La Biennale di Venezia commemorates the passing of Steve Paxton

La Biennale di Venezia remembers the choreographer and dancer Steve Paxton with great esteem and admiration.

Steve Paxton made history in dance and in the arts in general. A protagonist of the artistic revolution that had its epicentre in New York in the 1970s in the now legendary Judson Church, spreading post-modern American dance and contact improvisation around the world, Steve Paxton is an immense figure, by virtue of his relentless experimentation conducted out of the spotlight and with a coherence of style and way of life.  Yvonne Rainer, a companion in his journey both at the Judson and Grand Union, liked to joke that she had invented running and Paxton walking, and in fact many of Paxton’s early works – from Proxy in 1961, Transit in 1962 and English in 1963 to Satisfyin’ Lover in 1967 – made the act of walking a fundamental one.

Celebrated around the world as the author of seminal works, most notably his masterpiece The Goldberg Variations, Steve Paxton had been awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at Biennale Danza in 2014.

“As he proceeds, Steve Paxton – reads the motivation – has ‘silently’ opened innovative avenues to an experimentation that has crossed the boundaries into all the arts. His constant relearning and attending to the simplicity of the gesture, never routine but common, has shown us how man can expand his perception of the world”. On that occasion, he presented Bound: a sequence of episodes performed by the Slovenian dancer Jirij Konjar, to whom Paxton had handed down his place on the stage, each of which represents an isolated microcosm, in an almost numerical process of accumulation.

The President, the Director General, the Director of the Dance Department, and the Board of Directors all express, in the name of La Biennale, their condolences for the death of Steve Paxton.