ABSTRACT
To watch Steve Paxton dance is to witness an insatiable curiosity about the movement potential of the human body. As the lights come up and the music begins, Paxton nonchalantly plunges into a series of skips, spins, twists, and tilts, taking his body (and his audience) on an adventure across the last four decades of American contemporary dance. The corporeal is clearly his medium, the raw material which he forms and reforms depending upon his particular focus. His recent physical obsession has been the spiralling and unspiralling of the spine and the various ways the arms and legs can complete or disrupt that core movement direction. While his work may be motivated primarily by an investigation of muscle and bone, Paxton’s dancing is never simply a matter of physical actions. For Paxton, the physical is never a simple matter. It is, rather, ‘a complexity of social, physical, geometric, glandular, political, intimate and personal information which is not easily renderable’.1 Despite his protestations to the contrary, Paxton, in fact, has spent a lifetime attempting to render just that.
