Miriam Seidel Writer, Artist and Critic
					ISHMAEL HOUSTON-JONES' SPECIMENS at Christ Church, Philadelphia
						Nakedness doesn't just mean taking your clothes off. As Ishmael Houston-Jones demonstrates in his new performance work, "Specimens," emotional nakedness can be as revealing, and involve the same issues of voyeurism and intimacy, as the physical kind. The New York-based Houston-Jones created this piece in collaboration with his performers: the dancers of Headlong Dance Theater, Stanya Kahn and Paule Turner, Duchess--all powerful choreographers themselves. There was plenty of skin to be seen, too, starting with Houston-Jones himself in underwear and heels. Blindfolded, he moved in reaction to sounds, and examined his body with a dangling construction light, establishing a double sense of interrogation and self-interrogation. This sense continued with the entrance of the dancers, also blindfolded and wearing only underwear at this point, into the smallish, high-ceilinged Christ Church performance space. Standing directly in front of the audience, each embraced in turn by Houston-Jones, they spoke of what seemed like uncomfortable, revealing memories or images. Houston-Jones began this project with a visit to Philadelphia's Mutter Museum, and a feeling of being challenged to take in difficult realities (like the Mutter's medical curiosities) entered the piece here. That feeling of late-night, unblinking confrontation with your deepest fears or worst memories continued through a high-energy pastiche of scenes, bearing the mark of their birth out of intense improvisation. In one Headlong moment, two members verbally and physically hammered at the third, Andrew Simonet. Soon after, Paule Turner writhed on the floor, extruding harsh vocalizations, then released into beautifully extreme, tensely spastic and arcing movements. Movement-wise, you might call this Extreme Dancing. A later duet between Turner and Stanya Kahn, to the astringent wails of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, generated a similar, full-out movement heat. Simonet and David Brick executed some violent floor-slides and rolls, and toward the end, the men did some lifting and partnering that felt like a wrestling match. Costuming, or rather a flyaway rush of costume changes--the donning and doffing of business suits, tap shorts, dresses and aprons, knee pads and other athletic gear, from a pile in the corner--became a central part of the developing theme of self-revelation. No single item of clothing, it seemed, could be relied on for a dramatic identity; all gender roles were up for grabs. This sense of pre-millennial disintegration crystallized in an apocalyptic verbal duet between Turner and Amy Smith, with references to Oprah and toxic disaster, dust and purple sky. Meanwhile Kahn provided a slapstick counterpoint, pants around her ankles and loudly proclaiming her safety. (A recent emigrant from San Francisco to New York, Kahn compels attention and is a good comic, too.) The touch of actual nudity at the end seemed a footnote, a deliberate contrast to the many variants of self-exposure that Houston-Jones had by then set in motion, in this over-packed, hyperkinetic museum of hard revelations. --Miriam Seidel
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