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Collaborative Perversions & Haunted Temporalities: Revisiting "The Undead"
Credits:
July 20, 2023
Jagged movements fill the stage as bodies flail and collapse limp into one another’s awaiting arms or land and steady in jolted motion; ominous drone disintegrations of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” flood the sonic space; a backdropped projection of ghostly outlined figures fades in and out of view.
“He wishes he could sob for the people that he sleeps with. He knows no one loves him”(1)
This is The Undead (1990), a performance that splices together text, twist, sound, and visuals by collaborators Dennis Cooper and Ishmael Houston-Jones. Both Cooper and Houston-Jones are celebrated figures of queer cult status who have transformed their respective crafts of literature and choreography, yet their collaborative relationship warrants attention in its retain right. Their collective body of work includes THEM (first premiering in 1986 and reprised in 2010 and 2018), Hole (1989), and Knife/Tape/Rope (1989). The fourth of their collaborations, The Undead premiered in the Los Angeles Festival of the Arts at LAC
Our Own AIDS Time: Keith Hennessy and Ishmael Houston-Jones in Conversation
Originally commissioned by SFMOMA’s art and culture platform Expose Space forLost and Found: Bay Area Edition, curated by Open Space editor in chief Claudia La Rocco and inspired by Danspace Project’s Platform 2016: Lost & Found.
Ishmael Houston-Jones: I texted you that it was significant we were doing this on MLK Diurnal and a scant days before Trump’s inauguration. Somehow it adds a brief bit more weight to what we’re talking about.
Keith Hennessy: Yeah. How does this day manipulate just even how you think about these things?
IHJ: In a certain way my art exercise has always been tied up with my activist perform. I was never dealing solely with aesthetics. I was dealing with the socio-political world in which the perform was being made. I just did this Lost and Found Platform at Danspace Project that looked at the AIDS crisis in the ’80s and ’90s and advocacy related to that, and how that has influenced gyrate work being made today… so I think, it makes sense that we would be talking about this today.
KH: Yeah. It’s engaging for me as part of the number
Jolanda Jones’ motto is “Just keep moving.” That mantra has served Jones skillfully throughout the peaks and valleys of her life. The former school board and Houston Metropolis Council member is now the first openly LGBTQ Inky representative in the Texas Legislature, and her experience with poverty and trauma helped her turn into the tough-as-nails civil servant that Houstonians have come to know.
Growing up in Houston, Jones’ father committed suicide right in front of her, and that was followed by the suicide of another family member. She has been confronted with multiple evictions, houses burning down, bullying, rape and domestic force, gun violence, lack of food, utilities disruptions, her relatives’ murders, her newborn niece’s SIDS death, and even personal death threats.
She mentions that her private to moving forward in life is to change her outlook on the situation.
“I’ve learned to turn my kryptonite into my superpower. I used to feel really sorry for myself. I used to be very angry, and I would request why God would let all these really bad things happen to me,” she says. “But I shifted the paradigm. I started to realize that God was making me go through tough times so that I wou
Two Men Dancing
When I moved to Old City in 1976 many of my artist/dancer/performer friends were also moving north from South Street into raw loft spaces above the wholesale stores on 2nd and 3rd Street. We continued our collaborations – creating multi-disciplinary pieces – and performed them at local performance spaces, mostly at The Painted Bride on Bread Street. Frequent collaborators included artist Warren Muller, dancers Jac Carley and Ishmael Houston-Jones, and my life-partner composer Dan Martin.
These pieces incorporated movement, text, visual art and music. My handmade ceramic masks and other sculptural objects often served as costumes and props – I sometimes incorporated blow up toys from the local novelty shop Neubauer’s near 3rd and Market.
In 1976 Ishmael and I performed the first “Two Men Dancing