Gardens of Light and Movement: Elaine Summers in conversation with Kristine Marx

Transcription

1 Gardens of Light and Movement: Elaine Summers in conversation with Kristine Marx Kristine Marx PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, PAJ 90 (Volume 30, Number 3), September 2008, pp (Article) Published by The MIT Press For additional information about this article Access provided at 15 Apr :12 GMT with no institutional affiliation

2 GARDENS OF LIGHT AND MOVEMENT Elaine Summers in conversation with Kristine Marx 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 osteo-arthritis 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 Summers founded the Kinetic Awareness Center in 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 This interview was taped in Elaine Summers s SoHo loft during April May j 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 Kristine Marx PAJ 90 (2008), pp

3 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 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 1964 we did the first intermedia piece at Judson. When you entered the theatre there was a big sheet split in half. When the dancer came on she danced through and around the sheet, with the film projected onto the sheet. The dancer could go in and out any way she wanted to. It was improvised. There was a minimal score. We also included audience participation. They got up, went through the film, danced in it and sat down. Nobody told them to do that. We weren t doing Minimalism. Nobody was consciously doing Minimalism. Everybody was engaged in the chance method, which was to free you from your known expectations, limitations, what you thought you wanted to make. It was a way to break out of the prison of what you were taught to do; what you probably did very well. Everybody was a trained dancer, but we all had this feeling, partially from Merce Cunningham, partially from Anna Halprin. I certainly came into this thinking I don t want dancers that are all the same size. The ideas I had were not ballet. Fantastic Gardens was another early intermedia piece. Can you describe the performance? Well, again it s got long feet or tentacles or something. I was fooling around with Fantastic Gardens mentally before Judson. In February of 1964 I made it. I invited every artist I ever knew to agree to dance in it and to make sculpture. There was a 26 PAJ 90

4 whole group of artists participating. The sculptors were Al Hansen, Carol Summers (then husband of Elaine Summers), Ira Matterson, Bill Myers, and Robert Banieri. All along for about three years I had been making film. For Fantastic Gardens I used every bit of film I ever made. It starts out with the audience looking at the altar. There are women in black evening gowns, except for Sally Gross. Sally wore a white silk eighteenth-century dress that Theresa Summers (former mother-in-law) had bought at an auction. There was Sally all in white silk and everybody else in black. They re on a stage. The men are dressed in black ties, dinner jackets, bare feet and white gloves. They re standing on the floor. It starts out with the women coming onto their backs with their feet turned up and then rolling down. Then they do a dance where they re improvising. One couple is doing the cha-cha. Another couple is doing the tango. So we have eight couples doing this crazy dance. Then they played statues, literally, you know, the old children s game. That was the first dance. My friend Jim Wilson wrote the script for a dance based on the chance method. The dance included every one dancing through the entire space and everyone had lines to say as part of the text. Rudy Perez came diagonally across the stage leaping and jumping. I said I don t care how you jump, just jump get off the ground. He jumped and ran all the way across a line saying, mother let go of my tongue! Everybody was still dancing. Ruth Emerson was there, who is very tall and an exquisite dancer. I said to her, as you turn, lean out as far from your feet as you possibly can. Oh, she was beautiful! And she did it in a big circle. So everybody had big movement. But in the meantime, Sally Stackhouse and Freddy Herko came in nude, separately. They made another diagonal through what was going on. The painter Elizabeth Munro painted their bodies. They went across the room and she painted them. They went by again and she painted some more. They did this the whole time. By the end of the performance they looked like iridescent dragonflies. They didn t have a stitch on. They looked absolutely great. And then it s intermission. The dancers and audience left and we arranged a huge circle of chairs in the middle of the floor. We made a big pyramid of chairs. In the middle was an empty space which had in it eight sculptures by different sculptors that the dancers could climb into. There were no lights. I gave the audience little mirrors that I bought on Canal Street. As the audience returned after intermission, the whole place was covered in film images. It s film all around the hall. The projections are moving in slow motion on the ceiling and on the walls is every film I could collage together. The audience had the mirrors reflecting the light from the projections. Everybody looked like they had flames. Of course I didn t see this because I was running the projector, but I saw it in a photograph later by Walter Giese. Running through the film collage are small stories. Freddie Herko is the star of the little vignette of the city gardener watering strange flowers he is growing in garbage cans. I filmed it on my street Cornelia Street. It was shot just for Fantastic Gardens. MARX / Gardens of Light and Movement 27

5 After the second intermission, the audience found their chairs facing the opposite direction. They were facing the back of the church and the balcony with a split screen. I had made a film of a choreographed dance with Sally Stackhouse. She took the material that was in the film and did the same dance. It was the same material but it just happened at a different time. Freddy joined her and it became a duet. How did your work during the Judson years affect the rest of your career? Almost everything our minds love, our minds gobble up. I finally decided at twentyeight to come to New York and get serious about dance. I was coming from a ballet and modern dance background to a place where everyone is doing such wonderful things. Just hearing theory that I had never heard before was important. You need to exchange ideas and see things that you had only been dreaming of. Of course the concepts started with Isadora (Duncan) saying, why would you wear toe shoes? You might as well limit yourself to dancing on your hands. And it all made perfect sense. I didn t need any explanation. I just needed to hear somebody say it out loud. The spread of ideas... the way that your mind sees something because of the history of your mind, what it s been exposed to, what it has dreamed but never has seen, is important. There is something in life that we are meant to explore, that we re meant to find and play with. Think about the importance of everyone doing what his or her mind wants to do and is constructive. It s wonderful that we can do that. Before Judson, you studied with Merce Cunningham. What was that experience like? After leaving Juilliard, I decided just to continue on my own and study with independent teachers. I went to Jean Erdman and Merce. Of course, Merce became very important especially because of what he was teaching. He was setting up workshops where he taught his dances. What was it about the workshops that was important to you? Well, you know there s a classic way to train. You go in, you warm up, and you do your technique. You end up jumping and leaping which is very exciting so everybody claps and then you go home. Now you should go and dance. Everyone should be able to dance immediately after they take the class. Merce realized this. He realized so many things. I used to go to his concerts. It was like going into a big garden. He opened the gate and you looked down a pathway and it was a rich wonderful place to go. Then he d close the door and he d open another one. So he was always opening up different gardens to you. At the time I was very involved in thinking about gardens. When I first went to see Paul Taylor s concert, I looked down and thought he s in my garden! Well, it turns out that the gardens are very many and there s plenty of room. 28 PAJ 90

6 In keeping with this metaphor, what were some of the gardens that Cunningham showed you? It s not so definitive. It s just another part of dance, or what I call kinetic imagination, and it s hard to verbalize. He had a relationship to concepts and ideas, which is strange because he was so non-verbal. But maybe it isn t so strange. He isn t really non-verbal. His books are amazing. Maybe that s very much a part of his quietness. Maybe by being so quiet he gets to hear what his spirit and imagination have to say and he s busy with that all the time. His intermedia works and exploration of light are the most magnificent I have ever seen. With Merce it was a recognition. Like with Paul I thought, he s in my garden. So it was the first expression for me that I have a garden and it has particular characteristics or qualities. That connects with my idea that there is inside of us something that we re essentially interested in. For me I discovered that it was light, and therefore dark, and movement. I like to look at movement, think about movement, and light. That s where my imagination likes to live. I think I discovered this on a grant very early and realized that I could be a landscape architect. It was when I was traveling in England, France, and Italy. I think it was triggered by the gardens in Paris. I had just come from England and I did not like London. When I got to the Parisian gardens I knew why. London is a very gray and brown city. Every corner in the city had a military statue. It s rather oppressive. I didn t think about it until I got to Paris and I saw the trees, the sense of air and space and the color of the buildings. The whole city is a wonderful garden. Your interest in light reminds me of your work Windows in the Kitchen, the film and intermedia piece from 1980 with the dancer Matt Turney. In the film there is the dancer s beautiful movement and also the manipulation of movement through editing. Turney danced in front of a wall of windows. The light coming through was also a very important element in the piece. It had as much of a presence as the dancer. Yes. And that s film. Of course projected film is also light and you have projected your films onto dancers to create intermedia pieces. What are some of your ideas about using light and the body in intermedia works such as Crow s Nest from 1980? The big thing is the change of scale that is possible. The figures come close to you and the image is larger or they go the other way and the image becomes smaller. It s working with scale. The film footage for Crow s Nest showed a tiny flower up close that looked giant on the screen. The dancer standing in it looked very tiny. There s a section of rocks where the dancer looked huge. I learned from other works like Walking Dance for Any Number, that with intermedia you have to break the screen so that it becomes dimensional, instead of the dancer being just up against the screen. The screens for Crow s Nest are hung so that the dancers move in-between them. MARX / Gardens of Light and Movement 29

7 Sometimes the dancers are out in front of the screen and sometimes they are hidden in-between the screens. When they are behind the screens they disappear. How is intermedia different from multimedia? Multimedia just means many images. Intermedia is a way that we make rainbows. The rainbow is not the sun. It s not the rain or the mist. It s something that s made between all these things and in space. The projection has to be on the dancer to make it intermedia, rather than multimedia. Intermedia is when you enter the image and get wrapped up in it. You become a part of the image. One of your recent intermedia works is Hidden Forest. It was performed in 2007 at Lincoln Center. In this work you used some of the footage from Flowing Rock/Still Water, which was performed ten years earlier, also at Lincoln Center. What is the connection between these works? Jenneth Webster, the curator of the outdoor festivals, had been talking to me for many years about doing an intermedia piece. Flowing Rock was performed in 1987 where there was a pool. The films went up on the white wall. The dancers were up against the white walls and the image was reflected perfectly in the pool identically. It made the cement walkway disappear and the dancers looked as if they were floating on the water. James Byrnes, Shigeko Kubota, and Davidson Gigliotti filmed the event. I told them that I am not at all interested in a documentary but I would love it if they shot what they saw. The video from Flowing Rock was used in Hidden Forest. Hidden Forest was performed in a section of the garden. We projected the video onto the trees and the dancers. It was very dark and the dancers wore silvery costumes. We cut the video from Flowing Rock and projected it so it looked like ghosts from the past. That was the idea. The video was on the dancers bodies and the tree leaves and trunks and the ground. You have continued to create intermedia pieces since the sixties. What are you working on now? I am working with Andrew Lampert, the archival director of Anthology Film Archives and Dan Streible, the deputy of Cinema Studies at New York University. We are going to produce an intermedia work at Anthology Film Archives of Illuminated Workingman. We are using the outside walls of Anthology s building on Second Avenue and Second Street. I have this wonderful group of dancers that I have been teaching and working with. I ve been working with them for about three or four years. Illuminated Workingman was done first in Buffalo in June We did it in collaboration with the University of Buffalo. The whole of Buffalo contributed to it and supported it. 30 PAJ 90

8 So it first was made as a tribute to the workingman of Buffalo? Yes. The thing about working men and women is that they wear costumes. They have to signal with their hands because they can t talk to each other. In Buffalo, I went to the railroad yards and saw that they all wore bright flowered cotton hats of red and blue so that they could be seen. So it was like a banquet of beautiful people doing everyday things. How are you altering the piece to fit the situation in New York? The square where it was performed in Buffalo was huge. So it won t be that big in New York. In Buffalo, people who own the construction companies had just bought brand new giant machines bright yellow and I thought if I could just have those for the stages. And they gave them to me! They had never been used. The dancers danced on top of them. In New York the dancers will be on the street and on ladders with the projections on the outside walls of buildings. One of the things I was enchanted with in New York was what I call Con Edison s gardens, where they dig a big hole in the middle of the street and they put up yellow tape or barriers around it. I would like to do the performance in more than one location in New York. How do you see the arc of your career from your early work with Judson to your recent intermedia pieces such as Hidden Forest and the New York variation of Illuminated Workingman? It s all about light and movement. That s the whole thing for me. Your work in intermedia led to establishing the Experimental Intermedia Foundation. How did the foundation begin? I thought I d like to have a place where artists could try things and if it didn t work it would be ok. I wanted a place where they could experiment in the form of intermedia. The Experimental Intermedia Foundation was one of the first foundations for this form. With four thousand dollars, I had found this exquisite loft with thirteen windows looking out onto Third Avenue. It was between Lafayette and Third. It had a big studio space and an editing room. There was rehearsal space, equipment, and editing decks for the artists. We had all of our classes there and showed film. We had nine artists and they were awarded a grant for a year. I started it in 1968 and quit in 1986 and Phill Niblock took over. It s still going strong. Phill carries on the tradition of being helpful to other artists. You have worked not only as a dancer, choreographer, filmmaker and intermedia artist, but you have also been a teacher and developer of Kinetic Awareness. How did you get involved with this form of body therapy? I came to New York and I auditioned for Juilliard at twenty-eight thinking this is silly. If it doesn t work, I ll go to Columbia and get a masters degree in ceramics. I was just in love with ceramics as I was with dance at the time. But they accepted MARX / Gardens of Light and Movement 31

9 me to Julliard. I was so happy there where I met Carolyn Brown and Paul Taylor. We were all in the same class. It was heaven. I was there for a term, but towards the end of the term I had terrible pain in my hip joint. I finally realized after visits with three different doctors that I was not going to be able to continue because I was diagnosed with osteo-arthritis. But some dancing idiot inside me said, oh yes you re going to continue! When I discovered that I had osteo-arthritis I was seeing a therapist. So I laughed and told her, well guess what I got. My therapist said why are you laughing? Of course I then cried immediately. I cried for six months. That s how I found Kinetic Awareness. My therapist told me that there are two women in the city and why don t you take a class and let me know what you think. One of them was Carola Speads and the other Charlotte Selver, teachers of the great work of Elsa Gindler. How do you define Kinetic Awareness? The Kinetic Awareness Center is dedicated to the research, development, and understanding of the human body. We could add yours in particular. It s about what you can do to heal the body and to take care of the body based on the facts of kinesiology, anatomy and physiology. It s a constant investigation because life is dangerous and difficult and we re not going to live forever. It s an infinitely expansive world. No sooner do you learn something then there s more and more to learn. We re developing new parts of ourselves because we have so many minds. Elsa Gindler is an important figure in the early development of Kinetic Awareness. How long did you study with her? I studied with Elsa for three years. I had just started to put together going to the studio three hours a day by myself. What I found out is that I didn t even want to get off the floor. So I spent three months on the floor at Elks Brothers Hall in Woodstock, New York. And if I lie on the floor for three hours and wiggle my left finger and become cognizant of its possibilities, realizing what that left finger can do well, than that is my morning s dance work. That was very hard. Then gradually I began to understand kinesthetically when my own body wanted to resist gravity and move. As a major figure in the development of Kinetic Awareness, how do you feel you contributed to this field? The structure of my work in relation to Elsa s and other people s is that I focus on the facts. I began to seriously study anatomy. I found, just as with my love of light and movement, that I loved anatomy. I used to read poetry and plays. Suddenly, I d go into a bookstore and I d come out with anatomy books. I felt that I wanted to know the elements of the body. What is this instrument? I was studying with Elsa and was beginning to think very differently about the body... what is it? What does it do? 32 PAJ 90

10 My contribution to the field of Kinetic Awareness is the acceptance of the necessity to investigate and understand your body. Your mind collects what it s really interested in. There was a whole feeling at that time that it didn t matter what shape you were, what your dimensions were. But I knew that someone with long legs and a small, short pelvis... well, hell with a body like that you can really do an arabesque! I was never going to do an arabesque like that. I have my own gifts, but that s not one of them. It does make a difference what you can do depending on your dimensions, your structure. Your body is a universe. It takes a whole lifetime to understand it and just as you think you understand it, it changes. When students come to me for a Kinetic Awareness session I ask them to lie down and I look at their legs to see right away is there any genetic malformation because it s not nice to work with someone with a malformation who keeps demanding that she do the same thing as someone who doesn t have that. Now, what are you going to do? Are you going to give up dancing? No. Your body and your kinetic life spirit are dancing. And can dance their dance. One s body is the instrument that an individual has to explore the world. Through your shape and limitations, you understand your environment in a different way than somebody else with a different kind of body. It s a universe of differences. Little tiny differences that make all the difference. My mind puts together past experiences like a quilt. Things that happened years ago I suddenly realize what they mean and what they explain. When I was twelve, we lived in an apartment. I danced all the time. We had a wonderful chandelier. I got a good grip on it and I started practicing backbends because I don t backbend very well. And I fainted. I woke up with the chandelier on my lap. I didn t get scared. I don t know why I didn t get scared, but it never happened again. Then when I m forty I find out that I have a really severe scoliosis and I remember that incident. I remember wondering about it. So, all of the things that happen to us seem illogical based on if you do twenty-nine thousand backbends you re going to have a great backbend. Well, maybe not. Maybe you don t need to have a good backbend. Maybe that s not necessary to dance your dance. That s the interesting thing about a limitation. It doesn t have to necessarily be a hindrance, but could be something with which to work and turn into a strength. Your genetic structure can either be your fate or it can be just an influence or something that you take advantage of. Meredith Monk has a long torso and short legs. She learned how to dance with her body, not trying to look like the ballet model. And she s beautiful! The idea of what you should do and what you shouldn t is from the beginning of time. Different cultures have different wisdoms and different stupidities. There is so much to understand. I think we have jobs to do. MARX / Gardens of Light and Movement 33

11 What are our jobs? What we discover by listening to the voice inside. Your mind is out there looking for what its job is. Sometimes we don t know what its job is for a long time. Sometimes we know in two minutes. Sometimes we know when we are very young. You once said to me that everyone is his or her own healer. One of the rules when you re learning to teach Kinetic Awareness is that we do not do anything that causes pain. We learn to listen to it and acknowledge it and feel it. Then we see how we can move without pain. As a teacher, I m just talking with you and listening and then you can hear yourself. I m giving support for that part of yourself. It s all about you learning your own system. Learning the language of your own body. I m not teaching you anything. I m helping you to discover yourself, to discover the language of pain. What tells you what is good for you and what is not good for you? If it hurts, it s not good. What is nerve pain? Nerves have their own way of being and talking to us. You really do know. It s all inside you. You have talked about the kinetic mind. And you mentioned earlier the mind in plural. How is the kinetic mind different from, say, the analytical mind? That whole thing of different minds is that they are different gifts that are born in us. It s the inner voice that we become aware of because of our inner genetic self which is very solid and it will do what it will do. I paid attention to it. A couple times in my life I fought for something really hard. I had no idea I was going to do it. When I was a girl, I found a real ballet teacher and my mother said I couldn t go to the classes, it was too professional. She didn t want me to do it and she wasn t going to pay for it. I said, fine I ll pay for it myself. So I got a job. She wanted all the money from my job and I wouldn t give her any. I told her that this was something that I wanted and I was going to earn it. I couldn t believe I was doing this. I should have sacrificed anything to make her happy, but no. The voice came from inside. Inside of those experiences are things where you find your voice because it doesn t shut up. And then you are able to act on it and take the risk. When did you set up the Kinetic Awareness Center? In1968. A lot of things happened in the sixties. I had been in the dance world. I studied with Mary Anthony who was a marvelous teacher and very copasetic with Kinetic Awareness. I could see that she was working with breath. I have around six master teachers teaching at the college level and every one of them is different. Jill Green is at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She has a doctorate and is capable of doing research in this area. She s initiating a doctoral program in somatics, which includes getting a certificate in Kinetic Awareness. She has her first research grant to investigate how Kinetic Awareness does or does not help in the recovery from breast cancer. She has that program going. 34 PAJ 90

12 As in the spirit of Kinetic Awareness, you have pared down much of your work to its basic structure. The dance piece One and One and One and... from 1969 is an example. In that work you re using a dance score, which is a primary structure.... It s an elementary form. What does it actually do? What belongs to that form? And that form of course comes about from the sky, from light and dark, and probably, you know, Merce saying that there are only eight movements. It s not so complex, right? There s light. Now is light different than dark? Or is dark a variation of light? Or is light a variation of dark? If you re working with light you re really exploring the world of light. How do the dance scores in your choreography structure the dance. One and One is the perfect example. I can say it in one sentence and you can do it the rest of your life. The score is that you can do any movement you want once. You can say any word you want once. You can do anything once. If you forget and repeat, and make a mistake you say uh oh. Everybody loves that part. It s the perfect essential score for improvisation. The score doesn t change, but its realization is infinite. You also used a dance score in Walking Dance for Any Number from One of the instructions in this dance was that the dancer couldn t fall. Yes, and how did I know that? It didn t work. Falling destroyed the whole thing and I don t know why. If everybody is walking and one of the ten or fifteen dancers falls, it doesn t work for the whole dance. The choreography is not an improvisation after awhile. The dancer is improvising and that s why I write in the program realized by the dancers. The score itself is a set of limitations that do not change. If you change one of the rules, you either have made a new dance or a version of the same dance. This goes back to the limitations of the body we were talking about with Kinetic Awareness. I mean how you become aware of the shape of your body and what that means in relation to how you re functioning in the world kinetically and the kinds of experiences that you have. The dance score is interesting because it s a simple set of instructions from which the dancers improvise. So you re setting up limits that allow an openness for all kinds of variations to occur. This seems to be a theme that underlies the myriad forms that you have worked in over the years dance, intermedia, dance film, film, and your work with Kinetic Awareness. Yes, and the Kinetic Awareness teaching helps me to do that. Because I m not saying to you breathe ten times and then exhale through your eyebrows. I m saying feel your breathing and then I will tell you things that are true. You never have to think about inhaling. It s a score in your central nervous system. You must inhale. You will inhale. MARX / Gardens of Light and Movement 35

13 Breathing is the natural score of our bodies. You can count on it. You may not inhale as deeply as someone else or you may inhale more. It doesn t matter. You have the experience that gives you confidence in your body. And then you have to notice it. All I do is open the garden door like Merce. Your body knows that you know. That s what I mean about the relationship to the reality of your body, which includes all its experiences: good, bad, and indifferent. KRISTINE MARX is a video and installation artist. She exhibits her work at Plane Space, New York, and Fringe Exhibitions, Los Angeles. She teaches studio art courses at Parsons School of Design and Hunter College in New York City. 36 PAJ 90

14 Illuminated Workingman, 1975, Buffalo, NY. Photo: Paula Court. Courtesy Elaine Summers. MARX / Gardens of Light and Movement 37

15 Film still from Walking Dance for Any Number, Photo: Phill Niblock. Courtesy Elaine Summers. 38 PAJ 90

16 Top: Crow s Nest premiered at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in Photo: Davidson Gigliotti. Courtesy Elaine Summers. Bottom: Fantastic Gardens at Judson Memorial Church, New York, NY, Photo: Walter Giese. Courtesy Elaine Summers. MARX / Gardens of Light and Movement 39

17 WALKING DANCE FOR ANY NUMBER (1969) a dance score, with or without film A dance score for 2 10 performers. The performers may be dancers, actors, athletes, or anybody who likes to explore action. Each performer enters the performing area in any style of walk he or she chooses; the walker maintains this walk for however long he or she is interested in it. The walk, once it is begun, must maintain its rhythm, size, and style of step from the hip to the feet. This may not be changed until the change rule is used. However, the use of the head, arms, shoulders, torso, or pelvis may be varied as desired, as long as the walk itself remains the same, e.g., one may choose to begin with a slow, small step on half toe sustaining this pattern while rotating the head, and then perhaps adding or changing to extending the arms, or arching the upper back or undulating the torso, or leaning backward, etc. This kind of exploration can be infinite. When the walker wishes to change, he must STOP IN MID STEP. (Do not shift or fudge the feet.) Hold this stopped position as long as you wish. When you are ready to begin a new walk, extend the position you are in to any direction until you lose your balance. While going off-balance, catch yourself with a new walk determined by your off-balance momentum. You may go forward, backward, diagonal, sideward, etc. BUT YOU MUST NEVER FALL. DO NOT FALL EVER DURING THE ENTIRE DANCE. Being impelled by catching your weight off-balance, you will find your next walk. Once you have begun the walk, you must again sustain it until you are ready to STOP, and repeat the above instructions. Interaction among the performers If another performer wishes to, and can maintain his own walk, he or she may try to take you along. You may resist with your own pattern or, if you are in a stopped position, you may join his or her pattern. If you should have a 2, 3, 4 or more collision or pile up, all sorts of wonderful walks at variance can occur, but it is mandatory that everyone try not to fall. You may imitate another walker s pattern in the upper body while maintaining your own feet pattern. You may not run, skip, leap you must base all your action on some kind of walk: swift, slow, hesitating, circular, directional, low, high, large steps, half toe, knees bent or straight, etc. Performing the score with film The performers wear any kind of white clothing, so that their bodies will serve as mobile screens. They enter in the dark thirty seconds before the film begins in their first walking pattern, performing the score throughout the films and continuing in the dark for thirty seconds after the film is over. ONE AND ONE AND ONE AND ONE... (1969) One and one and one and one PAJ 90