Gravity

In Memory of Steve Paxton

This is a piece I wrote last year shortly after Steve Paxton died. Paxton was a pioneer of the dance form/exploration known as contact improv. I was never able to give myself over to the magic of this form. I always felt too large and clumsy and dangerous for it. I’ve watched it, though, and I mean it when it is magic. For those who have mastered it, they have truly learned to control gravity.

Dancers use contact improv as a way into new choreography or as a a meditation or as its own thing with no other purpose. It needs no other purpose, whatever other purpose some may give it. Art is funny that way.

Anyway, I’ve sent this around for a year and as we move farther and farther from Paxton’s death, the immediacy of it lessens for that context. Still, I’m happy with it and it can be read on it’s own, outside the context of Paxton’s life, perhaps outside the context of contact improv.

If you’re a dancer reading my Substack for the first time, know that I’m usually more about religious things. Okay, this piece has religious imagery in it, but it’s not as overt or foregrounded as my other posts. I’m just saying look around at other posts before clicking the “subscribe” button. This isn’t my typical “Crumbs” essay. And for those wanting a more typical “Crumbs” posting, this is not a turn away but I hope you find something here, too.

Gravity:

In Memory of Steve Paxton

The skin is a sensory organ you can’t shut off, an eye you can’t close, an ear you can’t cover. Constant information comes at us and we ignore or endure the bombardment. We react to change. What was warm is now cold. React. What was comfortable now stings. React. The load and rub of clothing go unnoticed until it rubs our skin, our flesh, our clay the wrong way.

Open the eye wider, increase the information, prepare the clay for impact, resistance, concession to weight and gravity. Take in. Give up. Control. Consent. Limbs entangle. They wrap around, protect. There are limits to velocity and flesh and time. Take care. Clay vessels break and turn to dust.

Dance passes from body to body. Teacher to student. Choreographer to performer. Pedestrian to pedestrian. (This is metaphor and not.) Skin to skin, sweat to sweat, contracting muscle, releasing breath, every organ, every tissue, every weight-bearing bone incorporated. Dance is art work. Wake the clay we’re made of, so fragile and strong and traveling on a one-way trip to expiration. Let us careen and crash and caress and care while we can. Receiving contact is a decision. Taking a fall is a skill. Supporting weight is a practice.

So we shape into art the things that pull us down.