Elaine Summers

Elaine Summers ( * in Australia) is an American choreographer and filmmaker and was in 1962 one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater in New York City.

Summers is a pioneering developer in the field of interaction between dance and film after 1950., You also working on the exchange between dance and other areas such as public space, working life, science, etc.

This work includes dance, improvisation ( dance scores), and especially film projections with live dance, and dance films and film dances ( the movies are conceived and experienced as dances). Often, the entire space is included in the performance.

In the field of dance technique and body work (s) Summers works on her studies with Carola and Charlotte Selver Speads in the extended tradition of Elsa Gindler. The name of their approach is Kinetic Awareness, also called: The Ball Work.

Biography / Intermedia

Summers was born in Australia but grew up in Boston Massachusetts. In the 1950s she moved to New York City. There, she was a co-founder of the group under the name of Judson Dance Theater would become famous later. Colleagues in this group were, among others, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton and Lucinda Childs.

In the late 1960s, Summers founded the Experimental Intermedia Foundation in New York. With her own professional dance group, the Elaine Summers Dance & Film Company, she joined many in galleries and public spaces in the United States (including with " Energy Changes " at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and with " Illuminted Workingman " in Buffalo, New York). They also undertook several tours, among others also in Italy, England and Austria (Vienna). 2007, the performance of her new track " Hidden Forest " took place, produced and as part of the Lincoln Center Out of Doors festival.

Elaine Summers now lives and works in New York, including at their internet concept work " Skytime ".

Kinetic Awareness ®

Kinetic Awareness ® ( = kinetic movement, awareness = awareness, attention) is name, destination, and method of this work.

It's about to explore their own movement possibilities aware and spread according to their own interest. Besides, also hollow rubber balls of different sizes are used, which are positioned below the body part in question. The resulting concentrated movements of the joints in multiple directions is simplified, and at the same time enables a self -controlled massage of the tissue. A particularly deep relaxation is possible, and (unconsciously ) retained voltage ( "frozen tension" frozen voltage) available again for the organism.

In the first phase, the body is explored in this way, examines each individual body part to its very own articulation, back and trained. In the following phases of this work that consciousness is applied to multiple body parts simultaneously explores whole-body systems such as breathing and blood / lymph circulation. In the third phase, maximum speed is at the lowest possible voltage emerged voluntarily controlled and differentiated in the fourth voltage levels. In the fifth phase, finally, the exchange with other dancers / movers / the environment.

Elaine Summers founded together with trained by teaching it inside 1987, the Kinetic Awareness ® Center, an organization dedicated to research and education in movement arts and sciences. Through this organization, and teachers are trained, empowered to teach Kinetic Awareness ®. Most teachers work in the United States of America, some in Europe.