Steve Paxton is a dancer and choreographer known as one of the founders of contact improvisation (a dance form in which two or more people move while remaining in constant and spontaneous contact). He has researched the fiction of cultured dance and the 'truth' of improvisation for 40 years.
Steve was a member of the José Limón' company in 1960 and danced for Merce Cunningham from 1961 until 1965. He was one of the founding members of the Judson Dance Theater, Grand Union and Touchdown Dance for the visually disabled (UK). In the 1970s and 1980s, Paxton worked with the group Freelance Dance.
Some of his important early works include Proxy (1961), Physical Things (1966) and Satisfyin'Lover (1967). In the postmodernist vein, Paxton's choreography questioned the established parameters of dance and used pedestrian, or everyday movement, meaning movement that is danceable by most able-bodied people (unlike more exclusionary forms of dance, like ballet, that require proficiency in technique).
Paxton has received grants from Change, Inc., the Foundation for Performance Arts, John D. Rockefeller Fund, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been awarded two NY Bessie Awards, and is a contributing editor to “Contact Quarterly” dance journal. He lectures, performs, choreographs and teaches primarily in the USA and Europe. Recently he collaborated Mikhail Baryshnikov, Trisha Brown, Lisa Nelson and etc. In 2008 he published a DVD-ROM “Material for the Spine” and book with Contredanse in Brussels.
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