Elaine Summers: Moving to Dance

Author(s): Ann-Sargent Wooster

Source: The Drama Review: TDR, Vol. 24, No. 4, Dance/Movement Issue (Dec., 1980), pp. 59-70
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1145324 .
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Elaine

Summers:

Moving to Dance
by Ann-SargentWooster

ElaineSummers has two identities: a respected choreographercoming out of the

Judson Dance Theatre and a highly influentialteacher of Kinetic Awareness, a system
permitting an extraordinaryrange and ease of movement that has been studied by
many people in the performingarts.
Summers began her dance trainingby studying ballet as a child. She attended the
Massachusetts College of Artand, because degrees in dance were not offered at that
time, studied to become an art teacher. She attributes her interest in the breakdownof
forms into their component parts to her Bauhaus-oriented art training. During her
sophomore year, she studied briefly with MarthaGrahamand Merce Cunningham in
New York.After graduating, she taught art for three years and then went to St. Louis
where she taught dance to the mentally ill. In1952she came to New Yorkto study dance
at Juilliard. Independently she studied Laban notation and Effort Shape, and took
classes in pre-classic dance forms with Louis Horst. She later studied with MerceCunningham.
AlexandraOgsburyin EnergyChangesat Museumof ModernArt,1973

lucky
change
that brought a remarkablegroup of dancers together in Robert Dunn's class at Merce
Cunningham's studio in 1960. The class developed an interest in ordinarymovement
that, coupled with chance techniques and minimal forms, came to characterize their
workof the 1960s. One of the difficulties for the dancers in the beginning was to give up
their unconscious dance mannerisms. In one class presentation Steve Paxton pushed
Judith Dunn around in a cafeteria cart. In the discussion afterward,she was asked if
she had wanted to have her toes pointed. Dunn answered, "No, do you mind if we do it
over?" and then proceeded to perform the piece again without pointed toes. (If she
had intended to point her toes in a ballet manner, that too would have been all right.)
Summers' subsequent choreography includes ordinary movement, film, dance and
intermedia. Her commitment to multiple and interpenetrating forms led her to found
the ExperimentalIntermediaFoundation in 1968.
Ina paralleland, for many years, hidden life, Summers has been finding solutions
to the bane of dancers' and athletes' careers-injuries. Because of a slipped patella
that she incurredwhile preparingfor a ballet concert in St. Louis, a doctor suggested
surgery, but Summers rejected this method of treatment as too extreme. She began
talking to others about their injuries and learned that the MayoClinic suggested exercises as treatment. She came to realize how little dancers knew about their bodies.
When she was a student at Juilliard,she attended a birthdaypartyfor a 21-year-old
musician who had been given a Stradivarius for his birthday.Watching the way the
violin had been carefully taken froma locked closet, gently removed from its protective
wrappings and lovingly passed around, she realized that musicians were more careful
with their instruments than dancers were with theirs (the body). A musician could
replace the strings. He could even replace the violin, but you could not replace the
strings of the body; i.e. the ligaments. Dancers, through ignorance, took unconscionably bad care of their instruments.
The turning point came when Summers began to be crippled by osteo-arthritis at
30. Doctors gave her little hope but invalidism.One night she had a dream in which she
was looking at the bow of a ship. Therewas a sailor dressed in white holding a rope and
doing deep second position plies. She woke up from the dream shouting, "He doesn't
do 200 plies every day."
A therapist friend to whom she recounted the dream recommended she study
movement with CharlotteSelvers, which she did. Subsequently, Summers studied with
Carola Speads for four years. Both Spreads' and Selver's teaching emphasized slow
movement and an awareness of internalprocesses. The class workemployed a variety
of objects-rolling pins, straws and balls-to aid in sensing the body.
When Summers began studying, it was simply to heal herself, but after intense
personal experimentation with herself as the subject, she began to use the work as a
basis for dance. The earliest dance using these techniques for relaxation and movement was Dance for Carola,done at Judson Churchin 1963. Inthe dance she went from
standing to squatting in 10 minutes. (Now, having become more adept at Kinetic
Awareness, the same movement might take 45 minutes.) In 1968, she began to plan a
dance that would incoroprate the five phases. She began to train a company in the
work, a process that would take three years.
Summers work most immediately derives from Elsa Gindler,who originated the
concept in Germany in the 1930s. Of Gindlers' students, Moishe Feldenkrais went to
Israeland CarolaSpeads and CharlotteSelvers came to New York.Summers' approach
differs fromthat of her teachers and the movement therapies that are partof the human
potential movement because she goes beyond psychology and body reeducation and

Elaine Summers in Energy Changes

applies Kinetic Awareness to creating dance and aiding performersin their respective
arts to an action based on the freedom and control it imparts.
Summers' development of Kinetic Awareness and the way it is applied to dance
and the performing arts, especially its reliance on slowness and organic process,
should be seen in relationship to other ideas in the 1960s. By the late 1960s and early
1970s, artists such as Robert Morrisin his essay "Anti-Form"called for an art concerned with its own internal mechanisms and forms. This reading of modernism
resulted in an art using gravity and entropy to shape composition. Real time was
substituted for the illusion of the passage of time. MeredithMonkused extremely slow
movements as well as organic body sound. Some presentations of RobertWilson took
12 hours or more to perform.In art, RobertSmithson designed structures such as the
Spiral Jetty to be completed by the spontaneous processes of nature.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was an interest in other cultures and alternative forms of behavior,especially those from the East. Manydancers studied Tai Chi
and Aikido, that were importantto dance both for their concentrated disciplined slow
movements and the mediations on the body they offered; these served to breakdown
traditionaldance structures.
Coupled with this was a growing cultural interest in self-awareness, in parta product of the women's movement.The 1960s, however,were still largelyanti-body,and only in its later phases did self-examination feature physical aspects. Summers' development of her approach to movement is an integral part of this cultural climate.

There are many applications and levels of Summer's Kinetic Awareness work.
Most individuals, including those who eventually incorporate Kinetic Awareness into
their own work, initially come to study because they have an injuryor other problem
with their bodies. Trainingand maintainingthe body is the central concern of dancers
and the reason why many majordancers in New Yorkhave ended up on Summers' floor,
where they often have to unlearn the techniques they have painfully accomplished.
Summers' course of study does not substitute one system of movement for another,
but by learning how the body works-physically, physiologically and psychologically-students can reclaim their bodies as their own.
Although many individuals study with Summers privately or in special interest
groups-such as the two-yearworkshop Summers staged for the PerformanceGroup
or the special classes arrangedfor composer Pauline Olivero's meditation group-the
more common approach to KineticAwareness is throughthe series of 15 two-hoursessions of the beginning course. Each session examines a different part of the body. A
normal sequence includes: the neck, shoulders, chest, lumbar,pelvis, thighs, knees,
feet, arms (elbows and hands),breathing,falling,walking(includingup and down stairs),
lifting, letting the body stretch itself, sounding (makingorganic sounds) and faces.
The complete course of study takes several years and has five parts:
1. By the end of the first phase, the student has become aware of
each part of the body and is able to articulate it. It should be possible
to move each part of the body slowly and with little tension.
2. In the second phase, one becomes aware of total body systems
such as breathing, circulation, tension, etc. The student should be
able to articulate slowly and with little tension more than one part of
the body simultaneously.
3. The third phase incorporates the first two phases and adds to
them the ability to change tension levels at will from minimum to
maximum tension.
4. Thestudent should be able to change speeds and move extremely
slowly or veryrapidly.Whilechanging tension voluntarily,they should
also be able to articulate any part of the body or all parts of the body.
5. The fifth phase combines the previous four and adds the ability to
relate to another person and be aware of them in a performance.
The floor workthat forms the basis for all subsequent movement is done primarily
on hollow rubber balls from three to seven inches in diameter. The balls are placed
undervarious parts of the body singly, in pairs, or as many as five to completely lift the
student off the ground. This frees the spine from its usual relationship to gravity.By
placing the body in a position for which there is no body image, the balls help to overcome habitual posture. Acting as a flotation device, suspending the body in space, the
balls facilitate multidirectional movement and allow exploration of positions that
would otherwise be difficult to achieve. They providea focal point-a psychic device to
increase concentration and mediation.
The ordinaryperson is not aware of the small movements involved in posture and
locomotion, and dancers are notoriously ignorantof the partmuscles, bone, ligaments,
etc., play in regulating movement. Most movement has become automatic. The goal of
Kinetic Awareness is based on the same premise. Mable Todd stated in The Thinking
Body in 1934:

It is possible to bring the organic impressions and resulting movements into consciousness and thus to control the adjustments.... The
ability to improvethe pattern of support and movement for the reduction of mechanical streses comes not through the development of
power and bulk in individual muscles, but from the study and appreciation of the human body as a weight-bearingand weight-moving
structure.
Therese Bertheratand Carol Bernsten in their recent book on their system of movement, The Body Has Its Reasons, share Summers' sense of the body:
As a painter prepares his canvas, a potter his clay, we must prepare
ourbody before using it, before expecting "satisfactory"results fromit.
It is the state of the body apriorithat determines the richness of lived
experience. Theawakened body takes initiatives,is no longer content
to receive or to "putup with."Whenwe live in our body, we give body
to our life.
Unusual in teaching, especially dance-related teaching, the emphasis is not on imitatingthe teacher or on correct form.Thereare no mirrorsin the studio. The concentration is on learning and experiencing how the body feels in action and repose. The
dependency on the teacher, a characteristic of dance with its unceasing lesson-taking,
is minimized by placing the responsibility for learning on each student.
In the first class, the students are asked to sense their bodies and observe what
they feel. A common experience is to find that the body is visualized as a hollow shell,
sparsely furnished(if at all) with a few organs, often located in strange places. This picture of the body as a geometric solid corresponds with how it might be perceived in a

phases
drawing,
kinetic awareness, it is possible to enter deeply into the inner structure and
move/dance from complete physiological knowledge.
The problems an ignorance of anatomy engenders are often experienced by
dancers as the result of their training. Kinetic Awareness uniformly gives them renewed confidence. Summers tells the story of a dancer in Spreads' class who, watching two 70-year-old women standing on one leg with ease, burst into tears because she
realized she had spent all those years learning to stand on one leg and, of course, she
had always been able to do so. Alexandra Ogsbury had stopped dancing when she
began studying privately with Summers. She had a pronated knee problem. Ogsbury's
teachers had always told her simply to straighten her knees. Ogsbury said, "They never
told me I had a problem. They just said I hadn't been doing what they had been telling
me to do." After solving her alignment problems through studying Kinetic Awareness,
Ogsbury went on to become the quintessential Kinetic Awareness dancer and perhaps
the best interpreter of Energy Changes.
One of the first things experienced in class is what Reich in Character Analysis
calls muscle armoring. Reich states:
In order to achieve the libidinal restrictions as required in present day
society and in order to master the resulting stasis of energy, it
[character] must undergo a change.... It is as if the affective personality put on armor, a rigid shell on which the knocks from the outer world
as well as the inner demands rebound. The armor makes the individual less sensitive to unpleasure but also reduces... his capacity
for pleasure and achievement.
Through the discipline of Kinetic Awareness, rigid, tension-filled and malaligned parts
of the body become visible for what they are. Past experiences have caused the denial
or deformation of parts of the body, immobilizing them. Muscles clutch unnecessarily,
or a shoulder is hunched to ward off past or present blows, real or imaginary. Often the
way the body is worn is associated with the parents' characteristic posture or a style of
standing or moving commonly seen when growing up. If a position was casually
adopted in adolesence, realignment is comparably easy. An attitude with deeper roots
or meaning can only be relinquished with difficulty and sometimes only if the alternative is continued pain from a distorted back or wrongly held leg.
Historically, all body awareness work is psychoanalytic in origin. One cannot work
on the body without encountering psychological problems. Summers acknowledges
the psychological causes of movement blockage as it relates to individual problems in
her teaching, but she emphasizes other areas. Group discussions center on how the
body feels ("What did you feel?" is the usual question), as well as a thorough grounding
in anatomy, physiology and nutrition. The goal of the work on one level is the reintegration of all of the components of the self, many of which have been suppressed as a child
or repressed as adults. Summers insists each student take the movement training and
make it his/her own. She provides the tools for the students to begin to heal
themselves. No higher compliment could be paid than the often voiced, "She gave me
back myself."

Breathing
Summers' teachings on breathing are an integral part of Kinetic Awareness. A
close examination of them gives a good picture of the nature of the work.

ourselves is constantly moving. One of the best ways of getting close

to yourself is to simply lie still and sense your breath. This is a traditional meditation exercise used in yoga and Zen. It is difficult to watch
yourbreath without interferingwithyourbreathingpattern. Each of us
has an individual breathing rhythm shaped by our physiological
mechanism and body structure. However, in the process of growing
up we are surrounded and inundated with instructions and opinions
about how to breathe which serve to alter our naturalpatterns.
Inhalation. One of the primaryinstincts of mankind is to hold
one's breath in situations of fear and anxiety. Inhalation is an
automatic reflex. Exhalation can be voluntary. If one is running or
climbing stairs or about to enter an anxiety-provokingsituation, practicing voluntaryexhalation willprevent one frombecoming breathless
and will be relaxing. There are many formulas and patterns for experiencing breathing-just as there are many uses for the breath
system.
We each have a completely different view of what the breathing mechanism is.
When working with an opera company on Kinetic Awareness, singers would come to
Summers individuallyand say they could work on any part of the body but that spot,
pointing to some area, explaining that it was inviolate because they had been instructed that that was where breath originated. Coupled with the mediation on the
breath that opens each class, the following three exercises are practiced to enhance
knowledge of breathing.
Fat Breath: An exaggeration of the normal action of the
diaphragm against the stomach. Air is felt descending into the abdominal region and pushing the stomach out into the round belly of
the Buddha.
Skinny Breath: This is paired with Fat Breathas its naturalcomplement. The descending diaphragm is resisted by contracting the
stomach till it hugs the backbone. This keeps the air in the upperportion of the chest.
No See'um Breath: Twominutes are allowed for air to be inhaled
slowly. Not only is this a good mechanism for slowing the body clock,
but one learns that in orderto take a deep breath one does not have to
undergo a great deal of tension and exertion.
Summers: "As the first phase of the work is developed we become aware of the relationship of our breath rhythmto our movements."

Movement/Tension
Watching a class lying shrouded in blankets, eyes closed, bodies barely moving,
one might think Summers offers classes in sleeping. During the first phase the emphasis is on relaxingand releasing tension and executing movement with as little effort
as possible. Movementat this point is slowed to a molasses-in-Januarypace. Slowness
serves as a meditation on the body. It permits a complete articulation of the joints, a
more thorough knowledge of the body and, by extension, the freedom to control it.
Most people never progress beyond the sensuous relaxation of the first phase with its
attendant sense of freedom that can leave you, as one dancer describes it, "feeling like
a pool of jelly." Even if study is abandoned at this point, most dancers admit to having

Trisha Brown believes all dancers should study with Summers because of the sensitivity to the body Summers' training imparts and Summers' ability to analyze errorin
dance movement. Furtherstudy adds tension and movement to the basic vocabularyof
attitudes toward the body.
Unlike Ginsler and her disciples, who stress relaxation,Summers believes in the
efficacy of tension. She describes tension as the electricity of the muscles. The dancer,
she thinks, must be able to use the entire spectrum of tension. Instead of the more
usual, "How can you rid yourself of tension?" she asks, "How can tension be wholly
yours?" She replies, "Allof the answers are in you, you just have to look."The dancers
learn to identify tension and to be able to command it at will, placing it at their service.
Summers was not seeking to invent a new system of movement, but her approach
significantly alters movement, often with unusual results. When working on conventional dance postures such as the plie and turnout,an understanding of the underlying
anatomy radicallychanges and strengthens the movement. The turnoutand kinetics of
a plie are developed first from the pelvis, then through opening out the hip joints,
stretching the muscles of the thighs, moving to the knees-where the plie superficially
seems to originate-and then through the calves, ankles and feet. By working
organicallyand understandingthe physical basis for alignment, positions are achieved
with minimumstrain and a lessened risk of injury.
The same principles apply in a more free-form manner when creating and
choreographing movement using KineticAwareness. A movement might be developed
as follows: the dancer knows her leg, knows what feels good to it and she lets it stretch
itself. A typical solo might be: extend anything you want three times, and fall on the
floor. Summers says, "You get strange movements working this way but that is not
what you are looking for. What is more importantis the life of every partof the body."
Fast movements are not the most characteristic form of Kinetic Awareness. The
dancers develop the ability to achieve velocity while maintainingcomplete awareness
of their bodies.

Energy Changes
All of Summers' choreographyfrom the 1960s to the present includes elements of
Kinetic Awareness. Of all the dances, Energy Changes, first performedat NYU'sLoeb
Student Center in 1971 and still performedby the company, offers the most complete
utilizationof Kinetic Awareness. It embraces not only the vocabularyand discipline of
movement, but also its approach to time. The dance usually takes two and a half hours
but can take as long as six hours (Brooklyn Museum, 1976). When Summers first
presented the dance, she was concerned about how the extreme slowness of the movement would be received. In its early phases, the piece attacks the concept of dance as
action to be watched, and, at times, the movement occurs in such slight increments it is
almost invisible.
The September 1973 performance of EnergyChanges in the Sculpture Gardenof
the Museum of ModernArt is the most complete union of the Kinetic Awareness work
and Summers' other preoccupation, the use of multimedia. The dance took place at
sunset and the gradually failing light of dusk was part of the choreography. Twelve
dancers were positioned so that five could be seen from any point. In an early and innovative use of video, monitors were placed around the garden so the audience could
see the dancers in other parts of the garden. On the first night, handmade instruments

Energy Changes, Southampton, N.Y.

by PhillipCornerwere placed aroundthe garden for the audience to play.On the second
night, the music was by Carmen Moore.
Because the dancers were scattered around the garden like distributional
sculpture with no boundaries between audience and dance other than costume, the audience became an integral part of the choreography. Like the advice of the spiritual
teacher who told his pupil the only sure test of whether he had achieved inner peace
was if he could maintain the state in Times Square, the audience's presence was, in
part,a test of the dancers' training.Inthe slow phases, the dancers had to contend with
the presence of the audience watching them engaged in an inner process.

First Section: One hour. Dancers begin the dance lying, standing or in a squat
position. The goal of this section is for each dancer to let the body do what it wants to
do. The instruction is to take each partof the body and sense it completely-bone, skin
and muscle-and to fully articulate it, moving slowly and with little tension. The demon
of this section and, by extension, all dance growingout of KineticAwareness is, "Letus
ignore what the body wants to do and execute something spectacular." The dance is
destroyed if the dancer gives in to this impulse. Although the movement is often so
slight as to be subliminal, the audience senses the shift in emphasis, and the essence
of this section is the empathy the audience feels with the sensitivity the dance is expressing toward the body. It is a contact the audience does not have with their own
bodies. At the end of the hour, a voice says, "Change."
Second Section: Forty-fiveminutes. Moving as slowly as possible and sensing
every partof the body, the dancers change position, moving up to standing and down to
lying, taking the whole time of the section. A voice says, "Change."

Then speed and tension levels are added. The dancers use the momentum of the body,
coupled with its weight and gravity,to move it through space. The use of momentum
may be disquieting to watch because-in contradistinction to most dance, which is the
demonstration of disciplined technique-the dancers appearto be out of control. Once
speed is added to the grammarof actions, huge amounts of space can be covered. A
voice says, "Change."
Fifth Section: Fifteen minutes. Different types of interactions between dancers
occur. If this section is not the source for contact improvisation,it represents a case of
paralleldevelopment. The dancers commence by making eye contact with each other
and progress to touching. Threedifferent types of confrontationtakes place. Splatt has
elements of the game of "chicken." The dancers run at each other in a sometimes
violent exchange of impact and weight. Before the moment of impact they have the
choice of avoiding contact by falling or running around, or they can collide with a
"splatt" gesture, ricocheting off each other or embracing. Bear Dance follows. It is a

form of wrestling-a confrontation including tension and aggressive movement.

Energy Changes concludes with Pile-Up.The dancers run together and quickly construct a spontaneous geometric shape like a house of cards with the bodies as building
blocks. The configurations are often strange. The person at the bottom calls out a
numberreferringto one of the several methods of getting into the structure.The edifice
collapses. The dancers returnto theircorners and come back to builda differentshape,
which is in turn dissolved several times.
0

the period of Energy Changes's evolution, the composer Pauline Oliveros began to
study with Summers. Before meeting Summers, Oliveros had been involved in meditation. She had a meditation project where 20'people met for two hours a day; Summers
came and did KineticAwareness with them. At the same time, Oliveros had begun to do
sound workwith Summers' groups. Oliveros was fascinated with the concept of energy
changes and its use of the involuntarymode. To go with Summers' piece, she composed a meditation called Energy Changes that found ways to, instead of directing,
have the musicians enter the involuntarymode and make music naturally.The piece
succeeded only as long as the musicians treated the productionof sound like "the ebb
and flow of landscape" ratherthan tryingto make something out of it (Summers'demon
of theatricality).The technique of organic development was subsequently used in a
DrumMeditation.The composition starts with a single-stroke drumroll. The musician
is instructed to "first imagine the tempo, the dynamic qualityof the sound-till it starts
itself." Using Kinetic Awareness gave Oliveros a different perspective on her work.
Sound became based on breath and passing energy around.The physical positions of
the players became more important.

Solitary Geography
Solitary Geographywas performedat Merce Cunningham'sStudio in 1977 by Matt
Turneywith music by Pierre Ruiz.The performingspace is imagined as representing
both an innerand outer landscape. The dancer is seen as a solitary traveler.At the opening of the dance, Turneycircles the space three times, first walking and later leaping,
defining the parameters of the space. At times, she moves very close to the audience,
and their position locates one of her boundaries. Then, taking the longest line across
the space, the movement is extremely slow at first and it takes a half-hourto cross the
room. Inthe beginning of this section, the dancer turns her neck and body in minute increments, responding to sensations produced by the inner landscape made available
by Kinetic Awareness. In slow motion, Turneysenses the ground with her feet. As she
moves, it is not, in Summers' words, "that old description that walking is like catching
yourself from falling."Instead, there is a slow rollingmovement of the foot from heel to
ball and through the toes- Summers' optimum method of walking-accompanied by
subtle shifts in the neck and pelvis. The dancer then turns, revolvingwhile still exploring inner, physiological information. In subsequent passages of fast jumping, movement is shaped by an awareness of external forces such as gravityand air.A sequence
of arabesque and attitudes follows, where the body is perceived as a directional device
like a weathervane or compass. The choreographic structure lies in the concerns of
Kinetic Awareness and makes them the subject of the dance. This is seen in both the
slow subtle movements with their attention to the dynamics of unseen forces and the
bold broad movements that draw their strength from the application of Kinetic
Awareness to movement.
0*

Summers' choreography has included pieces such as Energy Changes

(1971), Crow's Nest (1980), Solitary Geography (1977), City Corners (1976),
IlluminatedWorkingman(1974),City People Moving(1970)and WalkingDance forAny
Number(1969).She has remained one of the least known of the Judson Dance Theatre

premises
movement. In ballet, separate recognition is given to the choreographer as creator of
a dance and to the dancers for their interpretationof the roles. Dancers do not expect
to become choreographers. The opposite has been true of modern dance. Every
dancer expects to become a choreographer although they are separate disciplines.
Moderndance choreographers are identified with a style of movement of which they
are the prime exemplars, and the dancers within the company rarely receive individual notice for their unique interpretations of a dance. Summers has always tended to focus on choreography, even before her osteo-arthritis severly curtailed the
possibility of performing. This has tended to short-circuit her identification with a
particular style. More important has been her refusal to develop a single style of
dance with a constant and identifiable "look." Her eclectic approach has caused her
rarely to use the same kind of movement in subsequent pieces. Her underlying
premise is that one can do anything. Studying Kinetic Awareness, she believes,
makes the body naturally want to explore the limits of movement. As it develops
strength, the body does not want to be restricted to particularmovements, including
the natural movements that were the hallmarkof the Judson Dance Theatre. If the
capabilities of the body are explored, the movement begins to look "dancy," rather
than natural. (It is interesting to note in this light that some of the Judson Church
dancers have given up their minimal movements for work that reflects trained dance
technique.) Summers has acknowledged that she knew all along that her catholic approach would be a problem, but she felt it was worth the risk because dance can only
be free when it refuses to be limited.
I say yes to all forms of dance, yes. Though I might not want to do
them all, I think all movement is wonderful. Each style is identified
by what it leaves out as much as what it uses of movement possibilities... Kinetic Awareness is the beginning of real total dance.

Woosterteachesarthistoryat KeanCollege;herpiece on YvonneRainerappeared

Ann-Sargent
in T86.