Elaine Summers
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American choreographer, experimental filmmaker, intermedia-pioneer, and body-work originator
Elaine Summers was a founding member of the workshop-group that would form the Judson Dance Theater and significantly contributed to the interaction of film and dance, as well as the expansion of dance into other related disciplines, such as visual art, film, and theater. She furthermore fostered the expansion of performing dance in new, often outdoor locations.
Her movement approach Kinetic Awareness™ offers an extraordinary perspective on human movement and dance.
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[edit] To Judson Dance Theater
Summers was born in Perth, Australia and grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. She came to New York in the 1950s and became part of the workshop-group originally initiated by Robert Ellis Dunn that would later be referred to as the Judson Dance Theater in its second term 1962, together with a.o. Trisha Brown, Ruth Emerson, Sally Gross, Edward Bhartonne, Carolee Schneeman, Gretchen MacLane, Deborah Hay, David Gordon, and Valda Setterfield.
At Judson, Summers shared in the ongoing experiments with chance methods and pedestrian movement as part of the interest in expanding the then accepted methods of creating and performing dances. However she also embraced the more theatrical part of the collective (Aileen Passloff, John Herbert McDowell and others). Summers expanded dance into other disciplines, experimental film, visual art, and body work. In the later phase of the Judson Dance Theater she created dances that would to work with the entire environment of the performance space. She also initiated five of the total of 16 concerts of the group, one at Turnau Opera, Woodstock NY (Concert #2) and one series (Concerts #9-#12) at the Gramercy Arts Theater in New York City.
[edit] Intermedia
Summers worked intensively with film and its inclusion in live performance. This happened as early as in the first Judson Concert of Dance, when she went out to dance in the projection of her self-initiated chance-film Ouverture which she had made in collaboration with John Herbert McDowell and Eugene Friedman.
Her learning of filmmaking and her experiments at Judson finally lead to her own intermedia presentation Fantastic Gardens in 1964, where she used the entire performance space, located the audience in several settings, bathed the whole space in film- and slide projections, and combined many works of music and sculpture with her own dances, many of them improvisational scores realised by the dancers.
[edit] Kinetic Awareness™
Parallel to her work at Judson, Summers worked on treatments for injuries, including her own. Through working with Charlotte Selver and especially Carola Speads, she developed her approach Kinetic Awareness™. The work originated from the teachings of Elsa Gindler and has links to the approach later developed by Moshe Feldenkrais. The teachings of Wilhelm Reich were equally influential.
Kinetic Awareness™ is structured into five phases:
1 - becoming aware
The focus is on extremely slow and gentle movement of one body part at a time. Hollow rubber balls are optionally placed under parts of the body to aid the sensation and ease of the moving body becoming a conscious experience. For this reason, Kinetic Awareness™ is also often referred to as "The Ball Work". This phase is completed when the pracitioner can move any part of the body at will, slowly and with little tension.
2 - total body systems, coordination:
More than one body part simultaneously. This awareness is applied to total body systems such as breathing and fluid circulation. Movements are still very slow and gentle.
3 - speed levels:
From very slow to very fast, but still on the lowest possible level of tension.
By working with speed at first, injuries are avoided that would otherwise be risked by using an inappropriate amount of tension.
4 - tension levels:
From extremely relaxed and slow to very highly dynamic, fast, and explosive, with any part of the body at will.
Summers' ground-breaking understanding of the value of physical tension as a dynamic entity and its application as a tool to be mastered for human functioning, made Kinetic Awareness™ a very distinct discipline when it was originated. It also differentiated the work from many other approaches that would emphasise release but avoid high levels of dynamic tension.
5 - performance
Becoming aware of and combining all the previous phases in interaction with others.
As long as its basic-principles are followed, the work can allow considerable freedom from pre-set forms and exercises, which become possible and aiding options, rather than prescriptions. (this in contrast with e.g. certain forms of Yoga that prescribe the performance of specific postures for an effective result. Another expample for such an approach is the Constructive Rest Position taught in Ideokinesis) The emphasis of Kinetic Awareness™ is rather on becoming aware and conscious of one's subjective sensation and experience of movement of any sort. This open-ended and explorative attitude is encouraged as the main guideline, and strengthened by comparison with more objective information on human anatomy to one's own discoveries. Because it emphasises the development of the individual's personal range of movement and choices about them, Kinetic Awareness™ can also be viewed as an authentic movement technique.
By combining all of this information, the practitioner can choose to develop her or his range of movement as fully as desired.
[edit] After Judson (1964-present)
Elaine Summers continued to make intermedia-work combining film and dance and started to train dancers in Kinetic Awareness™, who would form her own company (a.o. Tedrian Chizik, Edward Bhartonne, Alexandra Ogsbury, Roberta Escamilla Garrison). To facilitate this process financially, she founded the Experimental Intermedia Foundation which is still active in experimental music in New York today.
In 1971 the Elaine Summers Dance & Film Company premiered Energy Changes at Loeb's Student Center of New York University. The piece covers all the five phases of Kinetic Awareness™, from slow gentle movement of body parts without active interference from the dancer, to highly energetic group interactions (with titles such as 'Bear Dance' or 'Pile-up'). The piece went into full premiere in 1973 at the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, including an early use of video showing dancers located in other parts of the garden.
The Elaine Summers Dance & Film Company toured extensively in the United States of America as well as abroad, a.o. to Italy, the UK, and Australia. Concerts would regularly have parts where the audience was invited to join in the realisation of dance scores which often created an awareness of basic elements of theatre dance, such as walking, or improvisation. Invitation to Secret Dancers was done in the same spirit on outdoor locations in many countries. (the latest performance was in New York City in 2005) Illuminated Workingman brought the city of Buffalo, NY, and construction work together with dance and intermedia, including several performances on location and workshops given to the public.
In 1980 Summers started to present her involvement with the sky. Skydance was shown during the 2nd Intermedia Art Festival at the University of Iowa (where she also made several film-dances as artist-in-residence) and subsequently at the Guggenheim museum. These events included balloons, planes, and large sky-objects created by Otto Piene.
Today Elaine Summers lives and works in New York City where she teaches Kinetic Awareness™ and develops her latest work Skytime an ongoing project that is centerd around the use of the internet.
[edit] Sources:
Banes, Sally, Democracy's body. Judson Dance Theater 1962-64. Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1983
Körtvélyessy, Thomas, committed to body choice and intermedia: Elaine Summers. paper dance history, Rotterdamse Dansacademie, 1994
-idem- , completely coming into moving: Kinetic Awareness for the contemporary dance teacher. paper educational sciences, Rotterdamse Dansacademie, 1996 (written in Dutch)
-idem- , personal notes from working with Elaine Summers on The E.S. Improvisational Dance Score Book, 1993-2006
Wooster, Anne-Sargent, Elaine Summers. moving to dance. The Drama Review T86, New York NY, December 1980, pp. 59-70
