Oo Ga La Dance
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https://www.ishmaelhouston-jones.comCopyright
Ishmael Houston-Jones
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anArchive
A Tribute to Oo Ga La Dance (2021)
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In 1983, dancer Ishmael Houston-Jones invites Fred Holland to an Untitled Duet also known as Oo-Ga-La Dance in St Mark's Church. The occasion is the 11th anniversary of Contact Improvisation and the dance is scored through a manifesto, unknown to the audience: The Wrong Contact Improvisation Manifesto.
We are Black.
We will wear our "street" clothes, (as opposed to sweats.)
We will wear heavy shoes, Fred, construction boots / Ishmael, Army.
We will talk to one another while dancing.
We will fuck with flow and intentionally interrupt one another and ourselves.
We will use a recorded music score – loud looping of sounds from Kung Fu movies by Mark Allen Larson.
We will stay out of physical contact much of the time.
Ishmael Houston-Jones and Fred Holland, *Oo-Ga-La Dance* (1983); video by Cathy Weis
IHJ and FH dance their counter-hegemonic dance in front of the cameras of Cathy Weis, and the eyes of what is starting to become a larger and larger Contact Improvisation. One of the founders of the form, Steve Paxton, writes Houston Jones a post-card, noting they "made a new thing appear—a maze of images woven effortlessly, evoked from air, earth&fire, carried on a fluid lighter than water. Real rich. I was much moved. The music's integrity & integration was deeply satisfying. Love, Steve"
In 2016, IHJ revisited his Wrong Contact Manifesto and annotated it:
We are Black
(The earliest iteration of Contact Improvisation was Magnesium, a dance performance created by Steve Paxton, first done at Oberlin College in 1972. Contact Improvisation remained in 1983 and remains still a dance form done largely by people who are liberal arts educated and are not Black.)
We will wear street clothes
(Contactors most often wore baggy, soft sweats with little attention paid to style.)
We will wear heavy boots
(Contact was always performed in bare feet and Fred and I were very punk rock; I wore combat boots and Fred wore construction worker boots. We used to be chastised for wearing boots at contact jams.)
We will play a loud, abrasive sound score
(Early contact was rarely done to any music and if so it was of the gentle ambient variety. We used a tape given us by a noise composer, Mark Allen Larson, which he made with samples from Kung Fu movies.)
We will have non-performative conversations
(We talked about anything we wanted, sometimes referring to the dance we were performing and at other times just everyday chit-chat, but neither were projected to the audience.)
We will fuck with flow
(In ten years, a classicism had attached itself to C.I. that dictated that movements “should” always be soft, flowing and sequential.)
We will stay out of physical contact as much as possible
(As the name of the form implies, this was an important rule to break.)
During the Future of CI conference (2021), Ishmael Houston-Jones added “two things that we didn't mention in our sort of manifesto… One was to purposely show the effort of contact. Like not to pretend that we were weightless and that we could actually fly, but actually to show the muscularity and sometimes allowing things to fail, really embracing failure. And the other thing is the queerness. People always assumed that Fred and I were somehow romantically or somehow connected. And Fred was like almost disgustingly heterosexual. He was very, very, very heterosexual. And I'm not. But people always made that assumption. And Fred once said like, oh, two black men dancing together on stage together and they're not rapping or killing each other. What else were people going to think? And that was his take that we were doing this very physical sometimes very sort of hard hitting thing, but it was done with a lot of love and a lot of care.”
For more context, a video of one of the performances that were held at St Mark Church during the same conference:
Contact at 10th and 2nd (1983)