Steve Paxton – a video amble
Friday, February 14 | 6:30PM
Organized and hosted by Lisa Nelson and Cathy Weis
This special evening marks the opening of Danspace 50th festival celebration and includes video and remembrances of the groundbreaking artist Steve Paxton (Jan 21, 1939 – Feb 20, 2024). Paxton was a singular, iconic dance artist who graced the sanctuary over many decades and whose influence spans five generations.
Choreographer, performer, and videographer Lisa Nelson, Paxton’s oft-collaborator and life companion, joins with choreographer and video artist Cathy Weis to share a selection of excerpts of rarely seen performance documents and video snapshots from his life at the Farm in Vermont. Interspersed with conversation, this viewing will give but a glimpse of the breadth of how, in Steve’s words, “dance is the art of taking place.”
Lisa writes “Prolific to a fare-thee-well, Steve’s thinking with the body’ left us a multiplex of paths to ponder. It would be hard to say which traces of his lifetime of giving dance will be most enduring—his writing, correspondence, talking, performing on and off stages, improvising, collaborating, composting, gardening, teaching, learning, playing, and hanging out. We are deeply grateful that video technology came of age close to the beginning of Steve’s adventure and we’ve had 50+ years to learn how to see through it.”
Paxton’s enormous influence on the dance field and on interdisciplinary artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Ralph Lemon, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Jennifer Monson and other luminaries in movement and art, is impossible to quantify. Ralph Lemon has written: “I didn’t know Steve until late in his life…but I had been in his audiences most of my art life, from his utterly wild, collectively exploratory Grand Union group days (Walker Art Center, 1975), the year I took my first dance class in Minneapolis and had no idea what I was looking at (I’m not even sure I was there, maybe I just heard about it); to his magnificent Goldberg Variations (Jacob’s Pillow, 1988), dancing that completely changed my dance thinking as the music in his body rivaled Gould and Bach; to Ash (Danspace Project, 1999)…to his longtime work with his longtime partner, Lisa Nelson, and their extraordinary intimacy.” –October Journal, 2024
Before you visit:
Accessibility at Danspace Project
Covid Safety at Danspace Project
Lisa Nelson (US): choreographer, improvisational performer, collaborator, learner, editor-publisher of Contact Quarterly. Her practice of Tuning Scores is an approach to composition, real-time editing, and communication that touches the (extra)ordinary self-knowledge that animates our choices as beings and artists facing challenges together—a danceway to collectively reimagine the illusions of our wobbly world. She lives on a farm in Vermont she shared with longtime creative partner, Steve Paxton. Reflections through interviews can be accessed through sarma.be’s oralsite and Conversations in Vermont.
Cathy Weis arrived in New York in 1984 and immersed herself in New York’s avant-garde dance community by videotaping the concerts of most downtown choreographers working in that decade. In 1993, Weis premiered her first New York season with String of Lies, a meld of dance and video. Since then she has done twelve productions in New York and Europe integrating technology and dance in performance, redefining the boundaries of “live” performance. In 2014, Weis opened a performance space at 537 Broadway. Eleven years later Sundays on Broadway has grown into a valued performance venue for downtown artists.