Early years Charles Houston Jones, born 1951 in
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, was the only child of North Jones and Pauline Jones, née Houston. He attended public primary and secondary school there and he attended his first dance class when he was 16 years old and a junior at William Penn High School. The Harrisburg Community Theater offered free dance classes to teenagers, and as he was involved in theater in school he went. This jazz-based show was his first experience performing dance. He enrolled as an English/Drama major at Gannon College, (now
Gannon University) in Erie, Pennsylvania in 1969. There was no dance program and he only studied there for two years before he "accidentally" dropped out. He was traveling the summer after his sophomore year of college with the intention of returning to school in the fall, but he found himself in Israel, and decided to stay there for a year. He worked as a pig farmer for nine months at Kibbutz
Lahav in the
Negev Desert. Then he worked for three months on a banana plantation at Kibbutz
Adamit in the
Galilee on the border with Lebanon. Houston-Jones found 1971 to be a propitious time to be in Israel; it was the years between The
Six-Day War and The
Yom Kippur War and there was a calm atmosphere among the Israelis. He had always been fascinated by collective socialist living situations, so the idea of being on a kibbutz intrigued him. He had never done any kind of heavy farm work and while there he had to get up at 4 AM: feeding pigs, mating them and working in the slaughterhouse. When he moved north to Adamit he worked harvesting bananas, and at the end of most days, he and his comrades would go skinny-dipping in the Mediterranean. He would sometimes dance on the beach in the nude. Houston-Jones was able to take just one dance class that entire year; the African-American choreographer and dancer Gene Hill Sagan was teaching on a nearby kibbutz. It was around this time that he began to use Ishmael as his first name and hyphenated his parents' surnames, though he never legally changed either.
Philadelphia After returning to the US in 1972 Houston-Jones moved to
Philadelphia. He audited dance classes at
Temple University with Helmut Gottschild and Eva Gholson. He then got into the Wigman-based company Group Motion Media Theater with whom he danced for two years. After leaving Group Motion he began studying improvisation and later performing with Terry Fox and the musician Jeff Cain under the name A Way of Improvising. He also studied with Joan Kerr, Les Ditson,
Contact Improvisation with John Gamble and "African" at Ile Ife, the Arthur Hall Afro American Dance Ensemble . It was during this time that he formed a strong comradeship with the visual artist Fred Holland who he met through their mutual involvement with the
Painted Bride Art Center. Houston-Jones and Fox were Holland's first dance teachers. Holland went on to make his own award-winning dance/theater works, some in collaboration with Houston-Jones. Houston-Jones began making his own work in 1976. That year, in collaboration with fellow ex-Group Motion dancer
Michael Biello & musician Dan Martin, he formed the gay-men's performance collective Two Men Dancing. This group made four evening-length works, most notably ''What We're Made Of'' in 1980. This piece was begun during his last year in Philadelphia; after living there for seven years, he moved to New York on Thanksgiving Day, 1979.
New York Houston-Jones arrived in New York in the
East Village, Manhattan in early 1980. He did some Contact Improvisation performances at Danspace Project with Danny Lepkoff, with whom he had studied. The East Village community at that time was infused with punk, new wave, drag, drugs and the mixing of a hipper, younger gay population with the modern dance and experimental theater milieux. Houston-Jones, like many dancers at the time, was influenced by the gay/punk/club scene and also by break dancing, graffiti and rap music. The first time Houston-Jones heard future collaborator Chris Cochrane play was at the club 8 BC. Dancers and choreographers would go to 8 BC, Limbo Lounge, the Pyramid Club, or King Tut's Wah-Wah Hut to see shows and also to perform. There was a palpable excitement and eagerness to see what was happening at venues such as PS 122, The Kitchen, Dance Theater Workshop and Danspace Project at Saint Mark's Church. There were smaller, grittier spaces as well like Dixon Place and Chandelier where something new was happening almost every night. With the exception of the Wah-Wah Hut and Chandelier, Houston Jones performed at all of these venues. It was during this time that Houston-Jones first heard
Dennis Cooper read from his book
The Tenderness of the Wolves, and knew that he wanted to work with him. At around this time, the pall of AIDS began to hover over the dance world. People in the dance and performance art communities were becoming sick and dying. Dance contemporaries of Houston-Jones (John Bernd,
Arnie Zane, Harry Sheppard, et al.) died at this time. Houston-Jones volunteered with the organization
God's Love We Deliver, and brought meals to people who were left homebound by the disease. Also during the early 1980s Houston-Jones traveled twice to
Nicaragua. He was there while the
Sandinista government was at war with the US-funded
Contras. For two weeks in 1983 he was part of a North American delegation at a theater festival and as a guest of the state. He was chauffeured in buses, housed in a hotel, fed in restaurants and generally pampered. The following year, 1984, he returned on his own, staying in a family's rented room and getting around on his own, which he found extremely difficult. He had met some people on his first trip who had arranged for him to teach at the
University of Central America, Managua. He taught contact improvisation to Sandinista soldiers. Students would show up in their fatigues, wearing leotards underneath. They would change and prop their rifles against the wall. He was in Nicaragua only over a month but after this second visit he became much more engaged with progressive politics and social issues. It was from these experiences, plus losses due to AIDS, and
Reaganomics that his work began to shift and pieces like
f/i/s/s/i/o/n/i/n/g, Radio Managua and
THEM were created. He also made several collaborative pieces, some with Fred Holland and later with the writer Dennis Cooper. He collaborated with several musician/composers who came from the punk and club scenes, most notably, Chris Cochrane from the bands No Safety and Suck Pretty. During this time he was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts and other agencies and he traveled several times to Europe and Venezuela to perform and to teach. == Professional work ==