In memoriam: Steve Paxton (1939-2024)
“Once you have found improvisation there is so much of it you never get enough of it.”
With gratitude we remember Steve Paxton, who has passed on February 20, 2024 at Mad Brook Farm Charleston, Vermont (the original homeland of the Abenaki people). He has been an important member of the Judson Church generation bringing postmodern dance into the world and contributor of the development of Contact Improvisation. Steve Paxton has been an important inspiration for the pedagogy of the SNDO, where contributed to the design of the program in the early 1980s. He was artist in residence in 2009.
Paxton came to dance from a background as gymnast and athlete, studying dance for some years in Graham technique in Phoenix Arizona. Then he joined the Cunningham company for some years. Then he joined the composition classes of Robert Dunn that led to the founding of the Judson Church Dance theater in 1962 of which Paxton was a core member. Together with Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti and many others they were part of a productive generation of choreographers innovating aesthetic directions of dance making.
Paxton has been a major influence for improvised dance. In improvisation, one tries, as the word says to engage with the unforeseen. Paxton speaks of a listening attitude, a knowing noticing, and noticing knowing. While moving one is confronted with habitual patterns of movement that the body comes up with. It is this mental exercise that Paxton finds of interest. How to learn to suspend anticipatory mechanisms of the body. To suspend one’s thinking. To confront oneself with futurity, and opt for different choices. Improvisation is for Paxton a machine to find out what happened
The Goldberg Variations by Steve Paxton was shown and recorded in 1986 at the Da Costakade first home of the SNDO, long before it was picked up by European producers. It was only performed in theatres in the Netherlands at the end of its run in 1992. Then a video production by Walter Verdin was made at the Felix Meritis Theatre in Amsterdam.
Founder of the SNDO, Pauline De Groot became acquainted with Steve Paxton and Mary Fulkerson, who was directing the Festival, and started to bring over dance makers of the first and later generations of the Judson Church period, establishing a major source of input for the school from New York City. Aat Hougée organized a panel interview with Steve Paxton, Lisa Nelson and Nancy Topf (1982). This was a formative period in the school’s history, and a time when new directions were explored. Both the curiosity about and the critical attitude toward dance education are striking, and explain the drive within the school to look for something different.
“I’m not surprised… that it’s difficult for people to manifest clearly and cleanly what they think and feel… what the artistic import of it is… I bet all those questions exist more for students now than they did before. It’s an incredible test we’re thrusting upon them… The invitation to the student creative dancer is to find one’s own ways. The consequences of the new pedagogy are quite extensive.” *1
In 2009 SNDO invited Paxton as Artist in Residence. Then he proposed that he wanted to look back at a work he had made in 1985 in Brussels called Ave Nue. This is a choreography that deals with the physical conditions of perception and the way the brain processes perception. It shows Paxton’s persistent inquiry in his work into all kinds of aspects of embodiment as well as his sense of humor and use of surrealist and absurd constructions.
“Maybe we're finally starting to train perception up to the point where it starts to be able to see more subtle body language”*2
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Footnotes:
*1 From: Lisa Nelson, Steve Paxton, Nancy Topf, interviewed by Aat Hougée, Whose Dance Are You Doing, 1982; in J. Fabius, redactie. “TALK/SNDO 1982-2006. 30 years of movement research at the School for New Dance Development”, Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten, spring 2009.
*2 (Paxton, 1999). (TALK online. Steve Paxton interviewed by Robert Steijn, SNDO 1999.
