A Steve Paxton Story
How do we make choices as we dance Contact Improvisation?
How do we express our agency while dancing?
And what do we do when we fall into repetition and get bored with our movement choices?
In honor of Contact Improvisation turning 50 years old this month.
Conversation with Nancy Stark Smith
By some mystery, by some small miracle, by some technological blip in the space time continuum, without Nancy knowing, without me knowing, our second to last skype was recorded in full, all 1 1/2 hours of it.
I found the file after she died when I was searching in my computer for everything Nancy related. Because she was such a private person, I put together only the gems that I feel she would have been happy to have shared with everyone.
What is it like to be gay and a POC in the contact community? A Q+A with Paul Singh
Questions for Paul Singh: What brought you to dance and what keeps you dancing?
New version of the essay: 101 Ways to Say No to Contact Improvisation: Boundaries and Trust
Excerpts from Fall After Newton
Here are two excerpts from Fall After Newton (© Videoda 1987), a documentary about the development of Contact Improvisation.
In these clips, narrator and initiator of the form, Steve Paxton, is joined by dancers Nancy Stark Smith and Curt Siddall, and musician Collin Walcott.
The full video is available in a collection that documents the first 12 years of the dance form.
To find the documentaries at Contact Quarterly, click here
Terminus Stations
Here is one minute of a 20 minute duet with dancers Sole Medina and Sergio Palomares Vicente. This was at the Salt Spring Island Plunge
.
Here is what I notice:
• The soft tone in their bodies that allows for an alive responsiveness
• The ease looking into, and entering the backspace
• Their use of hands to map their partner (rather than manipulate)
• Sole’s use of sound to communicate her current state
• They don’t seem to be putting impulses into the dance, but rather are receiving impulses from the mutual conversation
• How they don’t have “terminus stations.” They let one moment, one motion, be the seed of the next
What do you notice?
(In my book, * Dancing Deeper Still: The Practice of Contact Improvisation * I talk about seasoned C.I dancers and their terminus stations or rather lack of terminus stations)