{"id":558968,"date":"2026-02-01T16:18:20","date_gmt":"2026-02-01T16:18:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/558968\/"},"modified":"2026-02-01T16:18:20","modified_gmt":"2026-02-01T16:18:20","slug":"impressions-ishmael-houston-jones-oo-ga-la-reimagined-at-danspace-project-and-heidi-latsky-dances-who-am-i-now-at-92ny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/558968\/","title":{"rendered":"IMPRESSIONS: Ishmael Houston-Jones\u2019 “OO-GA-La Reimagined” at Danspace Project and Heidi Latsky Dance’s “Who Am I Now?” at 92NY"},"content":{"rendered":"

Features<\/a> > Impressions <\/a>The Dance Enthusiast’s Brand of Review\/Thoughts on What We See \n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"IMPRESSIONS:\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Published on February 1, 2026
Heidi Latsky Dance in “Days of Awe”. Photo: Richard Termine<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\tDanspace Project co-presented with Live Artery, New York Live Arts<\/p>\n

Ishmael Houston-Jones\u2019<\/p>\n

OO-GA-La Reimagined (The Fred Holland (1951-2016) and Ishmael Houston-Jones 1983 Untitled Duet Danced into the 21st Century)<\/p>\n

Improvised in Performance by Stephanie Hewett, Kris Lee, and AJ Wilmore<\/p>\n

Costume Consultant Malcolm-x Betts<\/p>\n

Archival Video Taped by Cathy Weis and Lisa Nelson<\/p>\n

Archival Sound Score by Mark Larson<\/p>\n

January 8-10, 2026<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

92NY Mainstage Series presents Women Move the World<\/p>\n

Heidi Latsky Dance,\u00a0Who Am I Now?<\/p>\n

Tracking Parallel:<\/p>\n

Rupture<\/p>\n

Choreography: Heidi Latsky<\/p>\n

Soundscore: Heidi Latsky with Nathan Trice\u2019s voice<\/p>\n

Dancer: Nathan Trice
\u00a0<\/p>\n

Days of Awe<\/p>\n

Choreography: Heidi Latsky in collaboration with the dancers including Santi Braz<\/p>\n

Soundscore: Heidi Latsky with MRI sounds, Latsky\u2019s brothers reciting the Mourner\u2019s Kaddish, and original music by Ximena Borges, Ainesh Madan, Christopher Brierley, Marty Beller, and Randall Woolf<\/p>\n

Film: Heidi Latsky with footage courtesy of the College of the Arts at Montclair State University.<\/p>\n

Additional footage: Richard Ducker and Alison Rootberg<\/p>\n

Lighting Design: Robert Wierzel<\/p>\n

Projection Consultant: Janet Wong<\/p>\n

Costumes: Heidi Latsky<\/p>\n

January 10-11, 2026<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Ishmael Houston-Jones (foreground) in front of the screened image of Fred Holland and Houston-Jones in OO-GA-LA Reimagined. Photo: Rachel Keane<\/p>\n

Ishmael Houston-Jones<\/a> and Heidi Latsky<\/a> have both devoted their careers to bodies that the dance field has not always known how to see without inherited assumptions:\u00a0Black and brown bodies, aging bodies, bodies marked by illness or disability. Both reject virtuosity as the primary measure of value, and both center lived experience. Yet the presented works approach this shared ethos in strikingly different ways. Where Latsky\u2019s Who Am I Now? at 92NY<\/a> addresses physical crisis through recovery, reflection, and personal reckoning, Houston-Jones\u2019s OO-GA-LA Reimagined at Danspace Project<\/a>\u00a0emerges from lineage, ghosts, and social friction, embedding its politics inside the choreography itself.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Ishmael Houston-Jones in OO-GA-LA Reimagined. Photo: Rachel Keane<\/p>\n

As the audience finds their seats, a clip of the original Fred Holland and Ishmael Houston-Jones<\/a> duet from 1983 is screened onto the altar wall of St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery<\/a>,\u00a0the figures rendered faint and ghostly as if already receding into memory.\u00a0 Addressing the audience from center stage, Houston-Jones speaks of \u201cdancing with ghosts,\u201d noting that the building was likely constructed by enslaved laborers and that Peter Stuyvesant, a slaveholder, is buried beneath the floor. \u201cYou can\u2019t always choose which ghosts you dance with,\u201d he says, before naming artist friends who shaped his world and are now gone: Holland, Blondell Cummings, Gus Solomons Jr., and John Bernd. This dance engages with racialized labor, AIDS-era and wider losses within the community, and artistic inheritance.<\/p>\n

\"Two<\/p>\n

Kris Lee and AJ Wilmore in Ishmael Houston-Jones’\u00a0OO-GA-LA Reimagined. Photo: Rachel Keane<\/p>\n

A makeshift kitchen occupies an upper corner of the stage. Before the dancing begins, Houston-Jones and a trio of young, queer, Black women performers (Stephanie Hewett<\/a>, Kris Lee <\/a>and AJ Wilmore<\/a>) embrace, establishing the revival as transmission rather than reconstruction. When Houston-Jones, a long-respected elder, pounds the floor before exiting through the center aisle of the audience, the gesture feels weighted with mourning and defiance, even as it introduces a new generation.<\/p>\n

\"Three<\/p>\n

(L to R) Kris Lee, AJ Wilmore and Stephanie Hewett in\u00a0Ishmael Houston-Jones’ OO-GA-LA Reimagined. Photo: Rachel Keane<\/p>\n

One performer assumes the role of DJ while the other two perform duets or parallel solos, then shift into trios as club culture and domesticity merge into the improvisation. Holland\u2019s riveting passages of turns, falls, leaps, and sudden suspensions, including a 45-second sequence Houston-Jones later singled out as one of his favorite moments in dance, place the trio in constant dialogue with a physical intensity that belongs to the work’s historical moment.<\/p>\n

\"Three<\/p>\n

(L to R) Stephanie Hewett, Kris Lee and AJ Wilmore in\u00a0Ishmael Houston-Jones’ OO-GA-LA Reimagined. Photo: Rachel Keane<\/p>\n

The original Holland and Houston-Jones manifesto states, \u201cWe will stay out of physical contact as much as possible,\u201d a line that reads less as literal instruction than as a stance toward a hostile social world. This trio is electrifying, fully offering themselves to the room and inhabiting the tension between proximity and restraint. Humor, flirtation, confrontation, and care coexist: cooking is mimed in gestures recalling Cummings\u2019s Chicken Soup<\/a> and sex is simulated. A poem from 1965 is read aloud about the \u201csurvival of roaches,\u201d<\/a> a metaphor for endurance in hostile environments. These moments refuse politeness in a space that remains, despite its progressive history, largely white. The work looks outward, insisting on visibility, pleasure, and insistent vitality.<\/p>\n

\"One<\/p>\n

(L to R) AJ Wilmore, Stephanie Hewett and Kris Lee in\u00a0Ishmael Houston-Jones’ OO-GA-LA Reimagined. Photo: Rachel Keane<\/p>\n

Even the titles suggest different ways of speaking to the audience. OO-GA-LA, rendered in all caps, reads as a percussive, declarative, and collective chant. Who Am I Now? is grammatically precise and inward-looking, shaped as a question and rooted in first-person reflection.<\/p>\n

\"Seven<\/p>\n

Jillian Hollis (center foreground) and Heidi Latsky Dance in Days of Awe. Photo:\u00a0Richard Termine<\/p>\n

Heidi Latsky\u2019s Who Am I Now?\u00a0(the evening’s title) begins in the rehearsal studio, where the audience sits along the four walls while the unsentimental Nathan Trice<\/a> traces the perimeter of the spare and clinical-feeling room in Rupture. Dressed simply, he dances to the steady hum from an MRI machine layered beneath his recorded voice recounting the logistics of brain surgery. The calm delivery contrasts starkly with the severity of the words (\u201cThey\u2019re going to cut into my head and scrape the tumor off my brain\u201d). The sharp, linear, and insistently repetitive movement suggests recovery through the discipline of this fine performer.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Nathan Trice in Heidi Latsky’s Rupture. Photo:\u00a0Richard Termine<\/p>\n

When the audience enters the main theater, Days of Awe (the second dance in the three-part Tracking Parallel work; the third not as yet created) expands into an eight-performer dance. Days of Awe<\/a>, named for the period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, carries the weight of reflection and mourning into the choreography.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Meredith Fages (foreground) and Heidi Latsky Dance in Days of Awe. Photo: Richard Termine<\/p>\n

Two dancers,\u00a0Meredith Fages<\/a> and Jillian Hollis<\/a>, smoothly travel in unison in and out of the group with quiet authority. They never touch. \u00a0Others remain largely in place, registering change through subtle shifts, repeated folds and arches (including Latsky, also a brain tumor survivor), as well as barely perceptible gestures.\u00a0 When touch finally occurs late in the dance, Henry Hollis and Nico Gonzales press their backs against each other and slip downward. They roll together, hold one another, and earn each other’s trust.<\/p>\n

Dim lighting, muted costumes, and a soundscape that shifts between the industrial pulse of the MRI, the recitation of the Mourner\u2019s Kaddish<\/a> and a melodic, (somewhat saccharine) piano score reinforce a tone of inwardness and restraint. A giant eye, as if always watching and taking stock, is projected on the upstage screen. The duet\u2019s continuous backward walking suggests time moving forward regardless of what the body is enduring.<\/p>\n

The evening concluded with an extended conversation between Latsky and the audience, underscoring her commitment to shared reflection alongside performance.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Henry Hollis and Nico Gonzales (center duet) and Heidi Latsky Dance in Days of Awe.\u00a0Photo: Richard Termine<\/p>\n

Seen together, OO-GA-LA Reimagined and Who Am I Now? suggest that choreography can shape not only how bodies move, but the ways in which the audience witnesses. In both cases, the choreography extends beyond physical phrasing to include how bodies, histories, and spectators are brought into relationship.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Heidi Latsky in Days of Awe. Photo: Richard Termine<\/p>\n

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