6 Ave Nue. Choreography: Steve Paxton. Production: Kaaitheater. Kaaitheater Festival, Théâtre de la Balsamine, May 1 – 12, 1985. 7 Cynthia Jean Novack, Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture (University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), p.52. 8 Steve Paxton Bio, Contact Quarterly, Winter / Spring, 2005, Volume 30, Number 1. 9 Steve Paxton biography, www.movementresearch. org/festival/08/index.php?/artists/steve-paxton/
10 Steve Paxton, Contact Quarterly, Winter / Spring, 2005, Volume 30, Number 1, p.69. 11 Steve Paxton, Material for the Spine, DVD, published by Contredanse, 2008. 12 Steve Paxton, ‘Nothing Comes To Mind‘, Contact Quarterly, Summer / Fall, 2003, Volume 28, Number 2, p.9. 13 Ibid.
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Some things come to mind: imagination, sensation, space, and the body – an impressionistic amble after Steve Paxton and the revision of Ave Nue Jeanine Durning
course there are the performances themselves, the dancing itself, ‘lived’ in the imaginations of those who have seen them / it / him – the dancer who is the ‘-scape for the duration, a container of [the audience’s] foci.’ 12 Imagine you are the audience: eyes seeing, bodies seeing / sensing other bodies dancing / sensing, eyes observing physical images in motion, minds in continual, fluctuating consideration of these images, imaginations creating empathetic sensations, these sensations informing and opening up imaginations. It’s an elliptical, unending process of constantly shifting perceptions. This is the contract of performance, what Paxton refers to as an ‘arrangement intended to facilitate some sort of sensorial exchange. By using vision, the audience is able to ‘ride’ the physical situation of the dancer. This is empathy, and also synesthesia.’ 13 Now imagine that what you see is not actually what you ‘get,’ or, rather, that what you ‘get’ is not what you see or not at least what you think you are seeing or, maybe, after all, what you ‘get’ is an experience of seeing in relation to a mixture of fixed assumptions and expectations in relation to continually shifting sensations in relation to constantly fluctuating perceptions of space, color, light, objects and moving bodies. Imagine, instead, that what you see is an ongoing shifting expression of potentiality. Within this space, a space of performance that Paxton has called the ‘artscape,’ where the contract between performer and audience exists, a kind of chaos is framed, and becomes an artificial reality, or, as Brian Massumi (political philosopher