All Falls Down

artforum.com/performance/Sam-Dolbear-on-Steve-Paxton-Drafting-Interior-Techniques-at-Culturgest-
Lisbon-79732

Performance

João Fiadeiro, Romain Bigé, and Rui Xavier, Waiting, Walking, Standing and Sitting,
2019, after Steve Paxton's Satisfyin Lover (1967). 4K video installation, color, sound, 14:16.
YVONNE RAINER ONCE QUIPPED that, if she invented running, then Steve Paxton
invented walking. At the opening of this major retrospective, “Drafting Interior
Techniques” at Culturgest in Lisbon, Paxton walked through the exhibition space
clutching a hand-held camera. We followed, watching him walk around, watching him
watch and film himself on projected documents around us. The observance of others
and the performance of the everyday are governing principles of much of Paxton’s work,
evident in the very first room of the exhibition, which is dominated by an elongated
projection of Waiting, Walking, Standing and Sitting, 2019, a video made by the show’s
curators, Romain Bigé and João Fiadeiro, with artist Rui Xavier after Paxton’s Satisfyin
Lover, 1967. On the wall, forty-two randomly selected Lisbon residents cross a stage
according to a set of simple guidelines. Bigé, Fiadeiro, and Xavier have slightly slowed the
footage to accentuate the uncanniness of this quotidian movement, where the
unconscious is rendered starkly self-conscious by being watched. Movements continue
to be invented, if not noticed for the first time.

Satisfyin Lover was enacted live the following night in the main auditorium at Culturgest,
prior to the Goldberg Variations, 1986, performed by the Slovenian choreographer and
dancer Jurij Konjar. Variation and repetition were played out on a stage through
multifaceted layers of inheritance: Bach’s 1741 score, recorded late by Glenn Gould for a
second time in 1981, accompanied Paxton’s 1986 dance as it was interpreted through
Konjar’s study of all its subsequent iterations. These numerous spirits gripped Konjar’s
body while audible, unconscious groans from Gould filled the auditorium. The
performance was a gift: to the audience, to Paxton, and to all future dancers in this
packed theater. Beyond this being simply exhibition of a canonical dance, it felt
necessary: a demand made upon the present to a new generation of dancers.

1/3
Steve Paxton, The Stand or The Small Dance, 1972–present, audio recordings, 5 to 7
minutes.
The second room of the exhibition concentrates on what it calls “studies in anarchy,”
Land of Hope and Glory, a patriotic English anthem, can be heard in the background of
one film, echoing through the space, mixing with other sounds. Bodies fall as empires
should. Here opens a long-held concern of Paxton’s and the subject of a small book with
a big presence in the exhibition: Gravity (Editions Contredanse, 2018). Copies of Paxton’s
essay anthology are scattered in the darkness of the fifth room, as are headphones,
pointedly hung from the ceiling and in which one can hear Paxton’s pensive crackling
voice reading from the text. Here visitors are encouraged to nap, regain energy, sit in
silence, and consider how gravity feels. What happens when bodies are thrown into the
air? What happens to the body when it is kept still? What tiny movements constitute
dance or performance? What happens when movement is left undetermined?

A particular rendering of anarchism is glimpsed through improvisation itself in the room

prior; a method through which choreographers deny themselves binding sovereignty
over others. In this spirit, dance mats are laid out in two of the exhibition rooms,
surrounded by dangling back-issues of the seminal journal Contact Quarterly, to be taken
off the wall, flicked through, even (as Bigé suggested at the opening) stolen. The whole
gallery space becomes a workshop, a studio, a place for people to meet, improvise, and
to work against authority’s teachings, not for the sake of novelty, but, as Paxton put it in
his opening lecture, to “grow a new body.”

The perpetual problem of exhibiting dance, not only against its vanishing points (as
described by Marcia Siegel) but against its petrification into tradition, is overcome by the
incomplete work of this exhibition: its mission to galvanize a community of dancers in
Lisbon. Mounted almost a decade after the crisis that unleashed unprecedented
austerity in Portugal, with rocketing house prices, cuts to art institutions (including to
Culturgest), this retrospective does something more than simply exhibit. It works and
reworks Paxton’s legacy in a place outside his immediate reach, presenting his oeuvre
not within the Bubble Wrap of the canon, but as a legacy worth reworking, issuing a
vulnerable invitation for further improvisation (with heterogeneous participants, from
professional dancers to local school kids) that is being taken up in droves. The show ends
with Paxton’s withdrawal from town to country in Lennart Laberenz’s Mad Brook Farm,
2019, a projection of flowers and grasses found at the eponymous retreat in northern
2/3
Vermont where the choreographer has lived since 1970. Paxton, at the opening, stood
close to the images, immersed in the glow of the farm. Though Paxton long left the city,
through this retrospective, Lisbon found him.

— Sam Dolbear

3/3