HOUSTON-JONES’ HIGH-RISK DANCING

Some performers talk about taking risks through their work; others simply take them. Ishmael Houston-Jones, who brings his improvised dances to Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) Thursday through Saturday, is definitely in the latter camp.

Sometimes the risks are personal, as when Houston-Jones, a solid-looking black man, improvises, stark naked and blindfolded, to the twang of country and Western ballads (in “f/i/s/s/i/o/n/i/n/g”). Or when--fully clothed--he dances circles around his mother while she gives an improvisational spiel about her son: a son she still calls “Chuck,” Houston-Jones’ given name (“Relatives”).

But sometimes the risks are political, as when he went to Nicaragua for a month in 1984 to give dance classes to young children--and, often, teen-age militiamen. Ever since, his anger and confusion about the Nicaraguan conflict have been central to his work. (Excerpts from his “Nicaragua Journals” will be included in the LACE program.)

“It’s the connections that keep me concerned,” the 32-year-old Houston-Jones said recently. “I didn’t come back (from Nicaragua) and just forget. I hear about a bus blowing up and it’s not some abstract newsprint bus, but a bus that this woman I knew and had coffee with could have been on.

“I think having my mother on stage is scarier than being in Managua,” he admitted with a laugh. “After all, she is not a performer and she can say anything she wants--and sometimes it hurts. I trust her that she wouldn’t say anything really off the wall,” he said, his voice trailing off, “but then you never really know.”

His first trip to Nicaragua in 1983 was to attend a state-sponsored theater conference. “I’m not sure if I ever was totally committed to the Sandinista cause,” he said. “Initially, it was my own sort of instinctive lefty leanings that told me something was wrong, that the United States shouldn’t interfere with the internal affairs of another government.”

Certain things became clarified by Houston-Jones’ visit; others became more complex. “I realized that some people we had met were propaganda people and that we were being given lines,” he recalled. “It just wasn’t on a human-to-human level.” A second monthlong trip to the strife-torn nation followed, nine months later.

“I just got air fare together, showed up sight unseen, taught contact improvisation classes for a month,” he said. “I think the goals of the Sandinistas are in favor of the people. The conflict arises in terms of their insensitivity to different political methodologies, to hearing different voices of dissent--in short, control.”

In performance, twirling around himself like a wound-up spring, improvising speech as well as movement, Houston-Jones stresses that high-risk dancing can be a valid mode of political activity. “In a very naive and almost Pollyana-ish way, I really feel the dancing helps to bridge the gap between the two countries,” he said.

It may be, he speculated, that taking risks is simply inherent to the process of improvising on stage. “Improvisation allows me to let whatever is happening underneath come out through free association. It’s a truer response for me than having to set choreography.

“As an audience (member), it always makes me uneasy that a dancer is trained to do a physically technical thing the majority of the audience cannot do. Improvisation has its techniques too, but they’re more subtle, more about opening awareness of the unconscious and about presence.

“In the long run, I tend not to believe in finite solutions, finite ends, finite identities,” he continued. “I believe in circularity and much more dialectical types of thinking. Answering every question just brings up another set of questions and there’s no reason to not ask them. But I don’t expect to find any answers or any true identity there either.”

Postponing that certainty, he might have added, could be the biggest risk of them all.