ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one of the dance works, Untitled Duet, an improvisation performed by Ishmael Houston-Jones and Fred Holland in 1983 as part of Contact at 10th and Second, a festival celebrating the first eleven years of contact improvisation. Considering Untitled Duet in relation to William Pope. L’s Another Kind of Love, it analyzes the racial implications of privileging Cagean notions of chance and indeterminacy over improvisation, as is often the case in histories of both “experimental” music and postmodern dance. As the manifesto makes clear, Untitled Duet entailed an undeniable negotiation of various strictures, including race, but also gender, sexuality, and genre—restrictions that are neither stable nor separable from one another. Pope.L’s performance, entitled Cage Unrequited, was part of the Performa 13 biennial and the affiliated exhibition, Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art in New York City.
