Every year, I compile a list of the groovy dance books published that year. When I was writing the whole column myself, I posted short blurbs, much like the endorsements you see on the back covers of books. I tended to choose volumes that center dancers’ stories, because that’s what I love to read. Since 2022, when I started asking colleagues to help me in this endeavor, the blurbs grew into reviews, and the choices expanded too. I try to offer each colleague a book they might enjoy, and I hope you enjoy these recommendations too.

This year I am kicking off the column with two items that convey the monumental work of two of our greats: Martha Graham and George Balanchine. Both are visually spectacular while also making strong connections between past and present.

Btw, here’s some good news for readers: The American Dance Guild is organizing the second Dance Book Fair on March 29. The first one, last year, was a well-organized, festive event. It’s a great place to meet dance writers and to browse dance books published in the last 15 years.

Martha Graham Dance Company 100 Years
Produced by Ken Brower and Deborah Ory, NYC Dance Project
Introduction by Janet Eilber
Text by Peter Sparling
Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers

Reviewed by Wendy Perron

To celebrate the centennial of the oldest dance company in the country, The NYC Dance Project has produced a weighty book of starkly striking photos of twenty-four works by Martha Graham. As Janet Eilber writes in the introduction, “She taught us that when the body is stationary, the inner life can provide intense psychological movement—the growing fury, crushing grief, deepening desire, dawning recognition, or any number of emotional revelations that can stop us in our tracks. And in those moments, Martha wanted us to vibrate with intention that could be felt in the balcony of the theater while never moving a muscle.” These images do indeed vibrate. Almost each section starts with a historic photo that anchors us in the past. For example, Barbara Morgan’s iconic photo of Primitive Mysteries (1931), back when Martha herself was the sole figure, or Mary Hinkson as Circe (1933) by Anthony Crickmay. The current full-size photos of recent dancers like Lloyd Knight in El Penitente, Xin Ying in Imperial Gesture, and Peju Chien-Pott in Night Journey are simply magnificent. The black-and-white photos give a sense of volume and depth, while the color photos are vibrant but look less timeless.

That special kind of severe sculptural beauty of Graham dancers has lasted through the ages due, no doubt, to the strict technique classes. As you linger on each page, you could eventually get a sense of Graham’s psychological choreographic oeuvre over the century.

Some of the images place distinctive roles within a natural environment. Lloyd Knight and So Young An, shown in Circe on a rocky beach, bring out the danger of that story. Leslie Andrea Williams, posing in front of Noguchi’s fence in Frontier (1935), gives a different meaning to that dance, perhaps suggesting (optimistically) that a young Black woman could now survey the land with the same sense of hope that a young white woman did in 1935.

It’s satisfying that each of these great Graham works is represented by both the past and the present, thus implying a strong future. One could explain the magic with the famous Graham sound bite writ large on one of the early pages: “Dance is the hidden language of the soul.” Here’s to 100 years of dancing and watching that language.

In Balanchine’s Steps: How The George Balanchine Foundation Preserves His Genius
Photographs by Costas, Additional photographs by Brian Rushton
Designer and Photo Editor, Kyle Froman
Text Editor, Mindy Aloff
George Balanchine Foundation and TideMark

Reviewed by Barbara Forbes

This beautiful book documents the process of creating the Video Archives for the legacy of George Balanchine (1904–1983). Dancers who worked directly with the choreographer were invited to coach those who continue dancing his ballets in his absence. Thanks to former New York City Ballet dancer Nancy Reynolds, who brought the idea to Barbara Horgan, founder of the Balanchine Foundation, in 1994, this video archive is growing. In Balanchine’s Steps allows us to glimpse how the transmission takes place.

A brief biography of each contributor, dancer, teacher, writer, and critic accompanies the stunning in-studio photographs by Costas and Reynolds’ husband Brian Rushton. Each pairing of coach and dancer offers historical context, first-hand tips, and inspiring insights. The voice of each contributor is unique and absorbing as we learn about the process.

Memories even reach into Balanchine’s past, for example when Patricia Wilde shares that Balanchine adored Olga Spessitseva’s Odette, having worked with her on Diaghilev’s one-act Swan Lake. In other cases, the photographs themselves convey the communication, as with Stephanie Saland coaching Miriam Miller in Vienna Waltzes, or Suzanne Farrell coaching Elisabeth Holowchuk and Michael Cook in Meditation.

Occasionally philosophical disagreements are revealed. Bart Cook advises that Agon is “not a relationship…We’re things…we’re energies.” To which his partner Allegra Kent responds, “We’re not things. We’re human beings.”

Kay Mazzo helps Miriam Miller understand that performing Balanchine’s ballets demands a rich connection with one’s internal self, “a dialogue guiding your presence and aura.” Jonathan Stafford writes of his sessions with Merrill Ashley and Mimi Paul that they changed the way he approaches those roles. And Peter Boal recalls being coached by Maria Tallchief in Scotch Symphony pas de deux, and her gazing up at him. “When her eyes met mine, she blushed. I’ll never forget that look.”

It is clear that passing on Balanchine’s choreography is not only a question of mastering the steps. There’s Edward Villella advising the male dancer in Bugaku to “keep a space between her waist and your palms” to allow your partner to function (in his case, Allegra Kent); Violette Verdy observing that “It’s about a little thing called atmosphere;” or Kay Mazzo advising Miriam Miller that “not to make ballet positions.” Each dancer finds a new relationship with the role they are dancing. “You open your eyes to a whole different layer of the work,” says Maria Kowroski, on being coached in Bugaku by Mimi Paul and Villella.

Perusing the evocative photos and intimate observations in this book convinces me that Balanchine’s legacy lives in the hearts of dancers. Those who created roles in his ballets are guiding the next generations, enlivening his choreography with nuance, imagination and sensitivity.

Nevertheless, A Choreographic Workbook
By Yvonne Rainer with Emmanuèle Phuon
Illustrations by Pascal Lemaître
Yale University Press

Reviewed by Nancy Alfaro

If only I’d had Yvonne Rainer’s Nevertheless, a Choreographic Workbook back in the day! This book is a gem, full of unique ideas for choreographing and teaching movement to trained dancers and pedestrian performers.

The first section of the workbook, titled “Conversation,” includes an insightful discussion with Yvonne Rainer and dancer/scholar Emmanuèle Phuon. Here they discuss Rainer’s early teaching session, “Nevertheless.” Rainer recorded it with instructions for the performers to interpret as they wished, while she lay on the floor pretending to sleep. The recorded instructions allowed the choreographer a chance to participate in the process, rather than being a hierarchical observer. When asked by Phuon what her motive was for ignoring the performers, Rainer said, “It was a one-shot experiment. It was a way of contesting or complicating my own authority. Or maybe amplifying it?”

The “Nevertheless” section includes a multitude of structural ideas and prompts for those who are doing pedestrian, trained, or task-oriented movement. (No Pantomime!) In this section, the body is deconstructed into segments, and Rainer proposes a variety of ways for these segments to move separately or in relation to each other. She also encourages her performers to integrate text, photos, film, and other mediums that have influenced them, culminating in a collage of words, movement, and visuals.

In the “Workbook” section, Rainer gives a series of short, choreographic commands, like, “Make a complicated two-minute piece,” or “Improvise spontaneously and emphasize one of the following: Time, Body, Light, Rhythm etc.” One of my favorite prompts is, “Make a piece that contains both functional and nonfunctional activities.” Pascal Lemaître’s simple, joyful illustrations are a gift throughout the book, but here his lunging and tumbling figures burst off page. These illustrated pages are followed by blank Notes pages so you can play along and notate your ideas.

Another section is called Pedagogical Vaudeville, so titled after a performance by students Rainer led in workshop at the Danish Academy of Art in 2000. Because she was working with untrained art students rather than professional dancers, she felt compelled to introduce ideas, rather than counting on them to bring in pre-determined moves. Here Rainer invites the reader to use the book’s Pedagogical Vaudeville diary as a score for a dance they may want to create.

Dancers, artists, musicians, choreographers, and educators will enjoy reading this engaging book by this inventive, critical thinker and creator.

The Choreography of Environments: How the Anna and Lawrence Halprin Home Transformed Contemporary Dance and Urban Design
By Janice Ross
Oxford University Press

Reviewed by Stephan Koplowitz

Janice Ross’ latest book isn’t just a record of two creative rule-breakers; it’s a deep dive into what made their genius and iconoclastic reputations possible. Perhaps I am biased, given my interest in anything site-specific. However, this book creates an immersive world filled with insight and interesting stories that will appeal to many readers. More than a biography of a house, Ross renders the home as a real, living place, filled with purpose and teamwork, where many artists found inspiration and ideas for years.

Ross’s relentless attention to detail is utterly compelling. She takes a subject that could seem academic—the connection between art and architecture—but always brings it down to the actual day-to-day of the Halprins’ home life. Her research delves into every conceivable aspect of the space, and we are privy to Anna Halprin’s private journals, Lawrence Halprin’s architectural sketches, their shared correspondence, and several photographs. She investigates the form, function, and furniture of the home, revealing how each element was a deliberate act of design, part of a larger, domestic choreography. We learn, for example, about the sloped floors and split-level rooms that were not mere aesthetic choices but direct provocations to movement. The large, sliding glass doors were not simply for light but were designed to dissolve the boundary between indoors and out (a prime California element), inviting the natural environment into their lives and creative process. The benches and other design elements “honor the unwritten credo of the Halprin home: to build with nature, not on it.”

The most celebrated feature of the home is, without a doubt, the dance deck, and Ross provides a thorough analysis of its importance. “On the surface,” she writes, “the dance deck might seem merely a trendy backyard feature born in the postwar era of mid-century modernist homes… Yet viewed from the intersecting perspectives of theater, social history, and the architecture of domestic space, it is a transformative object.” The deck—and, by extension, as Ross describes, the entire home—set in motion new paradigms for how the body relates to space. It is no surprise that dance masters Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, and Meredith Monk (to name the boldest) found new perspectives on the deck, guided by the Halprins’ vision for movement and designed space.

The Choreography of Environments will delight anyone wishing to delve deeply into an artistic life that seamlessly blends personal ideals of aesthetics, function, and movement into daily life. One can’t leave this book without looking at one’s own home space with new eyes, and what if…

Hollywood Dance-ins and the Reproduction of Bodies
By Anthea Kraut
Oxford University Press

Reviewed by Elizabeth Zimmer

Hollywood Dance-ins and the Reproduction of Bodies might well serve as a litmus test for aspiring dance scholars. If readers are prepared to spend many hours parsing the theoretical language and following the thousands of superscript numbers to the 80 dense pages of notes and bibliography at the rear of Anthea Kraut’s new book, and if those readers do so with excitement, even delight, they are probably in the right business. If not—if their attention wanders, and if they give up the quest—well, one of the reasons people become dancers is that they’d rather not sit and read and ponder all the time, right?

I love this book. It opens doors for me to vocabularies and ways of thinking that first surfaced after I left grad school in the 1970s—to the language of literary theory, of critical race theory, of feminist and cinema studies. After a while Kraut’s flood of information mutates into wisdom; anyone who makes it through the text will be changed by her subtle interweaving of hard facts with lucid analysis. We will also have made the acquaintance of several people—Marie Bryant, Angie Blue, Alex Romero and others—mostly absent from even a good dance history education, screen dancers likely to have been uncredited in films or assistant dance directors and teachers paid a mere fraction of what their male equivalents, like Hermes Pan, were earning.

Kraut declares that her aim is “to advance understandings of credit and debit as racialized and gendered relations that play out at the level of the body…” Intrepid readers will absorb concepts like surrogation, indexicality, “above the line” and “below the line” positions, and how these apparently simple, often financial terms apply to the transmission of dance information. They will learn about the role Ebony magazine, the Black community’s equivalent to Life, played in the years before television took over the job of showing us to ourselves. Ebony and its sister publication, Jet, collected and preserved many stories of the remarkable women and gay men who transmitted the work of film choreographers to white stars who worked less hard than they otherwise might to look spectacular onscreen. They’ll discover the trio of invisibilized dancers, Ernie Flatt, Carol Haney, and Jeanne Coyne, responsible for Debbie Reynolds’ triumph in Singin’ in the Rain. Kraut also details the remarkable interracial collaboration between Black star Lena Horne and white dancer Haney, herself celebrated for her performance in The Pajama Game on The Perry Como Show.

Hollywood Dance-Ins is a book I wish I had written, but in a thousand years I would not have had the patience, or the insight, to do the research and the thinking involved here. Masquerading as a dance history book, its real subject is political economy. If they bother to read it, it will inflame the barbarians currently running our country and our schools. Buy it quickly before they ban it or burn it and it becomes impossible to find.

Balanchine Finds His America: A Tale of Love Lost and Ballet Reborn
By Elizabeth Kendall
Oxford University Press

Reviewed by Martha Ullman West

Elizabeth Kendall’s deeply personal account of the great choreographer’s early years in this country is as meticulously researched and richly detailed as its predecessor, Balanchine and the Lost Muse: Revolution & the Making of a Choreographer. Yet it’s startlingly different.

The author also of Where She Danced, an elegantly written book about the feminist origins of modern dance, in which Kendall examined the lives of her subjects (readably !) in the context of their times and their culture, does the same in Balanchine Finds His America. In 207 pages, including an exhaustive bibliography (Disclaimer: my book, Todd Bolender, Janet Reed and the Making of American Ballet, is one of her sources) Kendall examines, through the contradictory lenses of feminism and Freudianism, a fifteen-year period of Balanchine’s life and work that was phenomenally productive professionally, and personally pretty turbulent.

She begins with his arrival in New York in 1933, a survivor of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution who was recovering from tuberculosis, broke, jobless, and having cast his lot with a young moderately wealthy American named Lincoln Kirstein. She ends in 1948: Balanchine has led three companies, choreographed for the Metropolitan Opera Ballet and Denham’s Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, established the School of American Ballet and New York City Ballet, headed American Ballet Caravan’s government-sponsored 1941 tour of South America, choreographed for Broadway and the movies, been married twice and had multiple affairs with dancers. Serenade, Concerto Barocco, Theme and Variations, and Four Temperaments were all made in this period.

The dancers who inspired these ballets were not all women, although readers new to Balanchine’s story might think so. They might also, mistakenly, think the music was of secondary importance. As for Balanchine the predator, of which Kendall both accuses and forgives him, he was after all a man of his time, and in at least one instance, on the 1941 tour, teenager Marie-Jeanne Pelus, according to one dancer, pursued him relentlessly.

“I want Balanchine’s story to stand in for the all-too-human stories of all great artists, as they make the bold and often treacherous inner discoveries that lead to their art,” Kendall writes at the end of her preface. That’s ambitious: All artists are products of their times and their cultures, and some, Balanchine included, are focused more on making the work than probing their own psyches. To give Balanchine’s life story immediacy, Kendall chose to write it in the present tense, making the reader wonder if something actually happened, and how she knows. However, with Balanchine Finds His America, Kendall makes her readers think and question, not only what she says about Balanchine and his work, but also the art of biography.

Fantasies of Ito Michio
By Tara Rodman
University of Michigan Press

Reviewed by Wendy Perron

The Japanese-born Michio Ito is a fascinating precursor to American modern dance. But when you read the research, you realize that the stories he told about himself were sometimes true and sometimes fictional. Tara Rodman’s solution to this dilemma is to say that his fantasies are equally important to the reality, that his desires say something about him as a boundary-crossing artist and about the culture surrounding him.

“Fantasy is how we know ourselves,” Rodman offers, “how we perform ourselves and come to think of those performances as constitutive of ourselves.” She alternately defines his tall tales as either self-promotion or “creative acts of the imagination that sustained” him. Another layer is that Ito, as an Asian dancer in the West, was a screen onto which many fantasies of others were projected, relating to “the national, racial, and imperial significations assigned it.” So on the one hand, we have his fanciful stories about dancing at a Pavlova performance or being pals with Nijinsky, and on the other hand we have his arduous path of building communities for dance in New York and Los Angeles during the time of the “yellow peril.”

One of the ways Ito was a pioneer of modern dance was that he influenced Louis Horst, the composer who laid down the rules for structuring choreography. When I researched Ito for my Unsung Heroes of Dance History series in 2021, I discovered that Horst had modeled his ABA structure on what he learned from Ito in the 1920s. That format became the favored method of organizing materials in modern dance for decades.

After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, the FBI raided Ito’s home in L.A. and arrested him as an enemy alien—which was not uncommon for issei men (born in Japan). He was taken into a series of prison-like DOJ facilities. In 1943, his request for repatriation was granted, and he sailed back to Japan. The American government had killed his dream of being a “universal artist.” But then—irony of ironies—that same American government offered him the job of producer at the Ernie Pyle theater in Tokyo, a top position during the American Occupation. In bombed out, devastated Japan, as Rodman points out, Ito became part of the remaking of his home country.

Ito is a towering, idealistic figure who crossed cultures, national identities, and dance genres. Rodman’s research is vast and impeccable. Because she traveled to Japan and learned the language, she could report on how the Japanese media covered him in both L.A. and Tokyo over the years. Rodman gives us a comprehensive excavation into his life, his work, and his dreams.

Juliet Prowse: Born to Dance, The Extraordinary Life Story of My Aunt
By Juliet E. Prowse
Prowse Media

Reviewed by William Whitener

Juliet E. Prowse has written a loving tribute about her aunt, the great and magnetic entertainer, Juliet Prowse. The author traces Juliet’s early years as a child in South Africa, where she studied ballet with Marjorie Sturman, co-founder of the Festival Ballet Society. It was 1948 and Juliet showed tremendous promise as a 12-year old. Long-limbed, strong, and with a smile that lit up the room, the young dancer became a member of the company and performed as the Queen of the Willis in Giselle. By 1954, she was living in London with the hope of joining Anton Dolin’s Festival Ballet. Alas, she was six feet tall on pointe and not chosen. Juliet began to forge her own path. The author proudly recounts her aunt’s rapid ascent, boosted by the encouragement of family members, friends, and lovers.

After replacing a principal dancer in a pantomime at The Palladium, Juliet tried out for the eminent team of Jack Cole and Gwen Verdon, who were in London auditioning dancers for the film Gentlemen Prefer Brunettes. She was cast, and this opportunity was followed by a featured role in the West End production of the musical Kismet. Her boundless talent was recognized by leaders in the field including the choreographer Hermes Pan. Juliet Prowse was launched.

The remainder of the biography chronicles the trailblazing efforts of Juliet as she became a dazzling presence on stage, film, and television; she developed a company of loyal dancers, choreographers, designers and musicians. Lauded for her fine singing and comedic gifts in musical theater productions, she was one of the most celebrated and highly paid performers in Las Vegas. Her artistic standards were legendary.

This is an inspiring remembrance of a beloved woman who successfully brought dance, both subtle and extravagant, to the general public. In her niece’s detailed portrait, Juliet’s love of life, joy, heartbreaks, and determination are on solid ground.

Dancing on the Fault Lines of History
By Susan Manning
University of Michigan Press

Reviewed by Morgan Griffin

Eminent dance scholar Susan Manning kicks off this selection of her essays with a brief history of herself. I appreciated this inclusion, as any interpretation of dance history is inherently personal. Her foreword reveals not only her own privileges and biases, but also her revised thinking over time. In fact, the evolution of these preconceptions serves as the through line of the book.

Divided into sections by “keywords,” the essays, spanning from 1986 to 2025, are organized into themes of “Gender and Sexuality,” “Whiteness and Blackness,” and “Nationality and Globalization.”

These themes are interpreted through the lens of spectatorship. The essays recount how viewership of these themes not only vary from viewer to viewer, but also adapt over time based on social movements, global awareness, and personal preferences. Isadora Duncan is on one hand viewed as a feminist offering liberation of the body, on the other hand viewed as objectifying the female body and simultaneously glorifying whiteness. Pina Bausch is criticized for her representation of traditional and at times violent gender roles. Or is her work purely a commentary deeply rooted in German history? Did Mary Wigman appropriate and Orientalize Asian influences, or did her work inspire Ohno Kazuo, who then adapted her forms into the Japanese dance world? Was she a Nazi empathizer or did she succumb so as to provide safety and subtle rebellion?

At the onset Manning acknowledges the fact that two or many different things can be true. Dance is an ephemeral art that puts bodies on view for people to see, to perceive, to interpret. How can there not be one million truths? Nonetheless, I felt a kind of hesitation on Manning’s part to make any real claim, any strong stance. She introduces each essay with a short forward calling out missteps or missing perspectives which she has since acknowledged. There seemed a bit of nervousness written between the lines. Perhaps a fear of being a white woman writing across these fault lines? And yet in teetering (even dancing) between these lines, I was left with no “aha” moments, no final clarity. Instead, I was left with a web of interweaving histories, accounts, and viewpoints that I struggled to synthesize.

And yet perhaps Manning has skillfully made her point. We are constantly faced with the struggle of how on earth to capture dance history at all, given the volume of oral and written histories we have access to. What Manning eloquently reveals is that we have the power to reconstruct our perceptions, by constantly learning more, by actively seeing differently, by changing our former understandings to try to absorb as many histories as we can.

Characters in Motion: A Workbook of Improvisational Exercises
By Lanny Harrison, edited by Jane Zipp
Vervante

Reviewed by Wendy Perron

An unforgettable performer, Lanny Harrison embodied many colorful characters within Meredith Monk’s The House for years. As Harrison recounts in this book, “I fell in love with improvisation—minimally held within simple structures.” Her lively approach comes out of a lifetime of teaching theater and movement on tour with Monk, at Naropa University, and in New York. Although the assignments are geared more to actors than dancers, this workbook offers many clues for anyone to begin envisioning and improvising. Some of the exercises are group visualizations; others are very specific. In the series called Tiny Two-Character scenes, one score is simply “2 characters: 1 is the Earth, 1 is the Moon. They are old lovers having an argument.” Other examples are Characters with their Shadows, in which the Shadow reflects the Character’s movements in some way. The Shadow can be inserted into other formats, for instance, Difficult Landscape with Shadows. In the Circle Dance, students pick up gestures and vocalizations during the movement session. As Harrison says of this end-of-class ritual, “Everyone is a Leader and everyone is a Follower.” Also a visual artist, Harrison has adorned these pages with vibrant watercolors and whimsical stick figures. Permeating the book is a level of charm—or maybe a faith—in a sophisticated kind of make believe.

Resistance and Support: Contact Improvisation @50
Edited by Ann Cooper Albright
Oxford University Press

Reviewed by Wendy Perron

With a touch of nostalgia for the 47 years of the engaging journal Contact Quarterly, I welcome this volume, which came out of the 50th-anniversary celebration at Oberlin College in 2022. Edited by Ann Cooper Albright, who organized the anniversary conference and a three-day writing workshop, these 20 essays highlight the evolution of Contact Improvisation from many angles. In the introduction, Cooper Albright writes that she chose the title, a seeming binary of “Resistance and Support,” because of its potential synergy. In the CI world, physical resistance is a way of supporting your partner, and she extends that idea to the intellectual realm: “When I push back on your ideas in a responsive and not a reactive manner, it is a kind of support.”

A glance at the contributors’ list reveals how CI, spearheaded by Steve Paxton (1939–2024) has spread from its beginnings at Oberlin and Bennington Colleges to other countries including Canada, Poland, China, Brazil, Mexico, and Taiwan. As we enter a post–Paxton period of CI, this collection is an expansive guide as well as a provocation.

In the first essay, “Mindfully Rocking and Rolling,” Dena Davida recalls the beginnings of CI cradled in an era of idealistic, bold, feminist rebellion. The entire volume is a testament to that 1970s slogan “The personal is the political.” One cannot write about CI without being personal because it is about one person’s body touching another person’s body. Kristin Horrigan writes on how gender identities complicate the experience of CI, poignantly lacing her essay with her own experience. In “The Small Dance of Listening,” Lesley Greco takes off from Paxton’s idea of the small dance as a score for how gravity affects us. She extends it to communing with other bodies, describing describes various listening practices where “Thinking and sensing are each part of an integrated whole.”

Sarah Young’s essay “Underscoring Nancy Stark Smith’s Legacy: Definitions and Disruptions” honors Nancy Stark Smith (1952–2020) with an explanation—and challenge—to Smith’s invented form, the Underscore. It’s a framework for solo and group improvisation that is performed annually at 70+ sites simultaneously. As one of the facilitators, Young has stretched the score, generating a bunch of questions for herself. Ultimately this is a loving tribute, reflecting the generous openness and questioning that Smith brought to her teaching and her editing of Contact Quarterly.

Paul Singh and Emma Bigé’s dialogue, “Doing It Wrong: Contact’s Counter Countercultures,” referring to that famous 1983 moment when Ishmael Houston-Jones and Fred Holland created Oo-Ga-La to declare their resistance as Black men wearing boots. Coincidentally, Houston-Jones just gave the score for that piece to a younger generation who will perform it in January at New York Live Arts.

To see such a robust treatment of CI at this point is heartwarming. CI has lasted way longer than its antecedents: Judson Dance Theater of the early 1960s and Grand Union of the ’70s. This collection helps expand and diversify a beloved form of American dance.

§§§

Books Announced or Received

Moving through Life: Essential Lessons of Dance
By Naomi Goldberg Haas
With Mikhaela Mahony
University Press of Florida
After a career that included dancing with Pacific Northwest Ballet, Naomi Goldberg Haas started a unique endeavor: Dances for a Variable Population. It’s a group of older dancers and nondancers that performs for senior centers and in parks in the NYC area. Her new memoir traces her dance journey and give uplifting lessons according to Movement Speaks® a curriculum that Goldberg Haas developed for aging people. DVP also has a teacher training program.

Teaching and Learning Dance through Meaningful Gestures
Text by Annabella Lenzu, photography by Todd Carroll
A longtime teacher at NYU Gallatin, Annabella Lenzu gathers nuggets from her 35 years in the field into three sections: Teaching, Learning, and Resources. This promotional video illustrates her lively style and holistic approach. Another achievement of Lenzu is that she organized the Dance Book Fair mentioned above.

Dance and Science in the Long Nineteenth Century: The Articulate Body
Edited by Lynn Matluck Brooks, Sariel Golomb and Garth Grimball
University Press of Florida
These 20 essays consider the ways that science and dance looked at the human body during an era of colonial expansion. With contributions by Jane Desmond, Emily Coates, Claudia Jeschke, Pallabi Chakravorty, Andrea Harris, and others, the scope is global. According to the press release, this collection “sheds light on a historical interplay that has shaped many of today’s political and cultural realities.”

White Screens, Black Dance: Race and Masculinity in the United States at Midcentury
By Pamela Krayenbuhl
Oxford University Press
Pamela Krayenbuhl suggests that Africanist movement vocabularies prevalent in mid-twentieth century film and TV have produced models of masculinity that still hold sway today. These styles are described in these four chapter headings: The Nicholas Brothers: Classy and Dignified; Gene Kelly: Brash and Athletic; Elvis Presley: Virile and Phallic; and Sammy Davis, Jr. Modish and Chameleonic.

Radical Sensing and Performer Training: Elsa Gindler’s Embodied Translations
By Rebecca Loukes
Routledge
An early pioneer of somatic practice, Elsa Gindler (1885–1961) rebelled against the aggressive ways that Gymnastic was taught in Germany. She was a teacher of both Charlotte Selver and Carola Speads, both of whom influenced Elaine Summers. Loukes devotes one chapter to Summers’ development of Kinetic Awareness as well as the Sonic Meditations of Pauline Oliveros, the avant garde musician who studied with Summers. Oliveros’ idea of Deep Listening is related to Summer’s idea of sensory awareness as a way to explore and to heal.

A ghost, an apparition, a figure somewhere between life and death, emerges from an alcove. Holding a candle, she touches the wall, as though to ensure that the physical world is really there. This wraith looks into the eyes of some of us witnesses sitting on the pews in this small, stained-glass windowed chapel.

The image of Eiko in a quarry projected on the walls of the historic chapel at Green-Wood Cemetery. All photos by Maria Baranova

I’m watching Eiko Otake in Stone 1, a collaboration with avant-garde pianist Margaret Leng Tan at the Historic Chapel of Green-Wood Cemetery, June 28.

Because of the dimness, sounds help to define the environment. In another alcove, Tan gently plays the toy piano, blows a red bird whistle, and tips a rain stick to make the sound of wind or water. Sometimes we hear the crunch of pebbles or dirt landing on the floor. The sounds bring us closer to nature, and the music provides a path into Eiko’s memories.

Eiko and Tan

Eiko brings her history with her as she creeps or staggers around the room. We’ve already seen videos projected on the walls of this century-old chapel, sometimes with her tiny image amidst a massive quarry. This piece is all about stones—huge, medium, and small. Her quarry self, filmed last year in Sweden, seems to be in conversation with her three-dimensional self, both wearing beige raincoats.

Friends matter to Eiko. That raincoat belonged to an old friend, Sam Miller, who died in 2018. (See her Letter to Sam, where she talks about remembering the dead and how the coat came to her.) She dunks the coat in a bucket of water, lifts it up, and mightily wrings it out. Is she trying to wring life back into the coat? Stone 1 is dedicated to Alice Hadler, a recently deceased friend and colleague at Wesleyan, where Eiko is a visiting artist.

Tan and Otake

After thrashing around with the coat, Eiko climbs onto a pile of stones and lies down. I remember her saying in an interview, “I practice dying onstage.” Tan approaches and carefully places stones on Eiko’s torso. She then puts her ear to her belly. Perhaps Tan has healed her, because Otake rises, all four limbs floating upward.

Tan and Otake

The piece has a special quality of touch: hands on walls, on stones, stone on skin, hands on doors, stones on body, head to chest, hands holding earth, earth holding bodies.

Eiko slowly opens the double doors to the outside, letting the nighttime in. We feel the enveloping darkness. A firefly darts in the distance. It occurs to me that this is the only place in the city where the doors of a performance space open onto complete darkness and quiet.

Eiko with bucket of water; projection of film above the double doors of the chapel

There is only one Eiko Otake. She is such a vivid presence that you never forget that this suffering, searching figure is Eiko. Yet what she is saying is universal. As she wrote in her book The Body in Fukushima, “We are breakable. All are fragile.” Although Stone 1 reminds us that death comes to all, there’s something spiritual in the idea that we share the earth with natural entities that last much longer than we do.

¶¶¶

Credits:

Music: Erik Griswold, Béla Bartók, and Bunita Marcus

Videos: George Rodriguez & Eiko Otake, Thomas Zamola for the Stone Quarry film shot at the Gylsboda Quarry in Sweden, via Milvus Artistic Research Center

Dramaturgy: Iris McCloughan

In the New York dance world, March came in like a lion and went out like a lion. The density of performances seems to have returned to pre-pandemic levels. Here is a quick round up of some of our local March Madness.

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago exploded onto the Joyce stage with two programs of rich repertory. In the first, Darrell Grand Moultrie’s Dichotomy of a Journey (2022) contained a gorgeous duet in which elbow-contact grew into a romantic adagio. The still in-process Nevermore, by Thang Dao, played with spooky imagery based on Edgar Allen Poe’s poem The Raven. For a rip-roaring finish, Rennie Harris’ new Dear Frankie revved up the dancers to full-blast house dancing in a tribute to Chicago’s influential DJ Frankie Knuckles. Alysia Johnson tore into this material while Cyrie Topeke nailed a jazzy solo and Aaron Choate strutted in fine flamboyant drag style.

Aaron Choate in Rennie Harris’ Dear Frankie, Ph Michelle Reid

At Danspace, Stacy Matthew Spence crafted a spare piece with live music by Charlotte Jacobs and Raf Vertessen. For I am, here; Here with us; Where we find ourselves, he brought a gently erupting, slightly jazz-inflected rhythm to his opening solo. When other dancers entered one at a time (Joanna Kotze, Tim Bendernagel, and Hsiao-jou Tang), it got more complex but avoided the usual liftings and partnerings. The connections were more subtle—just a whiff of a shared phrase or direction here and there.

Stacy Spence with Joanna Kotze, Ph Elyssa Goodman

The celebration of 150 years of the 92nd Street Y (newly branded 92NY), featured three companies—Graham, Limón and Ailey— that found a home at the Y in their early years. Each company paired an old chestnut with a new or in-progress work. The new work for the Limón company was Like Those Playground Kids at Midnight by Omar Román de Jesús, who also performed it with Ian Spring. Borrowing from contact improvisation, this duo created dramatic huggings and hurtlings, taking startling risks. Representing the Graham company’s forward look was an excerpt of We the People by Jamar Roberts, showing the dancers’ unadorned, ready strength—to songs of Rhiannon Giddens.
A highlight of the evening for me was watching the sublime Bahiyah Sayyed as a guest in Manifesting Legacy, which Hope Boykin made for Ailey II. Oh, the wisdom and sensuality of that dancing body!
And for a condensed education on modern dance, the accompanying exhibit, Dance to Belong: A History of Dance at 92NY, is on view in the Y’s Weill Art Gallery through October.

Bahiyah Sayyed, right, with Ailey II in Boykin’s Manifesting Legacy, Ph Richard Termine

Another anniversary—30 years of Buglisi Dance Theatre—brought Jacqulyn Buglisi’s lustrous Frida (1998) to the Chelsea Factory. Three former Graham stars—Terese Capucilli, Christine Daykin, and PeiJu Chien-Pott—reveled in the tortured soul of Frida Kahlo. Also on the program were the lively Caravaggio Meets Hopper (2007) and the earthy premiere, A Walk Through Fire.

Frida with Christine Dakin, PeiJu Chien-Pott, and Terese Capucilli, Ph Kristin Lodoen

Illinoise had fans of singer/songwriter Sufjan Stevens cheering at the Park Avenue Armory. Justin Peck’s direction and choreography gave it kinetic momentum. The young dancers, huddled around a campfire or dancing out their yearnings, had energy to burn. But the show took its time settling on a plot. I hope this problem gets solved by the time the production reaches Broadway on April 24.

Illinoise, Ph Liz Lauren

Shen Wei’s Dongpo: Life in Poems filled the Koch Theater with a visual splendor that was a both ancient and modern. Drawing on his background in Chinese opera and contemporary dance, choreographer/painter/poet Shen Wei created sumptuous, beguiling, dreamlike visions. More about it here.

Shen Wei’s Dongpo: Life of Poems

The musical Water for Elephants, with choreography by Jesse Robb & Shana Carroll, combined circus, aerial dance, and Broadway dance in captivating ways. Imagine the soul of an injured horse expressed in aerial silks! With this team of vivid characters occupying the Imperial Theatre, you could see why someone might want to run away with the circus.

Water for Elephants with Isabelle McCalla and Grant Gustin, Ph Matthew Murphy

Glacial Decoy (1979), the first work Trisha Brown choreographed for the proscenium stage, was quietly radiant at the Joyce. The contrast between Rauschenberg’s workaday photos (a lightbulb, a truck, a cow’s head) and the ethereal nightgowns billowing around the spring-y, lilting movement created a mesmerizing effect. If you missed it, find an excerpt on the Trisha Brown Company’s new Vimeo page. Also on the program were Working Title (1985, a stripped down version of Lateral Pass), and Noé Soulier’s premiere, In the Fall, an absorbing study in off-balance.

Glacial Decoy with Jennifer Payán and Cecily Campbell, Ph Maria Baranova

Existentialism, directed by Anne Bogart in collaboration with the wondrous actors Paul Zimet and Ellen Maddow, came to La MaMa. They showed how the sparest of movements can indicate affection, indifference, everyday drudgery, or a spark of curiosity. And when Zimet and Maddow, who are married in real life, find a moment to dance together, one cannot help but smile.

Ellen Maddow and Paul Zimet in Existentialism

Another show about an elderly couple—and their past— is the musical The Notebook. Noah and Allie’s long romance culminates in the poignant situation of her succumbing to dementia. The movement of Maryann Plunkett, who plays Older Allie, reveals her loss of control as much as the script. The halting, destabilized zig-zagging is painful to watch yet thrilling because Plunkett embodies Allie’s psychological plight so fully.

Marianne Plunket and Dorian Harewood in The Notebook, Ph Julieta Cervantes

For its Spring Dances program, Juilliard challenged its students with works by Kyle Abraham, Bobbie Jene Smith & Or Schreiber, and Shen Wei. Abraham’s Studies on a Farewell interlaced different ways of touching and caring with nicely open ballet lines. In Smith and Schreiber’s Fugue in Crimson, shape-shifting characters goaded each other with stylized aggression by way of brilliant choreographic imagination. Shen Wei’s Map (2005) traced the evolution of movements that paralleled the rhythmic changes of Steve Reich’s Desert Music—played live by the Juilliard orchestra—to a powerful cumulative effect.

Fugue in Crimson, with Polina Mankova & Reginald Turner, Ph Rachel Papo

Shen Wei’s Map, from left: Julie Ciesielska, John Chapell, and Kayla Mak, Ph Rachel Papo

At the Chocolate Factory, Ursula Eagly re-jiggered the space to transform it for Dream Body Body Building. With audience on one side of the wide space and performers on the opposite side. After a period of stillness on both sides, the performers picked up their chairs and infiltrated the audience. They started telling us their dreams—a few inches from our faces. An unexpected intimacy.

Ursula Eagly, with Madeline Best and Takemi Kitamura in her Dream Body Body Building, Ph Brian Rogers

Although the monumental Border Crossings exhibit at the NY Library for the Performing Arts closed in mid-March, the catalog, with many essays (including mine on Syvilla Fort/Merce Cunningham/John Cage at the Cornish School in the 1930s), is now available at here.

An ominous ambience descended on the Baryshnikov Art Center for 4/2/3, choreographed by the amazing duo Baye & Asa. A program note said they “grapple with our collective search for blame.” Inspired by the riddle, “What has 4 legs in the morning, 2 legs in the afternoon, and 3 legs in the evening,” it’s divided into three acts. First, three children (mostly innocent with a few aggressive shoves here and there); second, five adult dancers (mostly sinister, with occasional moments of caring here and there); and third, a solo for an older woman. In this last, Janet Charleston glowed with wisdom and vigor and…a certain aura. She was a sorceress.

Janet Charleston in 4/2/3, Ph Maria Baranova

Ph Monika Rittershaus

A mesmerizing dancer and an intellectual force in the field, Steve Paxton asked the most basic questions—about movement, performance, and hierarchies of all kinds. His curiosity led him to become a leading figure in three historic collaborative entities: Judson Dance Theater, Grand Union, and Contact Improvisation. For almost six decades, Paxton performed and taught around the world, earning the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennial in 2014. Since his death at Mad Brook Farm in Vermont on February 20, at the age of 85, expressions of intense gratitude have appeared across social media.

Paxton grew up in Tucson, Arizona, where he excelled in gymnastics. He also took Graham-based dance classes in community centers. To hear it from his childhood friend, the critic and educator Sally Sommer, “We partied all the time because we hung out at a friend’s ranch house, played records, and danced. We also danced at night on the tarmac of empty roads—turned on the headlights and cranked up the radio.” In school his two favorite subjects were English (hence, the eloquence of his writings) and microbiology (the curiosity of body mechanics). He attended the nearby University of Arizona, where his father was a campus policeman. He didn’t like the teachers, so he withdrew from college life.

He did like dancing. He accepted a scholarship to the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College the summer of 1958. Although the José Limón Company had provided the financial aid, it was his encounter with Merce Cunningham’s work that intrigued him. He recalled how the Cunningham company, during its first residency at this stronghold of established modern dance, caused “consternation” with his chance procedures.

Aeon, by Merce Cunningham,1961, From left: Steve Paxton, Carolyn Brown, Judith Dunn, Marilyn Wood, Viola Farber, and Shareen Blair (on floor). Studio photo Rauschenberg.

That fall, Paxton came to New York, where he continued studying with Limón. He soon added Cunningham classes, where, as a scholarship student, he helped clean the studio. Limón’s company was in residence at Juilliard, and when the school needed more men for the restaging of Doris Humphrey’s Passacaglia, Paxton was asked to step in. (Aside: Pina Bausch, who was a student at Juilliard that year, danced the lead female role.) He later said, “I regarded myself as a barbarian entering the hallowed halls of culture when I came to New York.”

When Robert Dunn offered a workshop in dance composition at the Cunningham studio in 1960, Paxton, along with Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti, was one of the first five to sign up. A protégé of John Cage, Dunn taught in a Zen manner, providing the space for experimentation without judgment. As Paxton has said, “The premise of the Bob Dunn class was to provoke untried forms, or forms that were new to us.”

Flat (1964) reprised in 1982 for Bennington College Judson Project, ph Tom Brazil

Stylistically, Dunn stressed the value of the ordinary rather than laboring to make a dance study “interesting.” From that evolved many of Paxton’s walking dances. Why walking? Of course it fits Dunn’s request for the “ordinary.” But also, as Paxton explained in this interview, at Walker Art Center, “How we walk is one of our primary movement patterns and a lot of dance relates to this pattern.”

Fellow student Simone Forti, who had studied with Anna Halprin, produced a historic evening of “dance constructions” at Yoko Ono’s loft on Chambers Street in 1961. Paxton performed in her works Huddle, Slant Board, and Herding. Forti had no interest in technique, preferring to meld the movement function to objects. As Paxton told me in a 2015 email, he found the effort to divest from his technical training “self-shaking, paradoxical, and enlarging.”

Also in 1961, Paxton joined the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Though bewildered at first, he loved the company and responded to the beauty and humor in the work. He felt drawn toward the Buddhist bent of John Cage and “felt at home” when listening to Cunningham, Cage, and visual collaborators Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

When the students in Dunn’s class wanted to show their work, they auditioned for the 92nd Street YMHA, the bastion of modern dance. Paxton, along with Rainer and Gordon, were rejected. (Aside: Lucinda Childs, however, was accepted and did perform at the Y in 1963.) So they went to Judson Memorial Church, which already housed the Judson Poets Theater and Art Gallery. Dunn’s students—who by then included Trisha Brown, Rudy Perez, Deborah Hay, Elaine Summers, and many more— collectively produced a series of sixteen numbered concerts, not all of them at the Church, from 1962 to 1964.

Trisha Brown’s Lightfall at Judson Church, Ph Al Giese

One of the early works at Judson was Trisha Brown’s Lightfall, in which Trisha and Steve perched on each others’ back until the standing person moved and the perching person slithered off. Robert Rauschenberg, who had started coming to Dunn’s classes, said, ”In Lightfall the two were just bouncing all over and under each other. The choreography seemed to be based on how much risk they could take.”

For an assignment to make a one-minute dance, Steve sat on a bench and ate a sandwich.

Paxton’s burning question at the time was Why not? About Judson Dance Theater, he said, “The work that I did there was first of all to flush out my ‘why-nots’…‘Why not?’ was a catchword at that time. It was a very permissive time.”

Yvonne Rainer wrote about his work at Judson in her memoir, Feelings Are Facts:

Steve’s was the most severe and rigorous of all the work that appeared in and around Judson during the 1960s…Eschewing music, spectacle, and his own innate kinetic gifts and acquired virtuosity, he embraced extended duration and so-called pedestrian movement while maintaining a seemingly obdurate disregard for audience expectation.”

One of the landmark pieces that came out of that aesthetic, which celebrated the untrained human body, was Paxton’s Satisfyin Lover (1968). In it, a large group of dancers simply walked, stood still, or sat on a chair. Jill Johnston wrote this now famous passage in the Village Voice:

And here they all were . . . thirty-two any old wonderful people in Satisfying Lover walking one after the other across the gymnasium in their any old clothes. The fat, the skinny, the medium, the slouched and slumped, the straight and tall, the bowlegged and knock-kneed, the awkward, the elegant, the coarse, the delicate, the pregnant, the virginal, the you name it, by implication every postural possibility in the postural spectrum, that’s you and me in all our ordinary everyday who cares postural splendor. . . .  Let us now praise famous ordinary people.

Paxton & Rauschenberg in their in Jag Vil Gärna Telefonera (1964)

Robert Rauschenberg, Cunningham’s lighting designer and frequent visual collaborator, visited Dunn’s class and started making his own performances. Paxton was often involved in Rauschenberg’s pieces, and the two were a pair at the time. In the fall of 1964, they collaborated on one duet, Jag vill gärna telefonera  (I Would Like to Make a Phone Call). This duet, based on photos of athletes, was reprised by the Bennington College Judson Project in 1982, and by the Stephen Petronio Company in 2018.

Judson Dance Theater marks a historical moment when (portions of) modern dance morphed into postmodern. At the time, Paxton thought of Judson as a place where you could just do stuff and not worry about big entertainment in big theaters. Rather than thinking they were doing something revolutionary, as Rainer felt, Paxton located himself in the lineage of modern dance tradition. In a recent Pillow Voices podcast about Grand Union, he says that modern dance—Graham, Limon, Cunningham, Humphrey, Dunham—gave permission to create new forms “from the ground up.”

Linoleum, a performance piece by Rauschenberg, with Paxton prone, 1966, ph Steve Schapiro

For an engagement at the L. A. County Museum in 1966, Trisha Brown convinced Paxton to improvise with her. He was amazed that her loose structure elicited an immediate response from the audience; he realized the “personal element reaching through the form” was the key to the audience response—and he got hooked on improvisation.

How can objects be transformative? In his surreal solo Bound (1982), Paxton wore a strange object around his neck that turned out to be a travel pillow. In some kind of endurance test, he walked slowly into a bright light, his eyes watering. For years he was fascinated by inflatable plastic sheets. In Music for Word Words (1963) at Judson Church, with the help of Rainer operating an industrial vacuum cleaner, he inflated a room-sized plastic bubble around himself, then deflated it and walked away. After several other experiments, his obsession reached its endpoint with Physical Things, the piece he made for “9 Evenings of Theatre and Engineering.” For that 1966 series in the massive 69th Regiment Armory, he created a huge inflatable tower that audience people walked through, realizing only later how toxic the plastic was.

Paxton in his Music for Word Word, 1963, Judson Church, ph Robert McElroy

Paxton’s Physical Things, 9 Evenings of Theatre & Engineering, 69th Regiment Armory, 1966, ph Peter Moore

Another question was about censorship: What, really, is obscenity? For a performance at NYU in 1970, he proposed a version of Satisfyin Lover in which 42 red-headed people would be nude. The university administration nixed it on the grounds of obscenity, so he replaced it with Intravenous Lecture, in which a medical assistant injects him while he keeps talking. This piece was reprised by Stephen Petronio in 2012 with instructions from Paxton to “make it his own.”

Stephen Petronio in Paxton’s Intravenous Lecture 1970), 2012, ph Julie Lemberger

In 1971, Paxton worked with Vietnam Veterans Against the War, who had made a documentary with testimonies of the atrocities that American soldiers committed against Vietnamese civilians. In Collaboration with Winter Soldier, he had two performers watching this anti-war documentary while hanging upside down.

In 1972, he proposed Beautiful Lecture, which juxtaposed a porn film with a film of the Bolshoi’s Swan Lake (the famous Ulanova version), to the New School for Social Research. Pressured by the authorities to omit the porn film, he replaced it with a documentary about people starving in Biafra.

Paxton’s dancing—with his loose limbs, swerving spine, and charismatic aura—was magnificent to behold. In Terpsichore in Sneakers, Banes described him as projecting “a continuing sense of the body’s potential to invent and discover, to recover equilibrium after losing control, to regain vigor despite pain and disorder.”

Steve Paxton while in with Grand Union, Walker Art Center Auditorium, 1975, ph Boyd Hagen

At the end of the Sixties, Paxton was working with Rainer on her piece Continuous Project—Altered Daily, which changed with every performance. Rainer had given the dancers—Paxton, David Gordon, Douglas Dunn, Barbara Dilley and Becky Arnold—so much freedom that the choreography eventually blew open, obliterating previous plans. After a period of uncertainty, the group then morphed into the Grand Union, an improvisation collective with no leader. It was then augmented by Trisha Brown, Nancy Lewis and Lincoln Scott. Some of Paxton’s questions at that time were “how to make artistic decisions, how not to depend on anyone unless it is mutually agreed; what mutuality agreed means, and how to detect it.”

Paxton witj, from left: David Gordon, Yvonne Rainer, Becky Arnold, Carol Dilley, ph James Klosty

In the June 2004 issue of Dance Magazine, Paxton said, “Grand Union was a luxurious improvisational laboratory. All of us were very formally oriented, even though we were doing formless work.”  He called the group anarchistic, which meant to him that they could do its work without a leader. He had witnessed a “dictatorial” situation and a fixed hierarchy in dance companies. For him, Grand Union “bypasses the grand game of choreography and company [where] ego-play is the issue.”

Grand Union residency at Walker Art Center, 1975. Steve jumping over David Gordon. At left: Douglas Dunn, Trisha Brown (almost hidden), Nancy Lewis and Barbara Dilley (head hidden), Tnx WAC Archives

Grand Union at Walker Art Center, 1975. From left: Barbara Dilley, David Gordon, Nancy Lewis, Douglas Dunn, Steve Paxton. Tnx to WAC Archives

When Grand Union was engaged for a residency at Oberlin College in 1972, Steve taught a daily class at dawn that included “the small dance.” Nancy Stark Smith, a student, took the class and loved it: “It was basically standing still and releasing tension and turning your attention to notice the small reflexive activity that the body makes to keep itself balanced and not fall over. So you’re standing and relaxing and noticing what your body’s doing. You’re not doing it but you’re noticing what it’s doing.” This concept of noticing interior movement became foundational for Contact Improvisation.

Barbara Dilley & Steve, Grand Union, Lo Guidice Gallery, 1972, ph Gordon Mumma

Trisha Brown supporting Steve, Grand Union, 1972, ph Gordon Mumma

He also taught an afternoon class in tumbling just for men. The question was: How can tumbling be taught in a non-aggressive way, with soft landings? The class produced a group piece called Magnesium that was, as Paxton said, a “prototype for Contact Improvisation.” After the performance, as he recounted, “Nancy told me that if it was ever performed again, she would like to be in it. I was startled. It had not occurred to me that such a rough-and-tumble dance would be of interest to a woman.”

Although Paxton is called the “inventor” of CI, he has pointed to the mutuality of the form. It’s “governed by the participants rather than by a leader, similar to the structure of Grand Union.”

Paxton & Nancy Stark Smith in a CI performance, ph Stephen Petegorsky. Behind them are Lisa Nelson, Daniel Lepkoff, and Christie Svane. Thorne’s Market, MA, 1980.

Contact Improvisation caught on for thousands of people who wanted to move—and move with other people—but who did not want to train to be concert dancers. Paxton and Smith co-founded Contact Quarterly, which presented an alternate vision of dance with its own strong aesthetic.

Lisa Nelson and Steve Paxton in their collaboration, PA RT, 1978, Ph Tom Brazil

He participated in Contact Improvisation, often with Nancy Stark Smith, for ten years. Then he started developing his solo works, including his improvisations to Bach’s Goldberg Variations from 1986 to early 90s. He then developed “Material for the spine,” which he described as “what the spine is doing in that tumbling sphere with another person—a kind of yogic form, a technique that focuses on the pelvis, the spine, the shoulder blades, the rotation of the head.” He has collaborated with Lisa Nelson, fellow improviser extraordinaire and his life partner, on two entrancingly improvised duets: PA RT (1978), and Night Stand (2004). Paxton has given workshops all over the U.S. and Europe, returning to some venues again and again, especially England, Netherlands, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Portugal.

Night Stand, ph Paula Court

When Paxton was honored by the Danspace Project in 2014, his Judson co-conspirator, Yvonne Rainer, gave a tribute. Here is an excerpt:

I won’t go into all the beautifully perverse and clarifying dances that Steve has created… over the years, like his performance of Flat from 1964, which I’ve heard drove members of a 2002 Parisian audience out of the theater as Steve took his own sweet time transforming himself into a clothes rack…and Proxy of 1961, which began with his promenading of Jennifer Tipton en passé on ball bearings in a washtub; and Steve’s glorious improvisations to Glenn Gould. Always we are riveted by his imposing presence and a solemnity that can morph unexpectedly into a wry comedic effect.

Paxton & Brown, Bennington College Judson Project, 1980, ph Tyler Resch

Trisha and Steve, ph Joanne Savio, Courtesy TBDC

In 1992, his burning question was What does an idea feel like? He brought this question to a panel at Movement Research at Judson Church. His Judson-era peers —Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, and Carolee Schneemann— seemed stumped by this question. No one answered him straight on, so he asked again: “Does an idea have a feeling for you? If you use a stove as a score, where’s the idea?”

The Beast ph Julieta Cervantes

His solo The Beast (2010), in which he seemed possessed, elicited intense reactions. When he performed it at Baryshnikov Art Center, dancer/writer Lisa Kraus wrote that he “presents his own body as a locus for inquiry… His investigation has become increasingly detailed, exquisite…he is pure facet, pure torque, pure stacked bones and stretched sinew.” Amy Taubin described it in ArtForum: “If a crustacean could trace its consciousness in its carapace, it might move as Paxton did in this darkly beautiful piece, an intimate examination of the living skeleton and an evocation of what remains in the grave.” One reviewer, however, claimed that the dance was “about” old age. In this interview at Dia:Beacon, Paxton rails against the word “about,” saying “it should be stricken from the vocabulary.”

While Paxton wasn’t a warm and cuddly teacher, he was thrillingly articulate. He never faked enthusiasm. He was trusted completely by his  colleagues from the Sixties—Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, and Cunningham dancer Carolyn Brown—in a way that I would call pure love.

Well after he had drifted away from CI, he extolled the efforts of Karen Nelson and others who brought CI to people with impairments. With democracy always in mind, he said, “that’s probably my favorite innovation in Contact Improvisation.”

Tea for Three at Danspace, 2017, From left: Rainer, Forti, Paxton, ph Ian Douglas

Reflecting on his role in the flow of dance history, Paxton said, while interviewed by Philip Bither at Walker Art Center, that he was both a “mutant” and an “evolver” (his terms), meaning he was both a maverick for change and a stabilizing force.

Paxton always opted for the organic, close-to-nature option. Toward the end of his life, he spent much time in his garden in Vermont. In a talk at the Judson Dance Theater exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in 2018, when asked about his life at that time, he said, “Every atom in the landscape in front of me that I look at every day is changing…I feel like it’s a living soup and I’m…kind of dissolving into its space.” He has now completed his dissolution.

Sources

Books and journals:

• Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance
By Sally Banes
Wesleyan University Press, 1977, 1987

• The Grand Union: Accidental Anarchists of Downtown Dance, 1970–1976
By Wendy Perron
Wesleyan University Press, 2020

• Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture
By Cynthia Novack
University of Wisconsin Press, 1990

• Taken by Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader
Editors: Ann Cooper Albright & David Gere
Contact Editions

• Caught Falling: The Confluence of Contact Improvisation, Nancy Stark Smith, and Other Moving Ideas
by David Koteen and Nancy Stark Smith
with a Backwords by Steve Paxton
Contact Editions, CE Books in Print

“Trance Script,” Contact Quarterly, Winter 1989 Vol. 14 No. 1, Judson Project Interview with Steve Paxton, Sept. 12, 1980.

• Avalanche, 11, 1975

• Democracy’s Body 
by Sally Banes
Duke University Press, 1993

• Trisha Brown: Dance and Art in Dialogue, exh. catalog, 2002

Online resources

Contact Quarterly — for many videos and articles

Steve Paxton Talking Dance, Walker Art Center, 2014.  Paxton gives a full account of his professional life with video clips spliced in, and allows questions to lead him into deep discussion.

Steve Paxton and the Walker: A 50-Year History

Steve Paxton and Simone Forti in Conversation, REDCAT, 2016, A charming performance/encounter between two old friends who are also dance icons.

Paxton Interview with Dia:Beacon, 2014

“How Grand Union Found a Home Outside SoHo at the Walker”