The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center in New York City presents the 2019 DTSA Booth Award: Honoring Ishmael Houston-Jones livestreaming on the global, commons-based peer produced HowlRound TV network at howlround.tv Monday 15 April 2019 at 3:30 p.m. PDT (San Francisco) / 5:30 p.m. CDT (Chicago) / 6:30 p.m. EDT (New York).
Ishmael Houston-Jones: 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. He and Fred Holland shared a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders. He was awarded his second “Bessie” Award for the revival of THEM, his 1985/86 collaboration with writer Dennis Cooper and composer Chris Cochrane. He curated Platform 2012: Parallels and Platform 2016: Lost & Found, both at Danspace Project. He has received a 2016 Herb Alpert, a 2015 Doris Duke Impact and a 2013 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Artists Awards. 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.
Houston-Jones’s performance works and curatorial projects attend to the urgent materiality of the sexed, raced, desiring body on stage. As an educator, Houston-Jones has passed down improvisational techniques and practices that are both artistically experimental and that helped maintain and perpetuate experimental dance during periods of embodied and economic crisis. Through the 2009 re-staging of THEM and his curatorial and choreographic work on the Danspace Platform 2016: Lost & Found, Houston-Jones has ensured that a new generation of dance artists inherit the kinesthetic legacy of the early AIDS epidemic’s impact on the New York dance community. He has simultaneously nurtured the development of new work by young dance artists, especially those who are queer and/or of color. In recognition of his outstanding oeuvre as a performer and choreographer, as well as his commitment to the legacy and continuation of experimental performance practices through his curatorial and pedagogical practices, the Doctoral Theatre Students’ Association of the CUNY Graduate Center is proud to present Ishmael Houston-Jones with the 2019 Booth Award.
Organized by Ash Marinaccio and Janet Werther
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