“With deep emotion, we mark the passing of dance artist Steve Paxton, who, through his inimitable wit and physical intelligence gifted the fictive world of cultured dance with a pathway to the truth of improvisation (a play on his own words). As initiator of the movement research he named Contact Improvisation and as CQ’s cofounder, his influence has resonated and penetrated generations of dancers around the world. Our gratitude is immeasurable for the beauty he shared with us. Steve took his last peaceful breaths on a brilliantly sunny midwinter afternoon at his home, with his companion Lisa Nelson beside him, in the lap of his beloved Mad Brook Farm community in the hills of E. Charleston, Vermont (the original homeland of the Abenaki people).”    ~ Contact Quarterly

The GLOBAL UNDERSCORE (GUS) centers on a yearly dance event in which dancers all over the world practice the Underscore simultaneously for a 4-hour period.

GLOBAL UNDERSCORE 2024
Saturday, 22 June 2024
14:00–18:00 UTC (10:00 am–2:00 pm EDT New York)

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We dedicate Global Underscore (GUS) to Nancy Stark Smith, the creator of the Underscore, who died on 1 May 2020. You can listen to the audio of Nancy’s memorial with many colleagues, family, and friends speaking about her and her work on Nancy’s website. Also, remembrances of Nancy are shared on Contact Quarterly’s NSS Harvest Facebook page.

David Koteen: If you were to fantasize—in your dream of dreams—the effect of CI [Contact Improvisation] on Western culture, what will you project?

Nancy Stark Smith:
More peace.
Flexibility (improvisation) based on a direct sense of being on the physical earth, in your physical body;
communicating with respect, intelligence, curiosity, compassion, humor, and love across boundaries
(race, language, ideology, dance form, cultures, subcultures, generations).
Clarity, confidence, risk, respect.
And more: cooperation, imagination, vitality.
High art play, adventure in work, responsibility, and humor.
A sense of independence and interdependence.

from Caught Falling: The Confluence of Contact Improvisation, Nancy Stark Smith, and Other Moving Ideas
by David Koteen and Nancy Stark Smith, 2008.

For the Global Underscore, we invite attunement
to the social, political, economic, and cultural realms
in which we each and others are situated
and in which we each and others practice the Underscore.
We invite awareness of oppression and inequity, acknowledging that oppression limits us all
and prevents some from participating fully, or at all,
in the Global Underscore, Contact Improvisation, and dance in general.

~ Patrick Crowley, Sarah Young, Colleen Bartley, Nicole Touzien, GUS Coordinators

COUNTDOWN TO GLOBAL UNDERSCORE 2024
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