Neofest to Open With Dialogue and Dancing

Isolation, pain and death may haunt the visceral dances of Ishmael Houston-Jones, but his career is alive and thriving. At 39, the New Yorker is gaining an increasingly widespread reputation for his mixed-media works and his uncompromising vision of contemporary struggle.

Broaching subjects as volatile as family and as political as hate, Houston-Jones confronts the audience not by preaching, but by baring himself.

“I have political thoughts, but I try not to put that directly in my work,” he said. “I don’t like didactic work; I make work about things that are immediately present in my life, and I prefer that audiences draw their own conclusions.”

Houston-Jones will present “The End of Everything and Other Dances” Thursday through Saturday on the opening program of Sushi’s Neofest VIII, Festival of the New Arts. He’ll share the bill with Terry Galloway, performing her monologue “Out All Night and Lost My Shoes.”

In addition to “The End of Everything,” Houston-Jones will offer a short video of his dance “Relatives,” made for PBS’ “Alive From Off Center,” a live portion of “Relatives” called “Dancing in the Semi-Dark,” and a work-in-progress titled “Without Hope.”

“Relatives,” a 1982 creation, begins with Houston-Jones spreading mothballs around a dark stage. He then moves in the darkness, describing what he’s doing, feeling and thinking as he goes. It is, as he’ll tell you, a piece about “perception,” intended to jar viewers’ understanding of dance as a purely visual form.

“The End of Everything,” on the other hand, is a more narrative work--although only part of the story, the opening solo seen in September, 1988, at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, will be performed at Sushi.

The full-evening version centers on a man marooned on an island, in a “country not his own, where people are mysteriously dying all around him.”

The action emphasizes “displacement and self-imposed exile,” as well as a series of encounters--many of which are overtly sexual--that take place while people are dying.

In one provocative sequence, Houston-Jones explains, “a riot breaks out and (the protagonist) winds up going into the walk-in fridge with a busboy . . . among the carcasses.”

Detailed as the narrative is, though, “The End of Everything” also utilizes Houston-Jones’ trademark improvisational style.

“I never set movements,” he said. “There’s something about improvisation that gets my juices going. I set up structures, limitations and aesthetic choices and work within them.”

“The End of Everything” also marks what Houston-Jones considers to be his increasingly literary direction. “I’m beginning to be more interested in words, and in how the words go with the movement,” he said.

In 1981, Houston-Jones made a work called “Dead,” in which he danced responsively to the taped recitation of a list of people who have died during the dancer’s lifetime.

“I’m interested in that sort of moment, like a slide,” he said of the chain of images in “Dead.” “It relates to how I make work. I do edit some, but making dance is more like making a list, writing one sentence after another without dealing with the transitional stuff.

“I’m interested in the cumulative effect. I have immediate responses from one movement to the next, and hopefully in the end something has jelled for the viewer as well as myself.”

After the simple list in “Dead,” Houston-Jones recalled, he “started writing sentences again.” “The End of Everything,” which was originally intended to be performed at an educational 1988 benefit in New York as purely improvisational, began with four pages of text Houston-Jones wrote in a single afternoon.

Since then, those four pages have grown considerably. “I’m trying to write this as a novel,” he said, although “probably nobody else would recognize it as such, (because) it’s basically a numbered list of declarative sentences.”

Nonetheless, writing is key to Houston-Jones’ recent and future work.

“I’ve never pursued writing,” he said. “But I’d like to be known as a writer as much as as a dancer. It hasn’t been that way, but I hope that’s flipping over toward the writing--or at least evening out now.”

Neofest continues May 3-5 with performance artist Richard Elovich, Llory Wilson and Dancers on May 11-12, performance artists Dan Kwong May on 17-19 and Pat Oleszko on May 24-26, and comedy troupe Culture Clash on June 1-2.