Steve Paxton

he'd be doing this was it is it albert reed or is it

i can't remember steve paxton Not Steve.

God, I wish I

did my.

And all of a sudden, ghost people appear on these screens overhead, making unknown, unknowable kind of mass gestures.

Steve Paxton built an inflatable sculpture on the floor of the army that took up the whole floor, which

the crowd walked through.

My piece, I had been experimenting with inflating polyethylene.

Uh, in addition to spinning and training my vestibular system, um, partner dancing is, has always been interesting to me in probably like eight years ago in 2018 is when I first started getting into contact improvisation, um, which is also interesting in terms of its relationship to the earth.

Um, because Steve Paxton, who is the founder, the inventor of contact improv, um, in the 1970s, he just started playing with gravity and he has, he's written, I And he's talking about gravity as like this, like that's what he's investigating.

That's his principal research question is gravity and like your body in relation to gravity.

And so Contact Improv is about weight sharing and it's about like partner dancing where you're just literally making contact with your partner.

But yeah, I recently got back into that maybe like two and a half years ago, which has been really great.

I love contact improv.

It's so extremely... rewarding when you do figure out how to like defy gravity with your own weight sharing and that's the thing is like you can only defy gravity with a partner like you like it's sort of like that's what steve paxton like discovered in his research with with contact improvisation it's like what is gravity how do we sort of like play with it how do we not be constrained by it and you have to do it with with another person you have to figure out like the perfect sort of weight sharing ratio And so I really love that because I also think that like, again, our etheric beings, us as etheric beings, we've come down to this earth.

to find to like figure out the obstacle of being constrained by a body being constrained by the laws of physics and you ultimately like your first and foremost job as a human as a as a consciousness that is occupying a body your first job is to like master the self um master and not to say like the self capital s but like master like you, who you are in your own sovereign body.

Yeah.

So Contact Improv started like around the 70s with Steve Paxton and Nancy Stark Smith, and they were just kind of looking at how to move the body and interact with another human being.

And that is, it's really very improvisational and works often.

It can be two people or many people, but it's basically interacting with another human in space and then moving around that.

Yeah.

You know, Deborah Hay, Simone Forti, Steve Paxton.

They were all, like, not cool.

Mm.