Steve Paxton

Pep Ramis and María Muñoz speaks with the american coreographer Steve Paxton and elaborate organic compounds at Mas Espolla in the year of 2009.

A surgeon is on the run from the police for unacknowledged reasons.

Two nudes, a man and a woman, interact with each other and a large balloon in a white living room. Performed by Steve Paxton and Becky Arnold. Camerawork by Phill Niblock.

A made for the camera video collaboration with Steve Paxton, a unique pas de deux between videographer and dancer.

The premise of the Dr. Chicago feature film trilogy is that Dr. Chicago (Alvin Lucier), a sex-change surgeon, is perpetually on the lam, fleeing the Feds and, in Cry Dr. Chicago, hotly pursued by his nemesis, a French gangster–cum–business tycoon (Claude Kipnis).

For Deborah Hay’s SOLO, Larry Heilos designed the control systems for eight radio-controlled carts that moved around the Armory floor, which were then covered with wooden boxes to make platforms for dancers to stand or lie on. At the rear of the space, eight formally dressed performers operated the radio-control system to move the platforms into and around the space. Composer Jim Tenney acted as the “conductor” of the “orchestra”. Sixteen dancers entered the brightly lit space either walking or riding on a cart. They then walked in solo, duet, or trio formations or rode on the moving platforms, following Hay’s specific rules and choreography. The sound for the performance was David Tudor’s realization of Toshi Ichiyanagi’s work FUNAKAKUSHI. [Overview courtesy of Anthology Film Archives]

In Steve Paxton’s PHYSICAL THINGS, a polyethylene air-inflated structure occupied most of the Armory floor, with a tower rising to the peak of the Armory roof. The audience walked through the structure, encountering slide projections, sounds, and performers. Emerging from the structure, they used small receivers to hear different sounds broadcast from wire loops suspended in a net overhead, thus composing their own sound experience.

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From George Manupelli's Doctor Chicago trilogy, starring Alvin Lucier as the evil (and politically incorrect) surgeon on the lam, Dr. Alvin Chicago with his sidekicks Sheila Marie (Mary Ashley) and Steve (Steve Paxton, who dies, dancingly, in each episode).

Performed like a series of vaudeville scenes that overlap, Antic Meet consists of ten playful and comedic numbers. The curtains opened with Cunningham moving among the other dancers as a clown-like figure "who falls in love with a society whose rules he doesn't know," and concludes much in the same way, as he attempts to keep up with the dancers, each with their own movements, as they dance diagonally across the stage. Cage provided the musical accompaniment, using a version of Concert for Piano and Orchestra, and Rauschenberg designed the costumes, which included fur coats and parachute dresses over black leotards.

In this tour-de-force of stylized deconstruction, the Yonemotos rewrite a traditional narrative of desire — boy meets girl, boy loses girl. Employing the hyperbolic, melodramatic syntax of Hollywood movies and commercial TV, they decode the Freudian symbology and manipulative tactics that underlie media representations of romantic love, and expose the power of this media “reality” to construct personal fictions. Using the psychoanalytic language of advertising, cinematic and television texts to tell the love story of a pole vaulter/concert cellist and a cowboy/Abstract Expressionist painter, they rupture the narrative with psychosexual metaphors and references to pop media and art. Self-conscious strategies such as overtly Freudian symbols, flashback reconstructions of childhood traumas, Wagnerian orchestration and loaded cliches are wielded with deft irony.