It encompasses processes of falling, rolling, of counterbalancing, of lifting. It is a partner dance form, a form danced a deux, and it is based on the physical principles of touch, momentum, shared weight and, most elementally, a shared point of contact.
Contact improvisation is a form of dance that he established a decade later, in the early 1970s, fusing the repetitive pared down moves of the Judsonites with some of the intuitive mirroring of movement that he had come to learn in a study of aikido, a modern Japanese martial art. Paxton danced with Rainer, among others, in the early 1960s, forming a school of postmodern dance now most often associated with Manhattan’s Judson Memorial Church. Paxton is a dancer that another dancer, Yvonne Rainer, once described as being able ‘to move like butter around a room’ – a phrase so delicious it is impossible to forget. From here they rush, unleashed and gathering velocity, to the road’s end, the western tip where suddenly they veer right, towards the glare of the dying sun.Ĭontact improvisation is Steve Paxton’s term. The gully is long enough for them to gather speed after they collect en masse at the eastern end, by the new café covered by the graphic designer’s showy mural.
The birds are here for the passages between them, pacing their flight along its narrow run. The birds do not care for the details of these two-storey houses in the way that the new homeowners do, eyeing the contours of their frontage, their turreted bays alternating between doorways. Low enough for them to gather speed in the gully of this long city road, this passageway between Victorian terraces with their mirrored uniformity. They fly low, not low enough to touch or to get caught in the knotted mess of our unbrushed hair but low enough to startle, to arrest our upward glances by creating fine streaks of green.
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