In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Gardens of Light and MovementElaine Summers in conversation with Kristine Marx
  • Kristine Marx (bio)

Throughout her long career, Elaine Summers has worked in a variety of forms, including dance, film, and intermedia. After graduating from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston in 1947, Summers came to New York and studied at the Martha Graham School and then at Juilliard. She soon was diagnosed with osteoarthritis and had to leave the conservatory. It was at this time that she discovered Kinetic Awareness, a body therapy and system for understanding connections between mind and body. Kinetic Awareness aided Summers’s recovery and continuation of dancing. She then studied with Merce Cunningham, Jean Erdman, Mary Anthony, Carola Speads, among others. Summers also took workshops with Robert and Judith Dunn in connection with her work at the Judson Dance Theatre, of which she was one of the original members. During the Judson years, she was a pioneer of intermedia with works such as Overture and Fantastic Gardens. In 1968 Summers founded the Experimental Intermedia Foundation. She was Artistic Director of the First Intermedia Art Festival at the Guggenheim Museum in 1984 and the Second Intermedia Art Festival at the University of Iowa in 1987. Summers founded the Kinetic Awareness Center in 1985. She has worked as a choreographer since 1953 and has had her own dance company for more than four decades. Her work has been shown worldwide. Skytime, an ongoing Web-based piece, is one of her most recent projects and can be visited at www.skytime.org .

This interview was taped in Elaine Summers’s SoHo loft during April–May 2008.

You were an original member of the Judson Dance Theatre. How did you first get involved?

Bob Dunn. He was great with a deep understanding of kinetic imagination and structure. Bob and his wife Judy were offering a class for the first time in the chance method of choreography which led to the first concert by members of the workshops. I had been going to Merce’s weekend workshops, so I knew what was going on. [End Page 25] Judson was always open to everyone who wanted to participate. We would come at eight o’clock and work until midnight. Everyone wanted to show their work. It was quite severe but without any bad feeling. Everybody knew why they were there and knew how hard it was to set something like this up. And we were being very successful, which was a complete shock. We were enjoying it and nobody was really exploiting it unfairly. It just seemed to happen. We made rules so that it would be fair. We were really learning how to criticize, not from a critical viewpoint but really to analyze. We’d say, is that what you intended to do? And the person would say yes or no. During one evening, Judy Dunn and Steve Paxton presented a duet for our consideration. We asked Judy, did you mean to point your toes? And she said no. We didn’t want to use the ballet mannerisms that we all were trained. We were all very interested in ordinary movement.

You presented Overture with John McDowell and Eugene Friedman at the first Judson dance concert in 1962. Can you talk about the making of this piece?

The very first dance performed at Judson was a film that was made to dance with intermedia. I was working with John McDowell. He’s an incredible composer and he composed later for Paul Taylor. He’s also an incredible choreographer. We got a whole bunch of film. John had a lot of 8 mm comedy films. We had a lot of W. C. Fields. I also had a collection of films and Gene had a collection. We made them into these little rolls and put numbers on them: one, two, three, etc. We went to the telephone book to choose the films. The first number from the telephone book that we picked out by chance was the first that we used. You can’t cheat. The telephone book said the first number is one. We edited the film rolls together. Nobody paid any attention to the fact that before...

pdf

Share