Dancer, improviser, and choreographer Steve Paxton has been researching the “fiction” of cultured dance and the “truth” of improvisation for six decades. This book was published to accompany the first retrospective look at his work and legacy, curated by Romain Bigé and João Fiadeiro, held at Culturgest, Lisbon, in 2019. Interestingly, in the case of Paxton, almost none of the usual remains of dance—scores, photographs, videos, interviews—were made or even kept by the artist himself. Thus the works recounted in the exhibition in Lisbon as well as in this publication were all made and conserved by others. The focus therefore is not the visible, exterior forms that were produced by him, but the felt and sensed, the mindfulness of his unique way of inhabiting movement.

The books combines visual documentation spanning 60 years of Paxton’s work, essays—reprints of historical texts and original essays—as well as a detailed chronology by Colleen Bartley. 

Authors include Julie Perrin, Bojana Cvejić, Alice Godfroy, Romain Bigé, Yvonne Rainer, André Lepecki, Bebe Miller.