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Steve Paxton
holds workshops based on his “Material for the Spine”
in Brussels and Paris. Moving on from Contact Improvisation,
he invites students to sense their spines in a large studio at the
Centre national de la danse.
Thomas Hahn talked to him
in Brussels and Paris. Moving on from Contact Improvisation,
he invites students to sense their spines in a large studio at the
Centre national de la danse.
Thomas Hahn talked to him
Steve, in “Material for the Spine,” what lies behind the word “material?” It’s movement material, to bring the spine to awareness. When I started this in 1986 it seemed to me that people could have perfectly useable and eloquent spines without ever having any sense of the spine itself which is not easily sensed. It does not provide a lot of sensations unless it is injured which is kind of a difficult way to learn about it. It has dulled sensations and you can operate around it. This has been an interesting search because the spine is not isolated from the rest of the body, so you have to figure out these connections and the next parts. I consider the pelvis and the skull a part of the spine, even though they are slightly separate. So I started learning about the hip sockets and the arm twines. I’m studying them from the inside out instead of from the arm through the shoulder.
Practically everybody grows up with malformation of the spine as a consequence of inappropriate seats etc., mainly at school. That’s true. Humanity didn’t evolve upright in the beginning. It doesn’t make sense to me that our sinuses have to work against gravity. When you cough you have to cough upward and that seems not a very good plan. But these structures remain as they were. Upright use of the spine is subject to misuse, especially sitting. We sit too much, that’s obvious. Wouldn’t it be great if we could be educated while running or climbing trees or something instead of sitting at a desk?
Your workshop is a study of the Aikido roll. How is this linked to “Material for the Spine?” In this work the use of the spine is derived from Contact Improvisation as it seems to organically do just that. All of the “Material for the Spine” involves doing the Aikido roll. I am trying to figure out if there is a way to provide the sensations of the Aikido roll prior to commitment to the roll itself which is frightening enough to make people not do the Aikido roll but to revert to the symmetrical roll that we know in the West, the somersault. We never developed the diagonal Aikido roll. We only get it out of the Orient and the martial arts. Most of the “Material for the Spine” deals with developing toward that moment when the Aikido roll happens. And it’s supposed to happen nicely, easily and without injury. Right now the students, in the third week of the course, have reverted to doing symmetrical rolls. They are great, fully rounded but not diagonal. We’re all frustrated.
When you began the workshop, did you already have a clear idea of the final result and how you want to get there? The Aikido roll is the end and the plan to get there is very clear. It’s to build the sensations ahead of time so when they get there it’s not too much of a shock to their system to try to do it. Now we’re talking about explaining Ki to them. Does any Westerner really think he understands Ki? The Japanese write in English a lot but they put it in terms that do not connect to movement very directly. I try to get them to the extremes of their Helix and I work a lot with walking. Rigorous exercises, many repetitions, just like at the ballet barre. There’s not a bit of improvisation in the basic structure of what I am providing. The objective of the workshop is to sense your spine and there are different ways to do that. So if you can’t sense your spine in various movement modes, then the Aikido roll should be useful. If you have a good sense of the pelvis, of the ischia, of the axis, of the cranium, all of that operates. The aikido roll is just a test, it’s one factor providing information.
Have you ever tried your method on Asian dancers? No, I’ve never had a chance. For them it would be easy, it’s so much part of their movement mentality. The struggle for my students is to provide themselves with more information than I can teach them. They are to become conscious of structures. For instance, they have to consider the centre of mass in the body; not theoretically but really and work with it and feel that place, feel the difference of what happens above the centre of mass and what happens below it. Because there are different arenas at work. Below the centre of mass you have the coccyx and the ischia. They are small, hidden parts of our structure which determine a lot about how we operate. I want to give the spines more plasticity and the experience of working extended periods in extreme twist so that they’re not always reverting back to the easy place of front or nearly front position.
Are you targeting the development of new types of movement, like Merce Cunningham with “Life Forms?” It seems to me like an art-dance approach to some of the same stuff that break dancing has developed: spinal waves in all directions, various rolls which operate the spine, lots of focus on what happens in that space just below the centre of mass and some work on having the femurs propel the pelvis, becoming aware of that mechanism. I’m not thinking of this in terms of production but dance is hungry for new material and it seemed to me, from much in the development of contact improvisation, that evidently stuff from the street and from the discos is getting into the dance world. It’s astonishing to me that contact improvisation also filtered into the dance world. It just filled it without people particularly studying it. People just took on the moves.
On the subject of Contact Improvisation and HipHop, aren’t the two completely opposing since street dancers were, or may still be, very reluctant to physically touch each other. This has to do with DipHop being derived from Capoeira, among other things, where the fact of not touching each other creates a difference with the origins of the dance, which is fighting, but keeps an attitude of martial arts. This attitude is clearly different from Contact Improvisation in which the bar is really too low. It’s still too easy to do, although this is not negative in itself.
Breakers sometimes say that they use dance to resolve conflicts and that this avoids physical violence which would inevitably be triggered by touching each other. Anything arts can give to all those new babies arriving on the planet and becoming teenagers which need tools to give them some distance from their own destructive tendencies, is great. I actually started CI as I was thinking that there was an absence of touch in dance education, an absence of trust and in our training of the body and the mind there was a predominance of competition. And I thought: “Is that the only means of training we have? Are we doomed to continue this kind of warfare as a means of keeping the body active?” So I found out that it is possible to make what Simone Forti called an “arts sport” which is based on touching and which is not transmitted visually and which does not use set exercises. It’s about hacking oneself, like a computer hacker, to get oneself to improvise. Having the unpredictability of somebody else’s mind in response to your own one is like a physical form of having a conversation.
Do you consider your method to be definitive or are you still in a research process which you share with your students? Having gone through the display of my “Material for the Spine,” we have definitely reached a research moment. It is my dream that in the studio situation the master-student relationship suddenly changes into a real laboratory where the human beings are the subject and also the scientist. And we have some highly educated and physically aware people in this class who are a real resource. Thanks to the Body-Mind Centering work that’s been going on they know their anatomy and how the body structure works.
Which are the current subjects of your research? It’s not only about dance but about dancers’ subjectivity. A dancer on stage has only her or his subjective feelings. Their dance happens, whether it is set or improvised. They don’t have a mirror. They are out there with their senses. Our subject is to dig into how these senses are trained. We’re now busy with the vestibular system of the inner ear. Does the sense of equilibrium have to do with the fact that what was an acceptable Aikido roll suddenly reverted back into a somersault? Consciousness is another part of the subjectivity that has to be considered. It has an effect on the body through the images it holds. One of the students said he began having trouble doing the Aikido roll only when he began thinking about it. Much of the DVD is already made. We have recorded three workshops to illustrate what they are kind of mining from; what I have been telling across various workshops. I am meanwhile writing quite a lot to get a more coherent and literate book out compared with the way I talk in class and to raise more issues.
You stress that the pelvic bowl is the centre of mass for the whole body and that there are muscular connections between the pelvis and some finger tips. Does this lead us to the origin of movement? Is it the spine? My friend Lisa Nelson works with the idea of desire to move. That is a kind of origin. The Japanese talk about the centre of mass, the One Point and the energy flowing out of that. The Indians talk of the seven Chakras. Ballet has its legs ... (laughs). I don’t put it in terms of origin. For me, it’s a system of interconnections. Everything is linked. You can originate movement in many ways. I just think the spine is a sort of neglected area in terms of sensations of the body. I am thinking in terms of the dancers sensing their movement, remembered and inspired in the moment. That’s the tool we really have to work with and that’s kind of essential.
Where does Contact Improvisation stand today? How is it developing? Looking around in the studios I find that Contact Improvisation has become a common behaviour, but contacters are less realizing that it is a lengthening of dance; it’s turning more and more into a sport or having fun. They no longer explore the projection of the spine, arms and legs which is the western world’s legacy to dance, i.e. moving with long limbs. Ballet is all about the simplification of movement into its longest projections. You don’t see that anywhere else. I’m trying to add back in the reason for that lengthening, which has a lot to do with providing the system, which is sort of anti-gravity. The gravitized posture is a non-healthy one. The spine is bent and falls into the soft tissue; circulation and breathing are hampered. Lengthening of the body frees it. And that’s why ballet dancers are such fantastic human beings to look at. Their bodies are superior in terms of processing air, not only in terms of action. Western dance contains material that makes you healthier. I’m suggesting this to people who never considered it. An arm extension is a good position to send blood out to the end of that arm and helps to bring blood back to the centre. The more it’s contracted the less circulation you have. My first contact with ballet was through a woman called Svetlana, in a small town in the mountains. I was still a little boy and she put into my body a sensation and sixty years after it is still there, just from seeing the technique. Isn’t it remarkable that such a thing can happen? It’s great that movement can provide a sensation which can provide an insight.
What about your own future? I’ve got tired of teaching improvisation. I’m still an improviser myself but I can’t teach what I do. That became frustrating. Also, CI is pretty rational and I needed to break loose from the rational to get back to provoking new material in myself. I’m sure I’ll have to break loose from MFS too. I’m booked for workshops until 2009, but hopefully there will be some performances as well.