Steve Paxton has researched the fiction of cultured dance and the “truth” of improvisation for 55 years. He lives on a farm, and he has received grants from Change, Inc., E.A.T., the Foundation for Performance Arts, and John D.Rockefeller Fund, as well a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been awarded two NY Bessie Awards, and is a contributing editor to Contact Quarterly
Dance Journal.
He was one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater, Grand Union, Contact Improvisation, and Touchdown Dance for the visually disabled (UK), and he began his career studying modern dance techniques, ballet, Aikido,Tai Chi Chuan, and Vipassana meditation.
He performed with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from 1961 to 1965. He lectures, performs, choreographs, and teaches primarily in the US and Europe.
In 2008 he published the DVD Material for the Spine with ContreDanse in Brussels. In 2009 he re-choreographed Ave Nue (1985) in Amsterdam, and toured Japan—including Night Stand, with Lisa Nelson, in Tokyo. With Contredanse of Brussels, he, Florence Corin, and Baptiste Andrien have developed the Phantom Exhibition, a multi-image room of meditations on Material for the Spine, which was featured in the Super Bodies Triennale in Hasselt, Belgium. In 2013 he was featured in Tanz im August, Berlin; and his
Night Stand was performed in NYC at Dia: Chelsea. In 2014 his work Bound, with Jurij Konjar, was presented in Ljubljiana, Venice, and Munich.
In June 2014 he received the Venice Biennale Leone d’Oro for lifetime
achievement in dance. He received another Bessie in 2016 for the same reason. Robert Ashley’s opera Quicksand, which premiered in January 2015 at the Kitchen, NYC, and was performed at Festival D’Automne in 2016, featuring set and choreography by Paxton, was included on The New York Times’ 2016 “Best 10 Classical Music Performances” list.