One of the fascinating dancer/choreographers of mid-20th-century American modern dance, Paul Sanasardo died on July 23 at the age of 97. He made works in the intense expressionist mode of Anna Sokolow, co-created an experimental space called the Studio for Dance, and taught rigorous technique classes for decades. He made more than eighty ballets, many of them full-evening works.

Born in Chicago, Sanasardo studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago. He took ballet lessons with Bentley Stone and occasionally with modern dance improvisor Sybil Shearer. He served in the army from 1952 to 1954, but his longtime friend Douglas Nielsen, says, “Paul conscientiously objected to using a gun, so he was assigned to be a cook.” On his time off, he studied in Washington, DC, with Erika Thimey, a proponent of the Mary Wigman/Hanya Holm style, and danced with the Washington Dance Theatre. In 1954 he moved to New York, where he studied on scholarship at the Martha Graham School and also with Antony Tudor, Margaret Craske, Mia Slavenska, and Karel Shook. He danced with Anna Sokolow, who cast him in the original “Panic” solo in her masterwork Rooms (1955). For years, he was a guest artist with Pearl Lang, partnering her often, and also appeared on live television and Broadway.

The Path (1972), Sanasardo with Michele Rebeaud, ph © Max Waldman

In 1958 he teamed up with Donya Feuer, a Juilliard grad who had danced with Graham, to establish the Studio for Dance (later Modern Dance Artists), a hub of experimental work that tended toward dance theater. (See Mark Franko’s excellent book Excursion for Miracles: Paul Sanasardo, Donya Feuer, and Studio for Dance, 1955–1964.) At Tudor’s urging, Sanasardo invited Pina Bausch, who was in New York on a grant to attend Juilliard, to work with them. She collaborated with them in Phases of Madness (1960), about which Paul joked, “We just beat each other up onstage.”[1] She performed with them at the 92nd Street Y while still a student. (For my essay about Bausch’s time in NYC, I interviewed Sanasardo about his influence on her.)

One of the extraordinary aspects about the Studio for Dance is that it nurtured a children’s company. It wasn’t just annual recitals, but these kids were serious players in the works. Eleven of them performed in In View of God (1959). Pina’s observation: “There was nothing childish. They were like adults, only very young ones: Young human beings. There was nothing cute. It was very simple.”[2]

Metallics (1964) with Holly Cavrell, Courtesy Cavrell

After Feuer decamped for Sweden in 1963, Sanasardo started the Sanasardo Dance Company, which quickly attracted both audiences and critics. As a performer, he had a double-edged intensity. As Doris Hering noted, “He could be simultaneously evil and heroic.”[3] According to Nielsen, he created his best work in the 1960s including Metallics, Shadows, The Path, and Pain. Anna Kisselgoff described Metallics, which entered the reps of both Ailey and Nederlands Dans Theater, as “an enigmatic psychological study in solitude.” Deborah Jowitt wrote in the Village Voice, “Sanasardo is concerned with human feeling, with powerful emotion. His dancers are all steel-and-fire supermen—beautiful and almost terrifying in their strength.”[4]

Pain (1969), with Sanasardo, center, ph © Max Waldman, 1970

Poster forfrom Bausch Fndn

Sanasardo was a revered teacher, fielding requests from all over the country, including for the Ailey company. From 1969 to 1974, he founded and led the School for Modern Dance at Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga Springs, NY, with his protégé Manuel Alum as assistant director. During the summer of 1972, Pina Bausch joined his  residency, and that summer the showcase included works by guest artists Alum and Bausch. Pina showed Nachnull (After Zero) and PHILIPS 836 887 DSY, and Manuel showed Sextetrahedron. French dancers Dominique Mercy and Malou Ariado, whom Alum had met in France, were part of the company that summer. When Paul could no longer procure visas for them, they both became founding members of Pina Bausch’s company in Wuppertal the following year.

Pina Bausch in her solo PHILIPS 836 887 DSY, included in the Sanasardo Showcase, 1972, Bausch Fndn

In 1971, Doris Hering, reviewing a concert that Sanasardo shared with Alum, wrote, “What I like most in the choreography of both Sanasardo and Alum is the deep sense of responsibility. It extends them beyond themselves. More than that, it affects their beautifully trained and obviously committed company. It also frees their choreography.”[5] However the constant pitch of angst was sometimes hard to sit through, causing Anna Kisselgoff to remark, “No one leaves a Sanasardo concert laughing.”[6]

Cut Flowers (1966) with Mark Franko at right, ph Oleaga, Courtesy Franko

A Consort for Dancers (1975), with Diane Germaine as Anne Sexton, ph Lois Greenfield, Courtesy Germaine

But Sanasardo was finding his way. “You learn by doing,” he said in an interview. “Your dancers have a tremendous influence on you.” [7] As if to prove that, Sanasardo generously gave opportunities to his main dancers to show their own choreography. They included Willa Kahn, Diane Germaine, Gerri Houlihan, Joan Lombardi, and Manuel Alum. It was risky for Sanasardo. On at least one occasion, Alum, who was an extraordinary dance artist, was reviewed more favorably than Sanasardo. (My historical essay on Alum as one of my Unsung Heroes of Dance History is here.) In 1971, Clive Barnes wrote in the New York Times, that Sanasardo’s

works have a high degree of polish and finesse. What they do not have is that quality of raw creativity that ironically enough is quite often shown by Mr. Sanasardo’s best‐known student and leading dancer, Manuel Alum. Mr. Alum is a disciple of all of Mr. Sanasardo’s virtues and adds a certain abrasive quality of his own.[8]

Sanasardo put his company on hold in 1978 when he went to Tel Aviv to direct the Batsheva Dance Company on a three-year contract. When he returned three years later, he resumed making dances, and Kisselgoff wrote that “Mr. Sanasardo is still at his best when he is exorcising his demons.”[9] But, as Nielsen says, “His heart wasn’t in it.” He disbanded his company in 1986. He and his life partner, William Weaver, moved to a small farmhouse in Cooperstown, NY, where he could paint in a silo. After Weaver died, in 2003 he returned to Chicago, where he was active, teaching steadily (free of charge) and choreographing with Larry Long at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts. He made a new ballet for Joel Hall Dancers to recordings by Nina Simone (an idea that he had hatched earlier with Alvin Ailey). And he continued painting.

In 2011, he was honored by the American Dance Guild with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

§§§

Memory Suite (1975) with Nielsen and Janet Panetta, Courtesy Nielsen

Sources: Douglas Nielsen, David von Ehrlicher, Chicago Dance History Project 2016 interview, my essays on Pina Bausch and Manuel Alum, the International Dictionary of Modern Dance, and Mark Franko’s book, Excursion for Miracles.

Memories from his dancers…

Paul always told the story that when Antony Tudor first saw Paul dance a solo, he said, “You couldn’t teach that to anyone” In four words: Feelings. Action. Drama. Humanity. No steps. Who but Paul Sanasardo would dare choreograph an entire evening to the spoken word from The Death Notebooks by poet Anne Sexton? (A Consort for Dancers, City Center Downstairs, NY, 1975.) We were actors who danced. After that Paul choreographed a duet, Abandoned Prayer, based on Christ and Judas. Paul was Judas. In rehearsal he kissed me on the cheek, but onstage he kissed me on the mouth. When Paul became the director of Batsheva Dance Company, I went with him and stayed three years. When we got back to NYC, Paul and I collaborated on a duet, Five Cases, which again felt more like a play without words.
—Douglas Nielsen is a performer, choreographer, teacher, art collector and former professor in the University of Arizona School of Dance. After performing and teaching in many countries, he founded his own group in 1981.

Both photos: Abandoned Prayer, with Nielsen and Sanasardo, Courtesy Nielsen

Paul was complex—a storyteller who could not be reined in, an old school taskmaster, passionate and overwhelming, not at all politically correct. Deep and dark and emotionally direct, Paul was also so very sentimental and generous in every way with a beautiful smile full of warmth and vitality. Through my magical introduction to dance as a member of his children’s company, my memories revolve around the tender treatment of his “children” in the dances that he and Donya Feuer created in that unique time and place in the late 1950’s/early 60’s at Studio for Dance. In the numerous times we connected throughout Paul’s long life, I was forever 12-year-old Judy Canner, one of his “children.” I am so grateful for Paul’s love and artistry, his forceful nature and his giving heart.
—Judith Canner Moss, Dancer/Choreographer/Teacher, on the faculty of Queensborough Community College
—I am also including this link to the short film/interview with Paul made by Sally Bowden and me in 2007, videotaped by Michael Moss with post-production/editing by Andrew Gurian.

Children rehearsing: Ruth Frank, Ellen Shookhoff
Judith Blackstone, Kathy Bushnell, Willa Kahn, Judith Canner Moss, Courtesy Moss

The Children’s Group in Sanasardo’s Pictures in Our House (1964): L to R: Judith Blackstone, Willa Kahn, Judith Canner Moss, Sally Bowden, Courtesy Moss

Paul’s advanced classes were unusually diverse even for the 1960s. Company members included at different times across the decade Loretta Abbott, Gus Solomons, jr., Martin Bland, Strody Meekins (who also danced with Eleo Pomare), Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, Diana Ramos, Michelle Llauger and Milagro Llauger, and, of course, Manuel Alum. In class one could see Juan Antonio, Ulysses Dove, Roberta Pikser, Clyde Morgan, Dyanne Harvey-Salaam, John Parks, Zita Allen, Uttara Coorlawala, and Virginia Johnson. Paul’s classes were a who’s who of New York dance—ballet and modern. Doing combinations across the floor toward the end of class invariably accelerated into a performance that all could see as well as be part of. With so much talent in the room and Paul’s demanding and inspiring way of teaching, nothing could be done by rote.
—Mark Franko, Dancer/choreographer/scholar, Emeritus UC Santa Cruz and Temple University, author of Excursion for Miracles.

Diane Germaine in Shadows (1973), ph David Fullard, Courtesy Germaine

Paul Sanasardo was a humane mentor, friend, and very physical creator; his technique was nuanced, energetic, thorough and often collaborative.  Paul was a strong, verbal, and poetic man full of communicated imagery and philosophy to invest a role we might be working on, or further our mastery of technique, or understand our life. Paul could be kind, he could be difficult,  but working with him for thirteen years as his principal dancer became the important and continuing base for me to be able to continue later as my own artist in the field as choreographer and writer.
—Diane Germaine, Dancer/choreographer/writer.

I started dancing with Donya (Feuer) and Paul in their children’s company when I was 10. Although we were kids, there was nothing childish about the pieces they choreographed and we performed. A lot was expected of us and as a result, we gave a lot. Working with them then was wonderful. It shaped my childhood until I started dancing in the adult company when I was in my teens. Almost 70 years later I still have close ties to several of those “kids.”
—Willa Kahn
—After I left performing, I taught for several years and ultimately went back to school to become a doctor. I jokingly say I was looking for another profession with a ‘d’ but really I wanted to give back. For 30 years, I served an indigent population as a family doctor, retiring 7 years ago. While it was fulfilling work, it never had the transcendency of dance. I feel so lucky to have been able to do them both.

Fatal Birds (1965) composite, L to R: Sanasardo, Judith Blackstone, Willa Kahn, Germaine doubled, Willa Kahn, Courtesy Germaine

In February 1971, I was a beginner dancer arriving from France, striving to study modern dance, which I had discovered just a few months ahead. Having heard of Paul’s classes on 21st Street, I dropped by his studio. I took his class every day. His approach of technique was unique and extremely efficient, mixing Graham and ballet exercises in a perfect balance. It was gradual and altogether very dynamic. He made me progress so rapidly that he took me into his company after just a year and a half of training with him!
—Dominique Petit, who danced in Sanasardo’s company 1972-74, later danced with Carolyn Carlson and had his own company. He has recently worked with Akram Khan in Outwitting the Devil

The Path (1972) with Nielsen and Germaine, ph © Lois Greenfield

Paul was inspirational, intelligent, intense, playful, expressive, theatrical and charismatic. Class was Paul’s vehicle for conveying his philosophy and thoughts. The essence of dance for Paul was to express ideas and emotions arising from life’s vital struggles. In his class, technique was strongly applied at the barre. For musical accompaniment Paul turned to Gene Lester on the piano, but Paul often added drums, cymbals, his voice, chants, all of which built intensity. His training helped mold me into the dancer/person I became. His imaginative spirit gave me the understanding, knowledge, and motivation to seek the expressivity of ideas and the potential for building a creative career as a choreographer, teacher, architectural designer, and painter.
—Joan Lombardi, member of Sanasardo Dance Company 1962–1984
Santa Fe, NM

Triad (1977); L to R: Sanasardo as Julius Caesar, Naomi Sorkin as Cleopatra, Nielsen as Mark Anthony, ph @Lois Greenfield

Footnotes

[1] From Chicago Dance History interview

[2] Quoted in Excursion for Miracles, 65.

[3] Doris Hering, “A Darkening Pond: Paul Sanasardo Reviewed,” Dance Magazine, August 1971, 73-74.

[4] This quote came via Doug Nielsen.

[5] Doris Hering, “A Darkening Pond: Paul Sanasardo Reviewed,” Dance Magazine, August 1971, 73.

[6] Kisselgoff, “Dance: Sanasardo Group,” New York Times, April 28, 1973.

[7] Chicago Dance History Project interview, 2016. Accessed August 7, 2026.

[8] Barnes, “Dance: Three Works by Sanasardo,” New York Times, May 22, 1971.

[9] Kisselgoff, “Dance: Sanasardo,” New York Times, May 20, 1982.

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”

I wrote this obit for The Guardian, U.S. edition of September 21, 2018.

Arthur Mitchell, ph Martha Swope © Billy Rose Collection, Library for the Performing Arts

A star of New York City Ballet and the co-founder of Dance Theatre of Harlem, Arthur Mitchell was also the first African American principal dancer in any major ballet company. Mitchell, who has died, aged 84, had classical lines, buoyant energy, and a palpable joy in movement.

In NYCB, where he danced from 1955 to 1968, he gained renown for two roles he created: the startlingly modernist Agon pas de deux, choreographed for him and Diana Adams by George Balanchine, and the mischievously bounding Puck in Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. According to his fellow NYCB dancer Jacques d’Amboise, “every time we toured Europe, he was a sensation … There would be hundreds of fans at the stage door.”

Mitchell and Balanchine in rehersal, ph Martha Swope

After Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, Mitchell had his own dream, which was to form a top-notch ballet company that would shatter the myth that black bodies were not “right” for ballet. In a garage lent by the Harlem School of the Arts and with the support of his mentor Karel Shook (artistic director of Dutch National Ballet), he started a school. They left the doors open to attract young people from the street. To entice the boys there, Mitchell compared ballet to basketball, hired drummers instead of pianists to accompany the class, and allowed them to wear jeans. Within four months, Dance Theatre of Harlem school had 800 students, and the professional company debuted in 1971 at the Guggenheim Museum. It thrived for more than three decades, becoming one of the most sought-after dance companies in the world.

With students i front of mural of MLK, ph Sharon Perry

Mitchell was born in Harlem. His father, Arthur Mitchell Sr., was a janitor, and his mother, Willie Mae (nee Hearns), raised their five children. From the age of 12, Arthur helped support his family by shining shoes and delivering newspapers. He started singing at the local Police Athletic League, a youth programme run by US police departments, and tap dancing in neighbourhood studios. A guidance counsellor spotted him dancing at a junior high school party and suggested he audition for the High School of Performing Arts (now the Fiorello LaGuardia High School).

After graduating from LaGuardia in 1952, he won a scholarship to the School of American Ballet, the training ground for Balanchine’s New York City Ballet. He danced with John Butler Dance Theater and with the modern choreographers Sophie Maslow, Anna Sokolow and Donald McKayle before joining NYCB. While still in the corps, he stepped in for d’Amboise in Balanchine’s Western Symphony. As Puck, he brightened the entire stage with his devious bounding. For Agon, he had no problem with Stravinsky’s atonal music. “Because I can tap dance, I can always find the pulse,” he said.

Diana Adams and Mitchell rehearsing Agon, , with Balanchine and Stravinsky looking on, ph Swope @Billy Rose Collection

Mitchell praised Balanchine for having an African American man dance with white ballerinas in the time of civil rights. He was very aware of the potential controversy of the central pas de deux in Agon. The man manipulates the woman in ways that bring their bodies into unusual points of contact. “He used our skin tones as part of the choreography,” Mitchell said. “Like where I have my arm, or how I would take her foot.” However angular the choreography, Mitchell, who was promoted to soloist in 1958 and principal in 1962, always presented his ballerina graciously.

Allegra Kent and Mitchell in Balanchine’s Agon. PC Fritz Peyer

The ballerina Allegra Kent, who partnered Mitchell in Agon during an NYCB tour of the Soviet Union in 1962, recalled how “the audience went wild” during their performance. She said: “Arthur was a superb partner. His musicality and stagecraft enhanced the choreography and made his partner look great.”

As co-founder and artistic director of DTH, Mitchell did not perform on stage, but his infectious energy made his mission come alive for those around him. One of his innovations was to replace pink tights and pointe shoes with those dyed to match each dancer’s skin colour, aligning the aesthetic with the Black Is Beautiful movement.

Balanchine supported the enterprise by giving his ballets gratis, including Agon, Concerto Barocco, Prodigal Son and Bugaku. However it was Geoffrey Holder’s Dougla (1974) that brought the house down. With its festive costumes, extreme technique and Trinidadian blend of African and Hindu traditions, Dougla concluded each programme with a gloriously giddy celebration. When the company debuted at Sadler’s Wells, London, in 1974, Mary Clarke wrote in the Guardian: “The company is irresistible. Young, fresh, still excited about the pleasures of the physical movement, they move with ease from the most demanding choreography of George Balanchine to the classical capers of Le Corsaire.”

Dougla by Geoffrey Holder, with Da’von Doane aloft, Ph Rachel Neville

In addition to Holder, Mitchell commissioned ballets by John Butler, John Taras and Talley Beatty, and choreographed a few of his own. He also mounted an evening of works by Bronislava Nijinska.

Sir Frederic Franklin, of Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo fame, staged Swan Lake and Valerie Bettis’s A Streetcar Named Desire for DTH. But it was his Creole Giselle that established the group’s ability to weave magic into a full-length romantic ballet. Mitchell set the ballet in the Louisiana bayou, and Franklin, who later became artistic adviser of DTH, staged it with traditional steps, but changed the harvest from grapes to sugar cane. When it premiered at the London Coliseum in 1984, Creole Giselle received the Olivier award for the most outstanding dance production of the year. It was broadcast on US public television in 1987.

Giselle with Virginia Johnson and Eddie Shellman, 1984, ph Leslie Spatt

In 1992 DTH was invited to perform in South Africa. Mitchell was reluctant, but Nelson Mandela called him and persuaded him that the young people needed inspiration. The company made the trip and performed for newly integrated audiences. Mitchell’s experiences teaching children in the townships inspired him to start the Dancing Through Barriers outreach programme at DTH.

Plagued by financial difficulties in 2004, DTH took a break. Mitchell named Virginia Johnson artistic director in 2009 but the company did not resume full operation until 2012. It celebrates its 50th anniversary this season.

Mitchell’s awards include a National Medal of Arts, a Kennedy Center Honor, and a MacArthur “genius award”. Earlier this year, Arthur Mitchell: Harlem’s Ballet Trailblazer, a show celebrating his life and work, was held at the Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University. (See my “What Wendy’s Watching” video preview of that exhibit here.)

He is survived by a niece.