Giving back: What an enlightened artiste can do

I can never forget one particular statement made by an incredible dancer in San Francisco when we were catching up on the life paths of our fellow dancers since college. Over the decades some had become leading dancers with Graham, Nikolai and Cunningham, others started their own dance companies and, sadly, a few had succumbed in the AIDs epidemic. My friend John Czwiacala had been in the Louis Falco Dance Company; perhaps New York City’s most technically demanding dance company of the time. My nickname for John was The Silver Surfer, as he abandoned NYC in the 80’s when diagnosed with HIV and survived and thrived in San Francisco benefiting from every new drug trial and living till 2012. John was active in social service and the words that stuck in my mind as we spoke of where we all were in life and accomplishments were, “after a successful career there are two kinds of people, those who give back and those who are selfish”.

These words blaze, like the Hollywood sign, over the head of Joseph Houseal. In the 1980’s and 90’s, his dance choreography and performance was literally used as a definition for “‘multicultural movement forms’ which cross the culture-specific barriers: Kabuki to ballet, modern to Indian” in Valerie Preston-Dunlop’s book Dance Words.

Joseph Houseal is Director of Core of Culture Dance Preservation, an organization committed to safeguarding Intangible World Heritage, with an emphasis on ancient dance and endangered movement traditions. I was intrigued by what experiences and pathways had led an American ballet dancer to travel the globe in quest of endangered ancient dance forms to preserve, both archival and in practice.

Training in ballet from the age of 15 under the dance pioneer Margaret Howard, Joseph went on to the Washington Ballet as a scholarship student culminating in a minor role in a George Balanchine New York City Ballet production with Mikhail Baryshnikov. By age 22 he felt limited by the possibilities of “being the paint and not the painter” in the world of dance and stepped sideways to embark on a 4 year Great Books course at St John’s College in Annapolis.

After working with some of the biggest names in the world of ballet, he says was inspired by a particular Jewish tutor in this small college, Chaninah Maschler, who challenged his ideas and “taught me to refine my thinking about art, choreography, meaning and spirituality”. He was fascinated by Greek tragedy as a form because it incorporates dance, poetry, drama and music into one unified aesthetic effect but so few people knew what Greek Tragedy really was, or what the movement was really like, so his choreography soon hit a dead end.

Introduced to Noh theatre through a poet friend’s translations, Joseph plunged into seven years in Kyoto, Japan studying and performing Noh dance-theatre and Kabuki, which has more flowing dance movements than the austere Noh. This and Baha’i Teachings influenced his work running his own dance company: Parnassus Dancetheatre in Kyoto which was a multi-cultural, interdisciplinary group incorporating dance forms from not only Asian and Western dance forms but also Arabian dance.

Joseph found it to be “a wealthy period for Japan, and we worked with traditional artists from 14 different countries in the seven years of productions. In the USA, he was an Emmy nominee for his PBS work on a Kabuki dance, “Ancient Elegance”.

Though impressed with the beautiful Japanese understanding, “To be an artist is to be enlightened”, Joseph adds “I don’t think this means so much that all artists are enlightened as that there aren’t really so many true artists”.

The next path and passion was graduate research at the Laban Centre for Dance and Movement in London. At the same time he choreographed, taught and performed around Europe with Baha’I philosophically inspired choreographies, including New Hope for the Dead, a multi-media multi-art show involving a cast of 22 and a solo piece for the celebration of the Birthday of Bahá’u’lláh at the Royal Academy in Glasgow accompanied on viola by the Scottish BBC Symphony’s principal violinist.

Filling out some of the eclectic professional dance experiences has to include Houseal producing TV pieces on the reconstruction of Nijinsky’s “La Sacre du Printemps” by the Joffrey Ballet alongside 3 years as artistic director for soul singer Chaka Khan.

A “chance” encounter with two monks walking by his California beachfront home led to a conversation about Ladakh, who is the best dancer in Ladakh , a trip to meet “the best dancer” who was brother to one monk, and a major dance preservation and research projects in Ladakh.

From being a writer on dance and regular contributor to Ballet Review, New York since 1984, he now writes on sacred and traditional dance arts, curates, researches, creates archives and DVDs monasteries as Director of Core of Culture based in Chicago, Illinois.

What and how he approaches preserving endangered dance traditions is the scope of a future article. For now I’ll simply quote Joseph Houseal’s work ethic, “A lot of people want to be the emperor. Think I will settle for being the plumber and make something that works.”

— Sharon Lowen is a respected exponent of Odissi, Manipuri and Mayurbhanj and Seraikella Chau whose four-decade career in India was preceded by 17 years of modern dance and ballet in the US and an MA in dance from the University of Michigan. She can be contacted at sharonlowen.workshop@gmail.com