Editing Contact improvisation (section)

=== From ''Magnesium'' to ''Contact Improvisations'' ===
Contact improvisation was developed in the [[United States]] in the 1970s by a group of dancers and athletes gathered under the guidance of choreographer and dancer Steve Paxton.<ref name=":0" />

In January 1972, Steve Paxton was in residence at [[Oberlin College]] during a tour with [[Grand Union (dance group)|Grand Union]], a collective where he collaborated with other prominent figures in postmodern dance, including [[Yvonne Rainer]] and [[Trisha Brown]]. For several weeks, he offered Oberlin students two sets of practices:
# every morning at dawn, a "soft class" involving an exploration that he soon called the "small dance," a form of meditation that is practiced standing, where attention is paid to postural adjustments and micro-weight transfers;<ref>Steve Paxton, "Why Standing?", ''Contact Quarterly'', 2015</ref>
# and later in the day, rehearsals for a performance that he transmitted to a group of young men and whose score is to explore the extremes of movement and disorientation, from standing still to falling, rolling, colliding, and jumping in the air. For these rehearsals, Steve Paxton relied on his training in modern dance (he had danced in the companies of [[José Limón]] and [[Merce Cunningham]]), in [[aikido]] and in [[gymnastics]].
The combination of these practices culminated in ''Magnesium'',<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://contactquarterly.com/contact-editions/index.php#book=videoda-contact-improvisation-archive-(dvd)|title=Contact Editions dance and somatics books & dvds|website=contactquarterly.com|access-date=2017-03-08}}</ref> a twenty-minute performance in which dancers performed on gym mats. The piece involved jumping, bumping into each other, manipulating, and clinging to one another. Paxton described the movements as using "the body as a whole, where all parts are simultaneously unbalanced or thrown against another body or into the air".<ref name=":0" /> After about fifteen minutes, the dancers stop and start a "Small Dance" that concludes the performance.

In the Spring of 1972, Steve Paxton received a grant from Change, Inc which allowed him to invite dancers to work on the form he was evolving. He invited some colleagues from the [[Judson Dance Theater]] years like [[Barbara Dilley]] and Nancy Topf, [[release technique]] pioneer [[Mary Fulkerson]], as well as students met during his teaching tours, including Nancy Stark Smith and Curt Siddall (from Oberlin College), Danny Lepkoff and David Woodberry (from the [[University of Rochester]], where Mary Fulkerson was a teacher) and Nita Little (from [[Bennington College]]).<ref name=":0" />

At the end of this residency, the group presented a performance that Paxton named ''Contact Improvisations''. The performance took the form of a continuous afternoon practice over five days at the John Weber Gallery in Manhattan. Spectators were free to come and go as the dancers practiced, alongside a concurrent film screening of George Manupelli's ''Dr. Chicago''.<ref name=":4">{{Cite web |last=Hennessy |first=Keith |title=The Experiment Called Contact Improvisation - FoundSF |url=http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=The_Experiment_Called_Contact_Improvisation |access-date=2017-03-09 |website=www.foundsf.org |language=en}}</ref>