Contact
Quarterly

Steve Paxton in video still from DVD-rom Material for the Spine – A Movement Study, produced by Contredanse, Brussels.

This selection of six Contact Quarterly back issues features writings by innovative dance artist Steve Paxton as well as performance reviews of Paxton’s solo work. Through a voice that is singularly clear, humorous, and ever provocative, in essays, interviews, images, and letters that span 1975 to 2015, Paxton speaks to a wide range of subjects including Contact Improvisation core principles and practices, performance and choreography, perception and sensation.

In addition to the Paxton articles, this collection of journals is chock full of writings, photos, and drawings by vital dance artists and movement practitioners such as: Alito Alessi, Melinda Buckwalter, Kent De Spain, Irene Dowd, devynn emory, Frey Faust, Simone Forti, Anna Halprin, Dieter Heitkamp, Paula Josa-Jones, Deborah Jowitt, Eva Karczag, Martin Keogh, Ralph Lemon, Karen Nelson, Lisa Nelson, Nancy Stark Smith, Nancy Topf, Mike Vargas, Ruth Zaporah, and more.

BUY YOUR COLLECTION NOW, as these beautifully illustrated in-print journals will soon become collector's items.

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List of Articles:
all articles are by Steve Paxton unless otherwise noted
[click on volume #s to see full contents of each issue]

Vol. 16.3 (Fall 1991)
“Helix – Nine Rolls” (6 pgs)

Vol. 20.1 (Winter/Spring 1995)
“Letter to Trisha” (2 pgs)
“The Man in the Box” (2 pgs)

Vol. 26.1 (Winter/Spring 2001)
“Steve Paxton: Extraordinarily Ordinary and Ordinarily Extraordinary”
a performance review by Daniel Lepkoff
with side notes by Paxton (8 pgs)

Vol. 28.2 (Summer/Fall 2003)
“Nothing Comes To Mind: mindscapes and the space; an amble” (3 pgs)

Vol. 30.1 (Winter/Spring 2005) CQ: The Early Years 1975-1987
Editor note: “For thirty years” (1 pg)
“Dartington March” (1 pg)
“Is Contact Improvisation a Performance Art?” (1 pg)
“Steve Paxton’s Improvisations” by Jack Anderson (1 pg)
Letters to CQ: “Improvisation Issue?” “What Authority?” (2 pgs)

Vol. 40.1 (Winter/Spring 2015)
“Gifts: Cage, Cunningham, and the Modern Dance Mutants” (3 pgs)
“Why Standing? Steve Paxton talks about how the Stand relates to Stage Fright and Entrainment in Contact Improvisation” (4 pgs)

Steve Paxton has researched the fiction of cultured dance and the "truth" of improvisation for half a century. Born in Phoenix, Arizona, he began training as a gymnast, studied a variety of modern forms (Graham, Limon, and ballet), and Aikido, yoga, and Tai Chi Chuan. He performed with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company 1960-64, and was one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater of the 1960s, the Grand Union of the 1970s, and Touchdown Dance (for the visually impaired, UK) in the '80s. In 1972, he instigated Contact Improvisation, which continues today as an international network of dancers who convene to practice and who publish news and research in the dance and improvisation journal, Contact Quarterly, for which he is a contributing editor.
    In 1986, he began work on Material for the Spine and produced a DVD-rom on his approach with Contredanse (Brussels) in 2008. Paxton wrote and co-edited three Contact Improvisation documentaries (distributed by Contact Editions): Peripheral Vision 1975, Chute 1979, and Fall After Newton 1987. A film of his solo, The Goldberg Variations improvised by Steve Paxton, was produced by Walter Verdin and KAAI Theater, Belgium, in 1992.
    Paxton received the Vermont Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts (1994) and Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Venice Biennale (2014) and the N.Y. Bessies (2015). His choreography for Quicksand, an opera by Robert Ashley, premiered in N.Y.C. in January, 2016. He lives on a farm in Vermont.

A full listing of Paxton's articles in Contact Quarterly can be found by entering his name in Search.