Steve Paxton

When I was a little kid, my sister Nancy, Nancy Stark Smith, who, uh, invented a form of motion contemplation, a dance form, an art form involving physical motion called contact improvisations.

And she founded it with a guy named Steve Paxton.

And when I was a little kid in the early '70s, she went off to Boulder [lip smack] and met, um, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and started a program out there in Colorado, which became a pretty important part of that university.

And through her, I was introduced to all manner of good things that really influenced my life, especially music, because she was friends with a lot of jazz musicians, mostly improvisers, who became, you know, tremendously important in my early development.