The Bigger Picture

Steve was born in 1939 and by the time he was ten years old, America was making big developments in the area of automobiles and entertainment. Here's a picture of a television from the 50's. Cars were getting bigger and more available, with the cost of a gallon of gas was 17 cents (quite different than the $4.20 we are dealing with now). The first Barbie sold my Mattel was created in 1959, when Steve would have been 20 years old.

The original Barbie from 1959.

A photo of Cunningham

Steve saw the Cunningham company perform, and like many other young artists, was inspired to move to New York to begin a new chapter of his life and try to get involved with the company. He began taking classes with Cunningham and was invited to join the small company in 1961. He said he remembers traveling around the U.S. in a VW (Volks Wagon) bus with Cunning ham or John Cage driving.
 Steve and Merce Cunningham

Volkswagon Bus of 1960's.

 The company was "small, poor and adamant," he said in an interview. Steve was interested in other areas of art such as music and painting while growing up.  In the fall of 1950 Hans Namuth (a film maker) recorded a painter, Jackson Polluck creating a work on a sheet of glass. This project was filmed from below with the movement of the paint and the painter seeming to be a form of choreography, it was a work of art, made from another work of art. This is an example of how painters were beginning to incorporate more movement into their processes of making art and experimenting with new techniques along the way.

There were great technological advances during Steve Paxton's early years, and film equipment was one of those materials to reach new heights. During 1983, with the collaborations of Lisa Nelson, Nancy Stark Smith, and videographer Steve Christansen, Steve made Fall After Newton, a film that recorded eleven consecutive years of contact improvisation which challenged the principle of verticallity.

As America has become a melting pot of many cultures, studies of Akido and Tai Chi Chuan have been brought from overseas. Steve dove into these techniques and incorporated them into his work, especially Material for the Spine, which was started in 1986 at a NYC workshop for Movement Research. He injured his spine and became interested in the operations of the skeleton. -Carrie

With the  development of the TV, the internet, and technology, and with the accessibility to of all this, people don't move like they once did, and not nearly as frequently.  Paxton has become frustrated with this lack of movement that now occurs in this society. He has stopped formal performances and has began to teach many workshops and classes. Paxton focuses primarily on working with the disabled but he believes that movement is vital to the development to all human beings.-Rachel