PERFORMANCE ART REVIEW : Houston-Jones’ Works Not Easy to Watch--or See

One of the reasons Ishmael Houston-Jones likes “In the Dark”--a dance that lives up to its name--is because it frustrates dance critics, he confessed to the audience at Sushi Gallery.

He’s right. At least it frustrated this one.

Sure, we know it was an act of liberation on the performer’s part, especially since it sounded like a work of frenetic movement. And with no more than a shadowy glimpse of the action, viewers could only pay attention to the spoken words hurled at us from every portion of the stage--and try to dodge the assault of confrontational poundings from Houston-Jones’ clunky combat boots, which often invaded the seating area.

The dance made Sushi’s intimate space seem thoroughly claustrophobic, but it struck the right chord Thursday with the opening-night audience at this offbeat performance, which kicked off the eighth annual Neofest.

The whole program was interpreted for the hearing-impaired by a wonderfully animated Holly Boursier. Unfortunately, the unlit dance made simultaneous signing impossible, and Houston-Jones had to stop after every sentence while a technician turned on the lights so Boursier could sign the spoken text. That hampered the flow of the piece for both the hearing and the deaf members of the audience.

Houston-Jones followed the piece with “Relatives,” a video segment produced for public television’s “Alive From Off Center.” It’s a warm and witty work that harks back to its creator’s roots, but the small screen is less at home in the formality of a performance space than in the intimacy of a living room.

Houston-Jones was much more effective in his gritty solo “The End of Everything,” a segment culled from his full-evening work of the same name. Violent outbursts and raw language pervade this tough work, and the music that punctuates the piece is just as grueling and unrelenting.

Feelings of fear, desperation and unchecked sexuality exploded from “The End of Everything” before the improvisation-based dance climaxed in a frenzy of spent energy and blurred images.

Houston-Jones also unveiled a “premiere in progress” during Thursday’s opening performance. The new work, “Without Hope,” was just as strong as “The End” in emotional content, and even bleaker in imagery and outlook.

Still dressed in his trademark infantry boots, he kissed and fondled a heavy cinder block, which he continued to manipulate in various ways throughout the work. The convulsive movements were echoed in a blood-curdling score by Mark Allen Larson that mixed African rhythms with excruciating human sounds.

None of Houston-Jones’ dances are easy to watch, but this exercise in grief and unabashed fury, which left him totally exhausted and emotionally drained, was even more remote and disconcerting than the others.

Since Houston-Jones was not prepared to present a full evening of his own work, Sushi paired him with another avant-garde performance artist, Terry Galloway. It was merely a marriage of convenience, but it made an interesting match.

The Berlin-born Galloway shares Houston-Jones’ concerns with death, injustice and alienation. And her flair for black comedy--albeit in a confrontational style--made a fine complement to his relentlessly hard-hitting approach.

Emotions ran dark and deep on both halves of the program, but Galloway explored the weighty themes through brief vignettes that were often side-splittingly funny--and generally more accessible than Houston-Jones’ brutal bursts of movement and cacophony of sonic effects.

Galloway’s contribution was a self-effacing, semi-autobiographical monologue titled “Out All Night and Lost My Shoes.”

Racing in from the rear of the studio with a bottle of beer, Galloway lunged right into action. Her oddball humor and poignant stories of isolation (she has been severely hearing-impaired since childhood, although she has chosen to never learn sign language) were shocking at times, but they never failed to connect with the audience.

“Performing makes me puke,” she said, catching her listeners off guard. “God said things to me like: ‘Little Terry, destroy the world.’ ”

What’s funny about crippled children at summer camp? Ask this clever caricaturist. She had the crowd in stitches recalling the experience.

At one point, Galloway painted on a scruffy beard, donned a battered raincoat and hat and, with a cigarette dangling from her lips, made the transformation into Jake Ratchett, a Dashiell Hammett-style private eye.

That was just one of the characters that paraded through her monologue. In a tongue-in-cheek discussion of suicide, Galloway said that poet Sylvia Plath, who put her head in an oven, used the “shake and bake method,” and lamented that “Amy Vanderbilt never wrote about the etiquette of ending your life.”

The double bill will be repeated tonight for all those strong enough to confront this talented pair of performers head-on.