Office Hours With Ishmael Houston-Jones

Ishmael Houston-Jones has built an illustrious career on a willingness to take risks, push boundaries, and improvise. A performer and dancemaker who primarily works in the postmodern dance world, he says he brings that sense of curiosity and spontaneity to the classroom, too—something he hopes to impart to the students he teaches at colleges and universities throughout the nation. 

“For the last several years, I have been ‘The Roving Adjunct,’ ” Houston-Jones says of the breadth of his teaching practice. “This fall, I was a mentor for MFA-in-visual-arts students at Columbia University, and I will be teaching one day a week at Sarah Lawrence College, two days a week at Yale University, and for a week at the University of Colorado.” He also holds teaching positions at New York University and Bennington College. “The scheduling is challenging, especially in terms of finding time to create my own work,” he says. 

That high demand for Houston-Jones’ knowledge reflects the impact of his oeuvre, which has earned him four New York Dance and Performance Awards (“Bessies”), the 2019 Edwin Booth Award for his influence on theater and performance in New York City, and the coveted John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 2022. He is also a curator and an author, whose auto-fictional compilation Fat and Other Stories: Some Writing About Sex was published by Yonkers International Press in 2018. 

Dance Teacher caught up with the multi-hyphenate about the joys and challenges of teaching, his unconventional approach to warming up, and his advice for today’s educators.

What do you enjoy most about teaching?

I often see my classes as laboratories of creation. As an improviser, I rarely entirely plan my classes. Rather, I propose an experiment and note the results. This will then often feed into my own creative art practices. Scores and ideas that arise in class will often manifest in pieces I make and vice versa.

What is the biggest challenge you’ve experienced working with today’s generation? 

The clearest difference between myself and the current generation of students appears in the use of language and the meaning of words. There are terms that I thought had clear meanings when I was their age that can be triggering or simply misunderstood without context and explanation. And since dance is a physical practice, well-defined concerns about boundaries and consent need to be articulated and agreed upon to a degree I’m now having to negotiate.

Do you have a role model in the dance education field?

I firmly believe that Donna Faye Burchfield has truly revolutionized the pedagogy of dance in America. In all the years I’ve taught in programs she has directed, she has brought a serious rigor to dance education by foregrounding theory, history, cultural studies, and criticism, alongside and equal to traditional and nontraditional dance techniques.

What message do you have for today’s dance educators who are working to inspire and empower the next generation?

“Trust.” That is simple to say, but what I mean is to trust yourself and to trust your students. Allow them to make mistakes, even encourage them to do so. I think my job is to inspire dancers and dancemakers to be their best selves and definitely not to be replicants of me. A studio full of people trying to dance like I do is one vision of hell I never want to see.

What sets your teaching style apart from so many others in the field?

Sometimes, my teaching has been called unconventional because I very often offer a warm-up that is not based in movement. Most of my classes begin with “free writing,” in which students write for an allotted time with no theme—and it will not be shared. Students then read their writing quietly aloud to themselves, usually while walking. This is a variation on Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. I believe there needs to be an acknowledgment that each student is an individual with a specific history and personality. Whether it’s in an improvisation class, a composition class, or even a ballet class, [recognizing] that each student is bringing their own uniqueness into the studio is important.

I read that your motto is to say yes. How do you convey to your students the importance of remaining open?

I do this by telling the class I am a fellow student. I don’t have all the answers, but I have many questions. We will find multiple answers to some of the questions while others are unanswerable—and that’s okay. 

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