Steve Paxton, Physical Things

On 13 and 19 October 1966, Steve Paxton invests the great hall of the Arsenal of 69th Regiment of New York with a giant inflatable structure of polyethylene.

On October 13th and 19th 1966, Steve Paxton occupied the large hall of the Arsenal of the 69th Regiment of New York with a gigantic polyethylene inflatable structure: an installation made up of long tunnels, a room and a tower, through which the spectators were invited to move. Equipped with a small pocket radio, each person was able to pick up the waves of a soundtrack composed by Robert Ashley.

This participative work, which appeared to Steve Paxton in his sleep, marks the climax and the end of a series of performances made by the artist with inflatable structures. The idea dear to the Judson Dance Theater to push back the limit between dancers and non-dancers reaches a radical form here, as the entire space is left to the public, free to stroll through an environment designed by the choreographer. This maze of synthetic guts, entitled Physical Things, proposes, however, a series of experiences that have a relationship with the body and its intimate perception. At certain points of the itinerary, anatomic visions emerge from the crowd: a young woman covered with liquid crystals, coloured by her blood circulation, moving pieces of flesh isolated by a black veil, twins observing passers-by. While in the tower the public is exposed to a continuous humming, in the room images from nature are projected onto an artificial tree. 

We owe 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, a series of performances presented in the large building of the Arsenal of the 69th Regiment of New York, in October 1966, to the complicity between the visual artist Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver, an engineer with the telephone company Bell. The concept was simple: allow a dozen artists to achieve the performance of their dreams thanks to the technology of the Bell laboratories.

Born from the experimentations of the members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and the Judson Dance Theatre, the 9 Evenings mark a decisive step in the changing relationship between art and technology. Evening after evening, projectors, video cameras, transistors, amplifiers, electrodes and oscilloscopes entered the stage at the service of ambitious, futuristic, iconoclastic or poetic visions – all filmed in black and white and in colour. When these films were rediscovered in 1995, Billy Klüver decided, in partnership with Julie Martin and the director Barbro Schultz Lundestam, to produce a series of documentaries reconstructing what had taken place on the stage and during the preparation of the performances. The original material was thus completed by interviews with the protagonists of each performance (artists and engineers) and a few famous guests. The 9 Evenings would thereby be restored to their place in the history of art. 

Source : Sylvain Maestreggi