March 2, 2010
Collaborations were popular with Steve Paxton because of his need for many performers to fulfill his ideas. In 1983, he got together with Nancy Stark Smith and Lisa Nelson to create Fall After Newton. This documentary portrayed an 11-year contact improvisation that started with Paxton's Magnesium and eleven years later, ended with Contact's 11th Anniversary Concert Series. This video showed the mechanics of slow contact improvisation and and slow movement. "Steve Christiansen used slow motion to make visible dance that was impossible to see with the naked eye." This changed how movement was seen.
Steve Paxton’s main goal was to create a “physical playground” where his students could explore the makings of their own bodies - as well as their relationships with other bodies, objects, and space. He was fascinated by the pedestrian world around him, Paxton developed a non-dance movement vocabulary that includes everyday activities such as sitting, standing, and walking. Paxton sees the human body as a physical machine that expresses both nature and the particular culture in which it operates through movement, therefore, non-dancers can conform to contact improvisation with ease.
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I was surprised to find out he studied with Merce Cunningham. I guess I didn't associate Steve Paxton with a classic such as Cunningham.
ReplyDeleteDid you come across any information as to how or why he created contact improvisation? Knowing what I do about Merce, I can't imagine he had much direct impact on the form. Gymnastics clearly played a large role but I can't figure out what the other threads could have been. Maybe his exploration was a small act of defiance against modern dance (formed during his work with Cunningham) paired with his gymnastics training?
I believe he created the concept of contact improvisation because he wanted to explore the slow movement between two moving bodies and the physical energy they both expressed such as weight, gravity, and inertia. He called contact improvisation a contemporary game to explore lifting, falling, and weight sharing. Steve thrived off of the total self indulgement when a dancer becomes one with his or her partner and the movement that can come with each unknown improvisation.
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