of the “dangers of the gay lifestyle.” In reality, of course, what artistic works like Them–a downright earnest piece of identity-politics performance–did was to make the point of how much society can make it suck to be gay, and provide the impetus to demand change.
The stories that Cooper–who exuded an almost preternatural serenity as he read–told were soul-crushing. This isn’t the shocking, taboo-breaking work I usually associate with the author, but rather a temperate, introspective examination of life and experience. It made sense coming from the silver-haired man reading them with his back to the risers last night; it was much harder to connect the 25-year-old text with a man who was in his early thirties when he wrote them. But I suppose that confronting the AIDS crisis in the Eighties, surrounded by death, gave him a sort of perspective I certainly lack at the same age.
The short, elegantly minimal stories he tells are of the rough process of discovering who you are in the middle of what’s basically a meat market. Cooper writes about the emptiness of sexual pursuit, of finding men to hook up with only to have to go out somewhere first, to drink until they can’t recognize themselves in order to bury their self-loathing. The story that sticks with me the most was of a hook-up with a young man. He comes over, watches TV for a while. He’s a virgin, but he has to be home by eleven-thirty; that’s the curfew his parents set. Don’t worry, Cooper has the narrator offer; it’s easy. Welcome to who you are, young man. Where’s love supposed to exist in this mess?
I think the social acceptance of homosexuality develops locally at different times and in different ways. When I graduated from high school in 1997, my class was sort of the last in which kids felt compelled to stay in the closet across the board. There was one young man who was out in my high school before 1997; he dropped out. The year after I graduated, freshmen entered who were out. That summer and the first few years of college, a number of people I knew came out, and I started to hear the stories of their early experiences: the anonymous hookups in the downtown Portland Nordstrom, the risky sexual behavior because AIDS seemed like just part of the price of being gay (their words, not mine), the lesbian who knew exactly how long her high school boyfriend took to come because she always stared at the clock during sex, waiting for it to be over (and no, it wasn’t all that long).
So it was hard watching Houston-Jones’s wrenching choreographic depiction of sexual self-destruction, the violence men do to one another serving equally as a metaphor for the violence they do to themselves. The scene with the animal carcass was devastating: the dancer, blindfolded, grappling, pawing, humping, climbing inside of a dead piece of meat, coagulated blood the color of shit smearing all over the place. And the smell: I’ve seen a lot of crazy things onstage by this point, and frankly have become blase about shocking images, but nothing makes something quite as visceral as the deceptively sweet scent of putrefaction.
But honestly, that wasn’t the hardest part to watch. It was the final scene, the six young dancers on whom Houston-Jones had set his choreography (he did take the stage early on to perform a solo, though), simply standing there, looking tired and feeling their armpits, necks, and groins, searching for swollen lymph nodes.
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It’s so painful to watch them go through the motions of preparing themselves for what they see as an almost inevitable outcome. Thankfully, at least in that respect, we’ve moved at least a little further on. Or so I hope.
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THEM Reviewed by Dan Bacalzo Oct 23, 2010 | New York
Sensuality and violence collide in Them, a vivid reconstruction of the landmark 1986 performance piece created by director/choreographer Ishmael Houston- Jones, writer/narrator Dennis Cooper, and composer/musician Chris Cochrane. All three of those artists have reunited for this excellent new staging at P.S. 122, and are joined by a talented ensemble in this moving meditation on youth, sexuality, and death.
As Cooper intones softly into a microphone tales of young men who took Arturo Vidich and Jeremy Pheiffer in THEM. their own lives, it's difficult not to think about the recent series of gay teen Photo by Michael Hart suicides that have occurred across the country in recent months. The motives for the deaths that Cooper describes are not always clear, and in some cases they are not even self-inflicted, but instead the result of accidents or illness. Still, there's an eerie contemporary resonance that makes the piece seem freshly minted, even though it was originally seen over two decades ago.
Cooper's text also details a number of same-sex hook-ups with a variety of boys and young men. There's a nostalgic quality to the narrative, with the stories mostly focused around the moments just prior to sex, rather than the act itself. The gentleness of Cooper's words here may surprise those familiar with some of the author's other works, which are often marked by extremely graphic descriptions of sex, sadism, and violence.
Indeed, it's actually in Houston-Jones' choreography that the more brutal aspects of the performance are revealed. Seven dancers -- Joey Cannizzaro, Felix Cruz, Niall Noel, Jeremy Pheiffer, Jacob Slominski, Arturo Vidich, and Enrico D. Wey -- perform a partially improvised movement score that often keeps the men's bodies off balance and incorporates bursts of physical violence. There's a rawness to the way they move, and a sexual heat that makes their interactions sizzle.
In one of many highlights of the evening, two of the men cruise each other, beginning with tentative glances and slowly building with slight touches, faster movements, and a final collapse against the back wall that is as aggressive as it is sexy. The most infamous sequence of Them involves a blindfolded performer wrestling with a dead goat. It's extremely disturbing, particularly when he inserts his head into the animal's carcass. This segment brings death onto the stage in such a literal, visceral way that it's impossible to ignore.
Accompanying both spoken text and movement is the live music from Cochrane. Some moments feature a jazzy underscoring, while others a loud wailing on the electric guitar. The music is dynamic and seems to literally propel the dancers into frenzied motion.
Houston-Jones' own performance is limited to the beginning of the show, as he participates in a silent ritual, followed by a dance solo that proves that the now 59-year-old artist continues to exude a powerful onstage presence that is just as compelling as the younger dancers who are showcased for the remainder of this beautifully realized work.
In one of the simplest and most evocative sections, Hamilton repeatedly knocks Fleming backwards onto a mattress that with each tumble slides further across the space. He helps him up and bats him back with a light shove, and dives over him as if to pin him. With the power vested in one partner,and both sharing a thoughtful, puzzled kind of belligerence and acceptance, the episode seems like a kind of slow interrogation of the self, a questioning of the components of one’s own desire of one’s own desire.
Simple pleasures and affections are far away. In Houston-Jones’s outlook, the bullying, clamorous, brusque, torn-up aspects of even the most ephemeral relationships are inextricably knotted up with our passion and tenderness and need. In Them, he grants those snarls their full measure of peculiar dignity, but his feeling for our rough human grace is overwhelmed by frustration and defeat.
At P.S. 122 (November 21 to 30). www.tbspMGMT.com
PS 122 Brings Back Controversial Show for 30th Anniversary By Sara Dover
It might be a miracle that Performance Space 122 has not been shut down yet. But, that isn't stopping the theater from bringing an experimental dance show that almost shuttered the venue in 1986.
“There are many things that have almost got us shut down. That was not the only one,” Director Vallejo Gantner said on the Gawker Media Rooftop for the avant-garde theater’s 30th anniversary. "This institution has been defined by unpredictability, by pushing the envelope, by taking risks."
The experimental 1986 performance entitled "Them" included a duet with a dead animal carcass.
Performance Space 122 Artistis Director with 2010 Season Artists Ishmael Houston-Jones told, the show's Ishmael Houston-Jones and Amanda Loulaki. choreographer, told Niteside the “nightmare vision” has symbolism of the AIDS epidemic, and the 1980s audience was a little more than shocked.
“People complained," he said. "People complained to the Board of Health, so I had to negotiate with the Board of Health and we convinced them the audience wasn’t endangered from the dead carcass that I was dancing with.”
For the 21st century version, Houston-Jones teamed up with musician Chris Cochrane and writer Dennis Cooper, re-staging and expanding on the script with a new cast while keeping the theme of relationships between men. He guaranteed the same intensity for the show’s second run, although didn’t confirm a reproduction of the horrific corpse dance.
“It’s very scary for me, I’m blindfolded and sort of rolling around and sticking my head in its body cavity. For one week it was a goat but the goat didn’t last for the entire week so then it was a sheep.”
PS 122 welcomed back the show with open arms. Marketing manager Laura Nicoll said that PS 122 was not upset over the 1986 incident.
“Oh no, no. We love it. No hard feelings at all,” Nicoll said.
Men With Men December 22, 1986
By Burt Supree
Ishmael Houston-Jones’s Them has become a much grimmer piece since the chunk I saw at “Dancing for Our Lives,” last January’s AIDS benefit program at P.S. 122. I remember it as aggressive and vital, but the current version seems more stiff-lipped, hardened, fatalistic, as if too many emotional and sensual options have been terminated since then. Them is framed by cruel bursts of sounds from composer Chris Cochrane’s harsh guitar and poet Dennis Cooper’s short descriptions of suicides and sudden death at the beginning and, at the end, Houston-Jones’s body lying center stage under a sheet. The other dancers stand isolated, as if in front of mirrors, touching themselves in the armpits, beside the public bone, along the neck, where the lymph nodes are located. Two of them, grabbing or caressing, remorselessly gather or wrestle the others backwards into their arms. If only AIDS took its victims so swiftly - with just a few moments between the trance of fear and the final breath. Donald Fleming, alone, I think, is left as the lights dim, still touching himself, with one arm caught in a vague wave goodbye.
Them isn’t a piece about AIDS, but AIDS constricts its view and casts a considerable pall. It’s a loosely organized work about some ways men are with men - physically, sexually, emotionally. Its violence is pretty overt and oddly impersonal - one guy goes after another with a stick of wood; Donald Fleming, in a frenzy of anger, smashes at a mattress till he’s exhausted. There’s a more genial boisterousness, too, the kind of rough-housing that arises out of more sensitive, half-embarrassing encounters. But the tenderness in the piece is cool, subdued, closemouthed.
Cooper gives us low-key recitations of sexual brief encounters and verbal glimpses of the once-cruisy world. But the images are deeply tinged with disappointment or the sense of seeing from a great emotional distance. Fleming and Houston-Jones improvise together with a supple angularity. Their coolly swinging limbs reach long and straight, but their bodies tend to buckle. They lean and push lightly into each other, easing past in a series of near misses; the their play gets rougher, jumping, bumping, and pushing, whirling, flying into the air to be caught roughly or not at all.
Barry Crooks - carrying a stick of wood like a gay basher - bats coins against the wall to Cooper’s recitation of deaths. All six dancers are up and jumping fast, dodging, grappling, horsing around. Some of the danced episodes are gentler, with half-caressing, half-embracing moves. Fleming carries Houston-Jones over his hip. David Zambran and Daniel McIntosh jump and fall all over each other. There’s an intricate and subtle physicality in the way Fleming and Julyen Hamilton nearly mold themselves together.
Plain sensual encounters involve more ambivalence, defiance, sullenness. Fleming and Zambrano cruise past each other, slightly dazed, just looking, just checking each other out. They get more restless, glittery- eyes, and run past the other through the depth of the space before crashing in each other’s arms smack against the wall. Hamilton holds McIntosh against a door-like wooden panel that’s leaning against a pillar. Half-caressing, they push and struggle as one, then the other, gets the upper hand There’s no knowing if the upper hand is what either really wants.
www.tbspMGMT.com
In one of the simplest and most evocative sections, Hamilton repeatedly knocks Fleming backwards onto a mattress that with each tumble slides further across the space. He helps him up and bats him back with a light shove, and dives over him as if to pin him. With the power vested in one partner,and both sharing a thoughtful, puzzled kind of belligerence and acceptance, the episode seems like a kind of slow interrogation of the self, a questioning of the components of one’s own desire of one’s own desire.
Simple pleasures and affections are far away. In Houston-Jones’s outlook, the bullying, clamorous, brusque, torn-up aspects of even the most ephemeral relationships are inextricably knotted up with our passion and tenderness and need. In Them, he grants those snarls their full measure of peculiar dignity, but his feeling for our rough human grace is overwhelmed by frustration and defeat.
At P.S. 122 (November 21 to 30).
www.tbspMGMT.com