On October 13th and 19th 1966, Steve Paxton occupied the large hall of the Arsenal of the 69th Regiment of New York with a gigantic polyethylene inflatable structure: an installation made up of long tunnels, a room and a tower, through which the spectators were invited to move. Equipped with a small pocket radio, each person was able to pick up the waves of a soundtrack composed by Robert Ashley.

 This participative work, which appeared to Steve Paxton in his sleep, marks the climax and the end of a series of performances made by the artist with inflatable structures. The idea dear to the Judson Dance Theater to push back the limit between dancers and non-dancers reaches a radical form here, as the entire space is left to the public, free to stroll through an environment designed by the choreographer. This maze of synthetic guts, entitled Physical Things, proposes, however, a series of experiences that have a relationship with the body and its intimate perception. At certain points of the itinerary, anatomic visions emerge from the crowd: a young woman covered with liquid crystals, coloured by her blood circulation, moving pieces of flesh isolated by a black veil, twins observing passers-by. While in the tower the public is exposed to a continuous humming, in the room images from nature are projected onto an artificial tree. 

Steve Paxton has researched the fiction of cultured dance and the “truth” of improvisation for 55 years.

Born  in Phoenix, Arizona in 1939, he began his movement studies in  gymnastics and then trained in modern dance, and later in ballet, yoga,  Aikido and Tai Chi Chuan. In summer 1958, Paxton attended the American  Dance Festival at Connecticut College, where he trained with  choreographers Merce Cunningham and José Limón. Soon after, he moved to  New York City. He was a member of the José Limón Company in 1959 and  performed with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from 1961 to 1964. His  study of Aikido began in 1964 at Hombu Dojo in Tokyo, continuing in New  York City under Yamada Sensei.

Paxton’s appetite for  deconstruction, exploration, subversion and invention led him to become a  founding member of the Judson Dance Theater (1962-66), which arose from  composer Robert Dunn’s workshops, Dunn himself being inspired by John  Cage’s methods. Paxton’s partners in experimentation were, to name a  few, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Robert Rauschenberg, and Lucinda  Childs. The Judson movement has been influential in the emerging  contemporary dance at different times in many countries around the  world. 

In the 1960s, Paxton created work from pedestrian, everyday movement, including such intriguing early dances as Flat (1964), Satisfyin Lover (1967) and State (1968). In tune with his interest in science and technology, Paxton participated in Nine Evenings of Theater and Engineering  in 1966, initiated by Billy Klüver, an engineer at Bell Labs, in  association with Robert Rauschenberg. He was also a founding member of  Grand Union (1970-1976), an improvisation collective reuniting several  original Judson choreographers: Yvonne Rainer, David Gordon, Trisha  Brown, with Douglas Dunn, Lincoln Scott, Barbara Dilley, and Becky  Arnold. 

In 1972, Paxton instigated Contact Improvisation, the  physical basis of bodies moving in touch: the fluid give and take of  weight, initiation, reflexes and innate physical empathy. Contact  Improvisation went on to become an international network of dancers who  convene to practice and publish news and research in the dance and  improvisation journal Contact Quarterly, where Paxton has been a  contributing editor since 1975. He founded Touchdown Dance with Anne  Kilcoyne in England in 1986, offering dance to the visually impaired. 

In  1986, he began research on Material for the Spine. MFS is derived from  observation of Contact Improvisation, in which the spine becomes an  essential “limb”. MFS is a meditative, technical study of spinal and  pelvic movement potentials. In 2008, Paxton published an interactive  digital publication Material for the Spine with Contredanse, Brussels, and created exhibitions with its materials; Phantom Exhibition, shown in Belgium and Japan, and Weight of Sensation at MoMA (USA).

Paxton maintains a long-term collaboration with dancer Lisa Nelson: PA RT (1979) and Night Stand (2004). In 2016, he toured a revival of Bound (1982) and premiered Quicksand in NYC, an opera by Robert Ashley with choreography by Paxton.

During  his career, Paxton received three New York Dance and Performance  Awards, or Bessies, including a lifetime achievement award in 2015; the  Vermont Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts in 1994; and the  Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement award from the Venice Biennale in 2014.  He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the  Rockefeller Foundation, the Contemporary Performance Arts Foundation,  Change, Inc., Experiments in Art and Technology, and a Guggenheim  Fellowship in 1995. In 2017, he became a USArtists Fellow. He lives in  Vermont.

Source: https://www.materialforthespine.com/

We owe 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, a series of performances presented in the large building of the Arsenal of the 69th Regiment of New York, in October 1966, to the complicity between the visual artist Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver, an engineer with the telephone company Bell. The concept was simple: allow a dozen artists to achieve the performance of their dreams thanks to the technology of the Bell laboratories.

Born from the experimentations of the members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and the Judson Dance Theatre, the 9 Evenings mark a decisive step in the changing relationship between art and technology. Evening after evening, projectors, video cameras, transistors, amplifiers, electrodes and oscilloscopes entered the stage at the service of ambitious, futuristic, iconoclastic or poetic visions – all filmed in black and white and in colour. When these films were rediscovered in 1995, Billy Klüver decided, in partnership with Julie Martin and the director Barbro Schultz Lundestam, to produce a series of documentaries reconstructing what had taken place on the stage and during the preparation of the performances. The original material was thus completed by interviews with the protagonists of each performance (artists and engineers) and a few famous guests. The 9 Evenings would thereby be restored to their place in the history of art. 

Source : Sylvain Maestreggi