Steve Paxton (1939-2024)

News comes that Steve Paxton, one of the great originals of dance history, died today. Born in 1939, he entered dance history as a student at the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College in 1959. Fifty-nine years later, he spoke to me of how, having arrived there as a Limón student, he found himself disturbed but riveted by the revelations of Merce Cunningham, Carolyn Brown, Viola Farber, and (in public discussion) John Cage. He knew that what Cunningham & Co were doing was strange and heretical - he was especially troubled by the idea of chance composition - but he could not tear himself away from those mind-stretching challenges. He went on to study with Cunningham and then (1961-1964) to dance with Cunningham, creating roles in “Aeon” (1961), “Story” (1963), and “Winterbranch”(1964); in 1964, he danced in the first Cunningham Event.

In those years, he and Robert Rauschenberg were lovers. They left the Cunningham enterprise at the end of the 1964 world tour, aware of some sense of trauma and fissure in so doing.

Paxton went on to pursue many of the most valuable lines of endeavour in postmodern dance. Contact improvisation, for example, has long been an often clichéd genre, but, if you saw Paxton himself do it, it had a vitality and coherence that made it marvellous.

He was even the only dancer I have ever known to “steal” an evening from Mikhail Baryshnikov. Many of us will testify that Baryshnikov was often the most miraculous and most genius-endowed dancer of our experience; but once, at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, in a programme when Baryshnikov danced the premiere of a Glinka solo by Alexei Ratmansky, Paxton, already in his seventies, danced with a dark and urgent singularity that, like some soliloquy from Samuel Beckett, registered with a power that was the evening’s peak experience.

In November 2018, old dances of his were presented by some of Stephen Petronio’s dancers at the Museum of Modern Art. I met Paxton at that time, interviewing him about his time with Cunningham. He spoke without ego and with an exceptional engagement with his experience of almost sixty years before, as if it were all still in the present tense in his mind - as if he were still coming to terms with it.

After that, I sometimes asked him questions by email. The direct and thoughtful way he answered always seemed characteristic of his originality, absolutely showing his involvement in both thoughtfulness and in movement.

Such scholars as Petronio, Wendy Perron, and the late Sally Banes have done much to chart and record vital aspects of Paxton’s work: I hope posterity will be able to appreciate him. Even so, more even than with most dancers and choreographers, his departure robs his work of what made it significant: we who witnessed him in performance and in conversation - far too seldom in my case - could only feel the marvellous quality and force of his being.

Wednesday 21 February

@Alastair Macaulay 2024