In the early 1970s a rangy Arizonan arrived in Devon as a guest teacher at Dartington College of Arts. Steve Paxton brought with him the latest developments in postmodern dance from New York, where he had been a founding member of the seminal Judson Dance Theater, and had developed a dance form called contact improvisation.
On his repeat visits to the UK, especially to the Dartington dance festival, set up in 1978, members of the UK’s emerging contemporary dance scene flocked to see him. “There used to be this huge exodus from London every Easter, coach loads of dance people going down to Devon,” remembered Mary Prestidge, a dancer and member of the X6 Collective.
X6 invited Paxton to their warehouse studio in London, where in 1978 he performed a duet, PA RT, with his long time collaborator and life partner Lisa Nelson. “I think that moment changed people’s lives, for a lot of people who were there,” said Prestidge. “We were all just completely stunned by it.”
Paxton, who has died aged 85, was humble about his achievements – the kind of artist who might be idolised in global dance circles, but would still sweep the studio before morning class. However, his impact on contemporary dance was profound.
More than just creating a style of dance, he encouraged new ways of thinking about moving. “It was an idea about questioning what the elements of dance were,” he said in a 2012 interview with Artforum magazine. “I started removing choreographic ploys. I wanted to work with an element of human beings that was not constructed, technical movement.”
Paxton’s early works stripped away the artifice and technique of classical and modern dance to embrace pedestrian movement: sitting, standing, dressing, eating, smiling and especially walking. His most well-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 assortment of bodies, the any old bodies of our any old lives” in a work that was decidedly egalitarian.
That same spirit of anti-elitist openness pervaded contact improvisation, a form where two dancers play with the push and pull of each other’s weight, rolling and falling, exploring balance and gravity. It was dance like a stream-of-consciousness conversation, the dancers tuned in and responding to each other in the moment, rather than adhering to pre-ordained steps, influenced by Paxton’s background in gymnastics and aikido.
“Isaac Newton observed the apple falling,” said Charlie Morrissey, who began working with Paxton in the late 1980s. “But Steve wanted to ask the question, how does that apple feel as it falls.” Not in the sense of storytelling, but rather an acute physical and sensory awareness. “What I’m teaching is just to get people to look at what’s happening,” Paxton said.
“Dance refocuses our focusing mind on very basic existence, and time, space, gravity,” Paxton later said. “This seems to me a reminder of nature, of our natures, and as such it provides a service to us in our physical doldrums. It is a wake-up call to deadened urbanites, a stimulus to work-habituated bodies.”
Born in Phoenix, Arizona, Steve was the son of Catherine (nee Hamilton), a bookkeeper and English tutor, and Douglas Paxton, the head of security for a university in Tucson.
Originally trained in gymnastics, he first took dance classes to improve his tumbling. Later he studied ballet, modern dance and martial arts and, having dropped out of the University of Arizona after a year, attended the 1958 American Dance festival at Connecticut College, where he encountered the choreographers Merce Cunningham and José Limón.
Moving to New York, he danced with Limón in 1959 and then the Cunningham company from 1961 to 1964. During that time he took part in a composition class at Cunningham’s studio led by the musician Robert Dunn, alongside Yvonne Rainer, David Gordon, Deborah Hay and others, whose first performance, in the basement of the Judson Memorial Church in July 1962, marked a pivotal moment in 20th-century dance. The Judson group soon expanded, with artists including Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Meredith Monk and Carolee Schneemann.
Paxton co-founded the improvisational group Grand Union with Rainer and others in 1970, continuing to question and subvert the nature of dance and performance. He was “a contrarian” according to Morrissey, “but in really brilliant ways”. Those who knew him talked of his rigour and incisive, analytical intelligence, but also his great sense of humour and calm presence.
In 1970 Paxton moved to rural Vermont, to Mad Brook farm, an alternative community of artists. He built a wooden studio attached to his house, with maple floors and many windows looking out to the mountains, and grew his own food in the garden. But he continued to perform and teach internationally.
In 1986, in Totnes, Devon, he founded Touchdown Dance 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 back, aiming “to bring the light of consciousness to the dark side of the body”.
Despite being interested in untrained movement, Paxton was himself a highly articulate and skilful dancer, his movement often economical but full of detail. From 1986 to 1992 he performed the Goldberg Variations, improvising to Glenn Gould’s Bach recordings. In 2004 he and Nelson created another duet, Night Stand.
Over his career Paxton received three New York Dance and Performance awards (known as Bessies) and he was awarded the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement in dance at the 2014 Venice Dance Biennale. His work may have been radical, but ultimately, as he once said with characteristic modesty: “The pleasure of moving and the pleasure of using your body is, I think, maybe the main point. And the pleasure of dancing with somebody in an unplanned and spontaneous way, when you’re free to invent and they’re free to invent and you’re neither one hampering the other – that’s a very pleasant social form.”
He is survived by Lisa and by his sister Sherry.
• Steve (Steven Douglas) Paxton, dancer, choreographer and teacher, born 21 January 1939; died 20 February 2024
