h3pg ‘Sanctuary Always Needed’: A Home for Dance Risk-Takers Turns 50

On a recent evening in the East Village, the dancers Kris Lee and AJ Wilmore careened across a studio, grappling and colliding with each other. Their limbs butted and interlocked; one dancer’s head burrowed into the other’s stomach. Sometimes what looked like fighting morphed into play, or the two ambled off on their own before crashing back together.

“I am so happy,” the choreographer Ishmael Houston-Jones said, embracing them in a hug as they caught their breath. He had asked the dancers to find “a sense of disrupting each other and disrupting yourself,” and they had fully taken the note.

Forty-two years ago, just down the street at Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, Houston-Jones had done a version of this same improvisational work, “OO-GA-LA,” with his friend and collaborator Fred Holland. They were two Black men critiquing the largely white world of contact improvisation, a form in which partners follow the flow of touch and sharing weight. Now, at 73, he was imparting the work to a new generation.

ImageHouston-Jones watches Willmore (in yellow) and Lee rehearse “OO-GA-LA Reimagined.” He wanted them to find “a sense of disrupting each other and disrupting yourself.”Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

The occasion for this reimagining is the 50th anniversary of Danspace, a pillar of experimentation in dance,66br casino home to risk-takers like Houston-Jones and Holland since its earliest days. From Feb. 27 to March 1, “OO-GA-LA Reimagined (The Fred Holland and Ishmael Houston-Jones 1983 Duet Danced into the 21st Century)” helps to kick off “Danspace @ 50: The Work Is Never Done. Sanctuary Always Needed.,” a four-month festival of performances, screenings and conversations that trace connections between past and present. (The festival opened on Feb. 14 with a tribute to Steve Paxton, the postmodern dance pioneer, who died last year.)

“It’s a daunting anniversary,” Judy Hussie-Taylor, Danspace’s executive director and chief curator, said recently. “How do you address so many artists, dancers, choreographers who call Danspace home? Because it’s not just ours. We don’t own this history and this legacy. It belongs to a dance community in New York and nationally and abroad.”

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The reception had none of the hype that accompanied President Biden’s mega-fund-raiser at Radio City Music Hall in March or his big Hollywood bash in Juneh3pg, but Ms. Harris’s event raised a similar figure as each of those. At the same time, the dizzying amount that Ms. Harris has raised during her two months as a presidential nominee can make even a $27 million fund-raiser feel somehow less than remarkable.