Thoughts on Contact Improvisation

Steve Paxton; Rossella Mazzaglia

doi:10.6092/issn.2036-1599/4204

Authors

Steve Paxton
Steve Paxton has researched the “fiction” of cultured dance and the “truth” of improvisation for 40 years. He lives on a farm, and he has received grants from Change, Inc., the Foundation for Performance Arts, John D. Rockefeller Fund, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been awarded two NY Bessie Awards, and is a contributing editor to Contact Quarterly Dance Journal. He was one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater, Grand Union, Contact Improvisation, Touchdown Dance for the visually disabled (UK), and began his career studying modern dance techniques, ballet, Aikido, Tai Chi Chuan, and Vipassana meditation. He performed with the Merce Cunningham Dance Co. from 1961-65. He lectures, performs, choreographs and teaches primarily in the USA and Europe. In 2008, he and Lisa Nelson performed Night Stand in Spain, and he published a DVD with Contredanse in Brussels, Material for the Spine. In 2009 he re-choreographed Ave Nue (1985) in Amsterdam, and toured Japan, including Night Stand in Tokyo. With Contredanse of Brussels, he, Florence Corin and Baptiste Andrien have developed the Phantom Exhibition, a multi-image room of meditations on Material for the Spine, featured in the Super Bodies Triennale in Hasselt, Belgium. In 2013 he was featured in Tanz IM August, Berlin; and Night Stand was performed in NYC.
Rossella Mazzaglia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2036-1599/4204

Abstract

Thoughts on Contact Improvisation is a stratified text, including excerpts from Steve Paxton’s interview with Folkert Bents, which was originally published in “Theatre Papers” (1982) and was further selected, edited and commented for this issue by Rossella Mazzaglia with a specific contribution by Paxton himself. As a result, the historical source is maintained and recognizable, but it is also enlivened and updated. The main themes Paxton accounts for are: the pedestrian movement in choreography, a definition of improvisation and an investigation of the ways it operates from a psycho-physical, an aesthetic and a pedagogical standpoint, its relation to life and to the actor’s techniques.

Thoughts on Contact Improvisation

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