\n<\/p>\n
Mr. Paxton\u2019s dance vocabulary wasn\u2019t always basic. For his 1963 work \u201cAfternoon,\u201d he taught Ms. Rainer and other dancers some choreography filled with tricky balances, in the Cunningham vein, but he had them perform it on the uneven terrain of a forest in New Jersey. Ms. Rainer later characterized Mr. Paxton as her \u201cfavorite wily choreographer.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 1970, Mr. Paxton, Ms. Rainer and several other members of Judson Dance Theater started performing together as the leaderless collective Grand Union. The group\u2019s shows were improvisational, anarchic, free-associative.<\/p>\n
For Mr. Paxton, Grand Union was a laboratory in the possibilities of form and performance. One possibility that he explored further grew into what he called contact improvisation, a duet form in which participants give and take each other\u2019s weight \u2014 tumbling, lifting, carrying, falling. The goal, Mr. Paxton explained in 1975 in the journal The Drama Review, was to find the \u201ceasiest pathways available to their mutually moving masses.\u201d<\/p>\n
Contact improvisation can look like gentle wrestling, but it can also be full of surprises, riding the edge of disorientation and risk. (Mr. Paxton had been studying aikido.) It was \u201ca form arising from us rather than imposed on us,\u201d Mr. Paxton told Dance Magazine. \u201cIt\u2019s a game that takes two people to win, so it doesn\u2019t create losers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Although contact improv was sometimes practiced in front of an audience, Mr. Paxton intended it as both a form of artistic experimentation <\/strong>and a meditative mode of heightening perception and nonverbal communication. For many people, it became a way of life, with a journal (Contact Quarterly) and conferences, classes and jam sessions in many countries. In the mid-1980s, Mr. Paxton was not pleased to learn that some people had come to see it as a recreational sport. (\u201cIn just 15 years,\u201d he said, \u201cit had gone from an art exploration and a performance thing to a recreation, a dating game.\u201d)<\/p>\n But he moved on to other explorations. From 1986 to 1992, he performed \u201cGoldberg Variations,\u201d<\/a> a series of intricate improvisations to a Glenn Gould recording of that Bach composition. Beginning in 1986, he developed what he called \u201cmaterial for the spine,\u201d a system focusing on the muscles and sensations of the back, aiming \u2014 as he put it in an instructional video \u2014 \u201cto bring the light of consciousness to the dark side of the body.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n