EP #92 - Choreography/COVID-19 with David Brick & Ishmael Houston-Jones

Today, I talk about choreography, dance, creativity and the pandemic with David Brick and Ishmael Houston-Jones.

 

David Brick co-founded Philadelphia’s Headlong Dance Theater with Amy Smith and Andrew Simonet in 1993. Over the next two decades, these three co-founders created over forty dances as Headlong, performing nationally and internationally. In 2008, David co-founded the Headlong Performance Institute, a training program for creating experimental performance.

David collaborates broadly in creating performance, participatory events, and community. His experience of growing up as a hearing member of a Deaf family continually influences David’s understanding of human bodies as active manifestations of culture. His recent work includes a residency at Dance Place in Washington DC to work on Island of Signs—a performance that explored growing up in a family with two languages, one that was shared and one that was not. He shared this residence with Carolyn Brick, his 78-year old Deaf mother who attended nearby Gallaudet University and was featured in a 1959 documentary about her experience there.

 

Ishmael Houston-Jones is choreographer, author, performer, teacher, and curator. His improvised dance and text work has been performed world-wide. He has received three New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards for collaborations with writer Dennis Cooper, choreographers Miguel Gutierrez and Fred Holland and composers Chris Cochrane and Nick Hallett. Houston-Jones curated Platform 2012: Parallels which concentrated 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. As an author Houston-Jones' essays, fiction, interviews, and performance texts have been published in several anthologies. His first book, FAT and other stories, was published in June 2018 by Yonkers International Press.