OO-GA-LA Reimagined (The Fred Holland and Ishmael Houston-Jones 1983 Duet Danced into the 21st Century)
Thursday, February 27 | 7:30PM
Friday, February 28 | 7:30PM
Saturday, March 1 | 7:30PM
Open Dress Rehearsal*
Tuesday, February 25 | 7:30PM
To RSVP for Open Dress Rehearsal, Click Here
As part of recognizing Danspace Project’s 50th anniversary, Ishmael Houston-Jones will present OO-GA-LA Reimagined (The Fred Holland and Ishmael Houston-Jones 1983 Duet Danced into the 21st Century), performed by AJ Wilmore, Stephanie Hewett, and Kris Lee.
Houston-Jones writes: “In 1983 at the Danspace Project festival Contact at 10th and 2nd which celebrated the 11th year that Steve Paxton named the form Contact Improvisation, Fred Holland and I were invited to perform a duet on the Partners Program along with Steve and Nancy Stark Smith and others. Fred and I, who considered ourselves to be the Black Punks of Contact, decided to do our C.I. duet by doing everything wrong. We rehearsed in East Village bars like the Pyramid Club on Avenue A after midnight and were given a cassette tape of sound loops from Kung Fu movies compiled by composer Mark Larson. But it was Fred who named the first ‘wrong’ item in our unpublished score when he said, ‘We are Black.’ We were one of very few people of color included in the festival or inhabiting the C.I. milieu at all. The videos of the two performances of OO-GA-LA by Cathy Weis and Lisa Nelson were largely unseen after the festival until found by Karen Nelson in the early 2000s. I’ve chosen to give the Wrong Contact Score to three AFAB dancers of color who are extraordinary performers, highly skilled improvisors, and innovative DJs to Queer this duet from 40 years and bring it to a new generation.”
*About Open Dress Rehearsal: Tuesday evening’s dress rehearsal will be free with RSVP and open to the public at limited-capacity. Open dress rehearsals are a mask-required, community-minded program prioritizing our immunocompromised and low-income audiences. Staff and audiences will be required to wear masks (N95 or KN95) and performing artists (if unmasked) will be required to test for COVID-19 (rapid tests provided by Danspace Project).
Tickets
support Danspace’s 50th anniversary!
$10 Members
$20 Regular Price
$30 A little extra
$40 A little more!
$50 Celebrating 50 years!
$100 Here’s to the next 50!
Before you visit:
Accessibility at Danspace Project
Covid Safety at Danspace Project
Ishmael Houston-Jones is an award winning choreographer, author, performer, teacher, and curator. His improvised dance and text work has been performed in New York, across the US, and in Europe, Canada, Australia, and Latin America. Drawn to collaborations as a way to move beyond boundaries and the known, Houston-Jones celebrates the political aspect of cooperation. Houston-Jones and Fred Holland shared a 1984 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders, which reintroduced the erased narrative of the Black cowboy back into the mythology of the American west. He was awarded his second “Bessie” Award for the 2010 revival of THEM, his 1985/86 collaboration with writer Dennis Cooper and composer Chris Cochrane. In 2017 he received a third “Bessie” for Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life and other Works by John Bernd presented by Danspace Project. In 2020 he received a fourth “Bessie” for Service to the Field of Dance. Houston-Jones is the DraftWork curator for works-in progress at Danspace Project in New York. He has curated Platform 2012: Parallels which focused on choreographers from the African diaspora and postmodernism and co-curated with Will Rawls Platform 2016: Lost & Found, Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS, Then and Now both at Danspace Project. As an author Houston-Jones’ essays, fiction, interviews, and performance texts have been published in several anthologies and in numerous journals and magazines. His FAT and Other Stories: Some Writing About Sex was published in June 2018 by Yonkers International Press.
Stephanie Hewett is a queer Afro-Caribbean multidisciplinary artist from Munsee Lenape land colloquially known as the Bronx, New York. She is a graduate of Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and the Performing Arts in New York City and has studied at the Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London. She holds an MFA in Dance Studies and works with both movement and sound design to access ancestral wisdom rooted in spiritual, physical, and sonic expressions. Hewett DJs and produces electronic music under the moniker Madre Guía, and experiments with sound to explore polyrhythmic potentialities of intergenerational healing. She is a member of RUPTURE, a bicoastal performance collective examining Black gatherings that center collective rest, folk games, somatic experimentation, and the creation of communal dance spaces as spiritual technologies and practices of resistance and refusal.
Kris Lee (she/they) is a New York based dancer/performer and home chef. She received her BFA in Dance from University of the Arts in 2019. Kris was a member of the Stephen Petronio Company (2021-22) and has toured with nora chipaumire (2019-20). She was one of the creators and performers for high noon (2022), the interdisciplinary performance work produced by Ninth Planet. Most recently they have performed in Remains Persist (2022) & Out of and Into: Plot (2023) By Moriah Evans; Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life and other works by John Bernd (reprisal) by Ishmael Houston-Jones & Miguel Gutierrez (2023); duel c (2023) & duel H (2024) by Andros Zins-Browne. They also had the pleasure of being a part of Impulstanz’ Danceweb scholarship program mentored by Isabel Lewis (2024).
Born and raised in Philadelphia, AJ Wilmore is an artist and performer who delves into storytelling, identity, and the complexities of black familial relationships. She excavates her innermost desires while grappling with questions of visibility, intimacy, and selfhood. Wilmore graduated from The University of the Arts, where she honed her craft in movement investigation and approaches. Her recent performances include ‘ADAKU’ by Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born at BAM’s 2023 Next Wave Festival and Joan Jonas’s ‘Mirror Piece I and II’ at MoMA. Driven by a practice of making love to her fears, Wilmore investigates the stakes, texture, and vulnerability of her social and sexual life.