The American choreographer Steve Paxton was one of the most influential dancemakers to emerge from the Judson Church Theater, a crucible of creative activity in New York during the 1960s. While experimenting with the body’s potential, he developed what he called contact improvisation, which defines itself: when two touching bodies move without plan, they generate improvised choreography through their shifting balance and weight.
Paxton danced the way most people move through their daily lives—without any apparent awareness that he was dancing—somehow erasing the distinction between nature and art.
Those who talk about innovation in dance today seldom examine the way the body and mind function together. Yet the start of the new season seems to me the perfect time to think about that subject. When I interviewed Paxton in 1986 for the Dancing Times, he made ideas dance.
“I’ve studied an enormous number of movement forms, artistic and non-artistic, martial arts, yoga, and I feel that anything you’ve trained into your body stays there forever…In that way, I’m unable to avoid influence. But choreography should be for me some kind of unknown, which can exist on different frontiers. My personal work, for instance, is improvisational: I’m training my imagination to work at the fast end of the time scale and not to process information through my consciousness. So I don’t know what I do when I improvise. I do know what it feels like, I do know what I’m aiming for consciously, but I’m not too sure about how the movement looks and links and adds up.
“Improvisation is a very difficult nut to crack because it can’t really be defined. It deals with the future, maybe only the next second but the future. Its definition is in the result of it.
“In working with one’s imagination, in improvisation, one runs up against the wall, finally, of one’s thought processes. One has explored an enormous number of them, and it has become a kind of barrier towards finding new material. In the traditional way of producing dances, what you start out improvising gets more and more set and finally becomes movement that is so set that everybody knows it.
“I’ve stepped out of the safety net, as it were, of the traditional, and the very first choice, the very first choice, in the early ‘60s, was pedestrian movement, which is a technique that’s based on the way we have made our architecture and planned our cities. And it looks at the decline of movement from when we were more field-oriented, when we had to climb trees, swim, stalk carefully, wait patiently while hunting. Basically what the society asks people to do is to walk on hard surfaces, lie down on soft ones, sit on medium ones. So we’re looking at a very restrictive movement vocabulary, which is largely invisible to us because we don’t think about it.
“So the basic question was, Here I am taking two classes a day and rehearsing as much as I’m able, but what am I doing the rest of the time? Where is awareness? What in my body is aware? Why does it spring to life when I’m in the studio, and where does it go when I step into the street?
“I examined that in various ways—walking is one. And walking in performance is such a contradiction because you can’t help being self-conscious, whereas when you’re just walking you’re not self-conscious about it. So that’s a paradox. But these paradoxes exist.
“It’s a constant battle for people who see aesthetics in terms of tradition. What made de Kooning’s Abstract Expressionist blotches and dribbles art? What made Rauschenberg’s Combines acceptable for a museum? What made Expressionism? I don’t know. Maybe it isn’t art…for a while. Maybe it has to exist for a while before people see the art of it or the art in it. What makes it a performance?
“I want people to come and do movement they do all the time—that’s what I want in my dances. I don’t want ballerinas to walk, because they have learned to walk a certain way and they have a certain attitude toward performance. I want something a little bit rawer than that. I want to point toward this pedestrian area and illuminate it to some degree, not for the person who’s walking but as an idea, as an idiosyncratic and unpredictable source of technique and dance.”
Paxton made Satisfyin’ Lover (1967) for a group of 30 to 84 people, who follow a written score. He described it as a “dance about walking, standing, and sitting.”
This is very post-modern!