Ishmael Houston-Jones

Quick Facts

Full Name	Ishmael Houston-Jones
Occupation	Choreographer
Date Of Birth	Jun 8, 1951(1951-06-08)
Age	73
Birthplace	Harrisburg
Country	United States
Birth City	Pennsylvania
Horoscope	Gemini

Ishmael Houston-Jones Biography

Ishmael Houston-Jones is one of the most popular and richest Choreographer who was born on June 8, 1951 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, United States.

Ishmael Houston-Jones (born 1951 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, USA) is a choreographer, author, performer, teacher, curator, and arts advocate known for his improvisational dance and language work. His work has been performed in New York City, across the United States, in Europe, Canada, Australia and Latin America. Houston-Jones and Fred Holland shared a 1984 New York Dance and Performance Bessie Award for their work Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders performed at The Kitchen and he shared another Bessie Award in 2011 with writer Dennis Cooper and composer Chris Cochrane for the 2010 revival of their 1985 collaboration, THEM. THEM was performed at Performance Space 122 (PS 122), the American Realness Festival, Springdance in Utrecht, Tanz im August in Berlin, REDCAT in Los Angeles, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and at TAP, Theatre and Auditorium of Poitiers, France. The 1985 premier performance of THEM at PS122 was part of New York’s first AIDS benefit.

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 and 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.

Ishmael Houston-Jones Net Worth

Ishmael Houston-Jones is one of the richest Choreographer from United States. According to our analysis, Wikipedia, Forbes & Business Insider, Ishmael Houston-Jones 's net worth $5 Million. (Last Update: December 11, 2023)

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.

Height, Weight & Body Measurements

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Who is Ishmael Houston-Jones Dating?

According to our records, Ishmael Houston-Jones is possibily single & has not been previously engaged. As of December 1, 2023, Ishmael Houston- Jones’s is not dating anyone.

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In the early 2000s Houston-Jones made a deliberate decision to stop making dance pieces. He felt that he didn’t know what he wanted to say and that he didn’t want to just make work just for the sake of making work. He was committed to performing in other people’s pieces ( Yvonne Meier, Lionel Popkin, and others), but he didn’t feel he had anything new to offer of his own. He did, during this time, make pieces with students at Alfred University, the New School, and at the American Dance Festival. He concentrated on teaching, writing, and serving on the boards of several not-for-profit dance organizations: ( Headlong Dance Theater, Danspace Project, Movement Research, and Ashley Anderson Dances .)

Facts & Trivia

Fernanda Ranked on the list of most popular Choreographer. Also ranked in the elit list of famous people born in United States. Ishmael Houston- Jones celebrates birthday on June 8 of every year.

He is a subject of the chapter “Speech as Act” in the book Dances that Describe Themselves by Susan Leigh Foster (Wesleyan University Press, 2002). and the chapter “Crossing the Great Divides” in the book Taken by Surprise by Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere, (Wesleyan University Press, 2003).