SP: How did we meet?

JF: I was a student at Oberlin College. Brenda Way was the dance teacher there, and she invited the Grand Union to come for a residency.

SP: And I was in the Grand Union. The residency was in January, and the Grand Union—about nine people at that point—showed up on campus, and in three weeks, every member of the Grand Union taught a lot of classes and we did three separate performances. There were a lot of men taking this thing, so I did a men’s class. My idea of teaching young men was to smash them together the way they smash small particles together in atomic research…and came up with a piece called Magnesium.

JF: Not to digress too far from this, but I wanted to observe that you taught ballet in this class.

SP: Did I?

JF: You taught a lot of tendus and pliés and things like that.

SP: We have to give our homage to the classics of course, but then I did smash you together. And I made them crash in the air and I made them fall down in heaps—this is called Magnesium and you can still see it on video. There were maybe a dozen people…the concept is so complex with that many people.… So in my next attempt I went to duets, and that became the study of contact.

Question: What was the motivation to have people slam into each other like that?

SP: I had been working on a solo whose vague premise was, Can I throw myself off the earth and not care what happens. That was my question, my research. You can imagine getting a grant for that—but sometimes we have to do things that are not related to the grant structure.

I had realized that it was vaguely possible, and I wanted to see if it was possible to teach what I had gotten to. So, John and his classmates were my attempt to teach it. I found it an incredible learning experience to teach them, because I had to watch them like hawks to make sure they were safe, and at the same time expose them to the maximum danger to see what the body would actually do. So we started crashing into each other softly, with a concept of yielding in the crash—the kind of stuff you would do if you actually wanted your cast to survive the performance—how to land and roll and how to expand their peripheral vision so that they were aware of what was happening around them. The challenge built the course, as it were, and how to survive what we were trying to do ended up being contact improvisation. Of course, we don’t know if there is an equally large or even larger number of people who didn’t survive contact improvisation—you know, the winners write the history.

My feeling was that human beings were strangely overprotected—a big fat American culture getting ever more soft. If you lived through the ’50s you saw it starting, the encroachment of an attitude of satisfaction and comfort being very important. It happens after wars.… After you’ve been through that shit, it’s natural—you want to put it behind you. And what was put in front of us was comfort, advertising, cars, movies, and TV, which managed to stop the thinking of a nation in its tracks, as far as I can see.

I was always interested in dance, but I was also a gymnast. I realize, retroactively, that dance—art dance, as we think of it—is mostly a matter of eliminating things from physical possibilities. Why was I giving a barre to a group of young men who never remotely would be ballet dancers? Because exercises have something—the barre, the tendues, in particular all the legwork—have something that you don’t get very many places, a kind of extension, or reaching, going to the limit of your leverage and then operating there. Once you get into that kind of leverage, you’re playing with a very different physics from the physics that you normally play with. So that seems to me a very interesting premise. If you look at Egyptian dancing or the hula, for instance, you don’t see that premise at all. Ballet operates in this realm of projection. I call it projection rather than extension—projecting outwards, around—very long on the spine, very high on the foot, the leaving-the-earth syndrome done gracefully. This eliminates a lot of possibilities, if you focus just on projection. Most dance forms are built on excluding possibilities.

Going toward inclusion was my aim. Before I did this, I did ten years of walking dances.

Walking. [Steve walks across the stage.] I’m putting this on stage deliberately because I want to frame it and let you see it in all its dumbness. Here it is—isolated, self-conscious, academically pretentious… It has a certain lumpen quality that I think is a real barrier to understanding or opening up aesthetic properties for the audience. So that was my study for ten years. Also standing and sitting, to give myself some compositional options.

The atmosphere in those days—mid-twentieth century—modern dance was so ripe and dramatic and powerful. There were a number of great artists who had made the journey from a pedestrian body and the dance techniques that they were taught into their own forms. By midcentury, it was well established that you could take a body and work it and it could eventually come up with a new form of moving that had its own exclusivities, its own essences, and its own purifications. You got rid of all the ordinary stuff, and suddenly you started getting a different way of moving. Our ordinary movement has so many little micromovements of potential in all directions. We’re like a big, overly cooked soup of potential, and classes are a way of straining that soup and getting down to just the carrots or just the rutabagas and making something of that. That’s composition, right?

Contact improvisation started with seventeen people. I had been working by myself, but of course how much of contact could you invent by yourself?

In Grand Union, I was about thirty years old, and my colleagues were thirty or a little bit older, and I was afraid I would hurt them if I taught them contact. I thought it should be people whose skeletons were still more flexible, so that meant people in their twenties and people who were used to falling down and whose bones could take it, because I didn’t know how dangerous it might be. I just wasn’t sure. Would people survive freeform, unstructured, sometimes really fast, sometimes disorienting movement? I didn’t see why not, theoretically, but…

People have long survived wrestling and fighting, and they have survived the sports of the day. On the other hand, they weren’t trying to invent the sport as a full-fledged thing. If you have decades and decades to slowly develop, then you get one kind of product, and if you try to do it in three weeks, you miss a lot of the connections and communications that make it safer.

Football is a rough sport. It’s disorienting if you are tackled and go flying and get landed on, but most of the time you can control your orientation and keep everything organized. But what if somebody else is slightly controlling your orientation? What would the senses do then? That was one of my questions. Could the senses be improved? Could people get past dizziness, disorientation? In those three weeks, I was studying the guys to see at what point they were starting to look like they might be a danger to themselves or somebody else. Can one collide without a sense of irritation or anger? Can you take it just as a physical possibility?

I had come from a study of John Cage forms in my first dance composition classes, leading into the Judson Church Dance Theater. That was ’62. We were looking at structures that cause the body to adapt in a new way to the conditions and turn out new kinds of movement. Because of this way in—as opposed to doing it all at the barre and through exercise with very little exploration—this approach was more about how to invite the body into conditions that would create a new way to move: a new relationship of the body to gravity, to the floor, to itself, to other bodies.

I regard the “small dance” as the reflexes that adjust everything to keep you upright. The event is so normal, so frequent, and so small that we ignore it. As a generality, the senses pick up new material, unusual stuff—small or large—within their range. The average, normal, lumpen quality of the walking, for instance, is really a barrier to understanding. When you can look at something and say, “Oh, that’s just old stuff; that’s just old walking,” or “That’s just old whatever,” it means your brain has stopped asking questions. There’s absolutely nothing that should go unquestioned or that could be questioned without deriving material from it.

Those of you who have had Material for the Spine know that I have taken this all into a system. Even in a step you can feel the helix happening between the heel and the shoulder and the body rotating for the step, the swing of the arm becoming the spiral. So you have this helix.

You asked me earlier what turns me on. What turns me on is trying to find out what’s going on and then being aghast that we didn’t know it already, or didn’t sense it, or didn’t intuit it. What stops the intuition? What makes us not see or feel the helix happening when we walk?

How to address the simple things. They’re so simple. The front of the body versus the back of the body. Nobody ever addressed that in a dance class. It’s so obvious that it doesn’t need to be addressed. This is the kind of thing that really turns me on. The foot hitting the floor, how does it do it? How does the weight get transferred? How does the body last as long as it does if it is used correctly? Amazing questions. The mind/body relationship, endless fluctuating fascinations.

Roger Neece: You were at Oberlin working on Magnesium and beginning the exploration into Contact. And now we’re hearing about your current work with Material for the Spine. I’d like to see you fill in some of the intervening events that supported that arc.

SP: I would like to see me do that too, Roger. I should have been keeping better notes, I suppose.

It’s studio stuff. It’s not stuff for talks, and it’s not stuff for writing. It is being in the studio and doing it and doing it and doing it. And doing it with different people so you don’t fall too habitually into a relationship that turns finally into a kind of night-club act of moves…because it seems to me that there’s a very natural flow from improvisation right into structure. It’s really hard to keep the improvisation going. You almost immediately start to know stuff about what you’re doing and then you start to control what you know and then suddenly you’re verging on choreographic form, which is cool. But what if you’re interested in studying improvisation, which is what we do when we’re really surprised at where we are—and if conditions change suddenly, it’s how we survive. Conditions normally don’t change that fast, and the culture and all of us do as much as we can to keep conditions from changing too radically, but in fact the microview shows you that it’s evolving all the time, and furthermore all of it is, all at once, changing. So I like to have that as the reality with which I work.

Asaf Bachrach: A lot of your work, also work I’ve seen of yours from the ’60s, is about the study of composition—movement in stillness and in many other ways in relation to space. How do you think of the relation between the study of composition and composition? Do you think for you it is one and the same thing?

SP: You’ve just blown my mind. What do I think of the…relation…between the study of composition and composition? This is somebody who has a mind that has both in and out of the moment in the same question.

Composition is a way to avoid improvising, and the study of composition is: you improvise to study compositions. If you need an example of new compositions, you have to improvise to get there. I think when things become institutionalized, they absolutely lose the essence that we’re talking about. I think to recognize contact improvisation as a therapy, to enter that whole chain of events, would be, in fact, to have to describe it, to bring it into words, and to get it generally agreed as to what we’re talking about—in other words, to have it leave the improvisational realm and become composed, something for which you could get a paper from an institution. I know that other kinds of slippery and ephemeral forms have done this, but look at what we’ve got without it. Look at this amazing, amorphous, “who cares,” kind of… By and large, aside from keeping your body together and performing and dancing, we don’t have to do very much to keep this together. That seems really strong…as strong as the pyramids. Somehow we’ve got this human pyramid thing going, where the solidity of the structure will ensure—has already ensured—far greater life than we ever envisioned for it. Nobody foresaw this, although it became pretty obvious the way it was going early on.