In the early 1970s, a slim Arizonan arrived in Devon as a visiting lecturer at the Dartington College of Arts. Steve Paxton brought the latest developments in postmodern dance from New York, where he had been a founding member of the groundbreaking Judson Dance Theater and had developed a dance form called contact improvisation.
During his repeated visits to Britain, especially to the Dartington dance festival, organized in 1978, members of Britain’s emerging contemporary dance scene flocked to him. “Every Easter there was a huge exodus from London, with loads of dance people going to Devon,” recalls Mary Prestidge, a dancer and member of the X6 Collective.
X6 invited Paxton to their warehouse studio in London, where he performed a duet, PA RT, with his long-time collaborator and life partner Lisa Nelson in 1978. “I think that moment changed people’s lives, for a lot of people who were there,” Prestidge said. “We were all just completely stunned by it.”
Paxton, who has died aged 85, was modest about his achievements – the kind of artist who might be revered in global dance circles but still sweeps the studio before morning class. However, his impact on contemporary dance was profound.
More than just creating a dance style, he encouraged new ways of thinking about movement. “It was an idea to question the elements of dance,” he said in a 2012 interview with Artforum magazine. “I started removing choreographic tricks. I wanted to work with an element of humanity that was not constructed: technical movement.”
Paxton’s early works stripped away the artifice and technique of classical and modern dance to embrace pedestrian movements: sitting, standing, dressing, eating, smiling and, above all, walking. His best-known work, Satisfyin’ Lover (1967), is for a group of between 30 and 84 performers who walk across the stage, stopping to stand or sit according to a written score. The critic Jill Johnston described “the incredible variety of bodies, the very old bodies of our very old lives” in a work that was decidedly egalitarian.
The same spirit of anti-elitist openness permeated contact improvisation, a form in which two dancers play with pushing and pulling each other’s weight, rolling and falling, thus exploring balance and gravity. It was dance as a stream-of-consciousness conversation, with the dancers tuning in and responding to the moment, rather than adhering to predetermined steps, influenced by Paxton’s background in gymnastics and aikido.
“Isaac Newton saw the apple fall,” says Charlie Morrissey, who started working with Paxton in the late 1980s. “But Steve wanted to ask the question: what does that apple feel like when it falls.” Not in the sense of storytelling, but rather an acute physical and sensory awareness. “What I teach is just to get people to look at what’s happening,” Paxton said.
“Dance refocuses our focused minds on the very basic existence, and time, space, gravity,” Paxton later said. “This seems to me to be a reminder of nature, of our nature, and as such it serves us in our physical problems. It is a wake-up call for numbed city dwellers, a stimulus for bodies accustomed to work.”
Born in Phoenix, Arizona, Steve was the son of Catherine (née Hamilton), an accountant and English teacher, and Douglas Paxton, the head of security at a college in Tucson.
Originally trained in gymnastics, he first took dance lessons to improve his tumbling. He later studied ballet, modern dance and martial arts, and after dropping out of the University of Arizona after a year, he attended the American Dance festival at Connecticut College in 1958, where he met choreographers Merce Cunningham and José Limón.
Moving to New York, he danced with Limón in 1959 and then with the Cunningham company from 1961 to 1964. During that time, he took a composition class at Cunningham’s studio under the direction of musician Robert Dunn, along with Yvonne Rainer, David Gordon and Deborah Hay. and others, whose first performance, in the basement of Judson Memorial Church in July 1962, marked a pivotal moment in 20th-century dance. The Judson group soon expanded, with artists such as Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Meredith Monk and Carolee Schneemann.
Paxton founded the improv group Grand Union in 1970 with Rainer and others, continuing to question and subvert the nature of dance and performance. According to Morrissey, he was “a contrarian”, “but in really brilliant ways”. Those who knew him spoke of his accuracy and astute, analytical intelligence, as well as his great sense of humor and calm presence.
In 1970, Paxton moved to rural Vermont to the Mad Brook farm, an alternative artist community. He built a wooden studio at his house, with maple floors and many windows overlooking the mountains, and grew his own food in the garden. But he continued to perform and teach internationally.
In 1986 he founded Touchdown Dance in Totnes, Devon, with Anne Kilcoyne, working with visually impaired students. That year he also began researching Material for the Spine, a detailed analysis of the movement of the spine, with the aim of “bringing the light of consciousness to the dark side of the body.”
Despite his interest in untrained movements, Paxton himself was a very articulate and skilled dancer, his movements often economical but full of detail. From 1986 to 1992 he performed the Goldberg Variations, improvising on Glenn Gould’s Bach recordings. In 2004, he and Nelson created another duet, Night Stand.
During his career, Paxton received three New York Dance and Performance Awards (known as Bessies) and was awarded the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 2014 Venice Dance Biennale. His work may have been radical, but ultimately, as he once characteristic modesty said: “The pleasure of moving and the pleasure of using your body is, I think, perhaps the most important point. And the pleasure of dancing with someone in an unplanned and spontaneous way, when you are free to invent and they are free to invent and you don’t hinder one from the other – that is a very pleasant social form.”
He is survived by Lisa and his sister Sherry.
• Steve (Steven Douglas) Paxton, dancer, choreographer and teacher, born January 21, 1939; died February 20, 2024