In the 1960s, Paul Sanasardo’s technique classes were the most rigorous modern dance classes in New York City. Many people in his advanced class became notable dance artists. The lead male dancer of Sanasardo’s company, Manuel Alum, was outstanding in that class. Graced with physical beauty as well as a strong sense discipline, he performed, whether in class or onstage, with a piercing intensity. When I saw a concert of his, I was blown away by his portrayal in The Cellar (1967): gripping, extreme, courageous. His authenticity and craft continued throughout his oeuvre of more than fifty works. Like many men in the dance community, tragically, he died of AIDS in the prime of life.

“I listen to Mozart always as more like being in a mountain…There’s a spirituality that a mountain has, the spiral ascending. I’ve always been attracted to that.” —Manuel Alum

Cellar, ph Milton Oleaga, JErome Robbins Dance Division, NYPL

Manuel Alum was a dancer of uncommon gifts. Whether expanding into space with grandeur, or responding to an internal voice, he was a compelling figure onstage. Dance artist Margaret  Beals recalled his “dark, soulful eyes and a body of liquid steel.”[1] Scholar and former Sanasardo dancer Mark Franko described him as a “riveting soloist whose intensity had a cool, almost schizoid detachment.”[2] New York critic Zita Allen wrote that “he pounces on movement with a falcon’s precision.”[3]

Alum was also a singular choreographer, creating mystical solos and swirling group pieces that mixed classical ballet and space-sculpting modern dance. He was not in the vanguard at the time, but he dug deep into the human psyche, and his rawness made for vivid dances. Chicago critic Linda Winer wrote of his mind/body integration that he was one of those “rare souls whose conceptual and technical wizardry are backed by a sympathetic kind of brain. Whatever he did, his mind did too.”[4] He explored rituals of other cultures, prompting Franko to write that “Alum initiated a form of choreographic multiculturalism.”[5] His dances had a spiritual component that was expressed in a variety of ways. Commissions came to him from companies across the modern/ballet divide, including Dance Theatre of Harlem, the Hartford Ballet Company, Ballet Rambert in London, Ballet Hispanico, Washington Ballet, and the Bat-Dor Company of Israel.

Born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, Alum’s first encounter with dance came when the great Cuban ballerina, Alicia Alonso, rehearsed in a room in his father’s hotel. “I used to bring her towels,”[6] Manuel remembered. At the age of 12, he visited Chicago and decided to stay there with his grandmother. He studied painting, but a class with Jamaican modern dancer Neville Black opened a window into dance. Seeing his natural talent, Black offered him a year-long scholarship and a spot in his company. While in Chicago, Alum saw Sybil Shearer perform—and he found his calling. In her improvised solos, the extraordinary Shearer could keep a (small) audience spellbound while spinning a tapestry of quirky moves. Alum has said, “I felt she was doing with her body what I was doing with my abstract paintings.”[7] In 1961, Alum moved to New York, where he studied at the Martha Graham school on scholarship while supporting himself with restaurant jobs. But after two years at the Graham studio, he felt, “It was not the place for me to grow.”[8] He wanted to make dances, but her company members were expected to devote themselves solely to her choreography. A fellow student at the Graham School, Diane Germaine, brought him to the studio of Paul Sanasardo in Chelsea. Sanasardo, a commanding performer, had been in the original cast of Anna Sokolow’s masterpiece Rooms (1955), which depicts urban alienation in a searing, powerful way. In his own work, Sanasardo took Sokolow’s expressionism to tortured—and torturing—extremes.

Donya Feuer and Paul Sanasardo, 1961 NY Times

Sanasardo and Donya Feuer, a Juilliard graduate, had started the Studio for Dance in 1958; it immediately grew into a vital hub of experimentation in a vein that could be categorized as dance theater. The m.o. was to delve into the human psyche with a dramatic edge, producing works that Franko characterized as “personal and poetic as well as provocative and disturbing.”[9]

In order to produce these collaborations, the Studio for Dance cultivated an environment that offered a sense of possibility. In a conversation quoted by Franko, Feuer waxed eloquent about her partnership with Sanasardo:

Being together made it possible to be what I would like to call “safe.” The world really could be just what this was, and nothing else. I think it was that that was so beautiful about the Studio for Dance, that it was filled with this kind of energy and belief, and way to work, and dedication. And it was also a kind of liquidity where courage was not a question: everything was possible, nothing was impossible. You could talk about beautiful things; you could talk about brutal things; all of it belonged to something bigger than that.[10]

Conceptually, philosophically, psychologically, as articulated by Franko, this approach sought to replace alienation with intensity.[11]

Feuer, however, departed for Sweden in 1963, at which point Sanasardo’s influence loomed larger. Because Alum arrived in late 1962, he did not have a chance to really work with Feuer. But he obviously was enthralled by Sanasardo’s intensity and experience. One of the positive aspects of Sanasardo’s influence was that he valued classical training, and he urged his dancers to study with Mia Slavenska, the Croatian former star of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo—which Alum did, along with classes from Maggie Black, former assistant to Antony Tudor, and Karel Shook, co-founder of Dance Theatre of Harlem. Within a couple of years, he attained a level of technical mastery that anchored his dancing. Almost immediately, he became a principal dancer as well as assistant to the director of the Paul Sanasardo Dance Company.

Sanasardo encouraged Manuel to choreograph, giving him space to rehearse, organizing shared concerts, and helping with design elements. The first opportunity for Alum to show his own work was in 1963, when Sanasardo engaged Judson Hall, a midtown space, for three of his top dancers to show their choreography: Judith Blackstone, who had performed with Sanasardo and Feuer since she was 10; Germaine, a strong, forceful dancer; and Alum. For Manuel’s first solo, Wings I Lack (sometimes called Of Wings I Lack), Sanasardo helped make the wooden wing that was essential to the piece. Alum appreciated the support during the ten years he was with the Sanasardo company, saying, “I was given the opportunity to make mistakes.”[12]

During the 1966-67 season, Sanasardo produced a series at the 92nd Street YM-YWHA, the bastion of modern dance in mid-century New York City. The series included his repertoire as well as pieces made by six of his dancers (Blackstone, Germaine, Franko, Alum, Cliff Keuter, and Elina Mooney). The critic Clive Barnes praised Sanasardo’s generosity in give this opportunity to young dancers. Barnes singled out Manuel’s choreography, noting that his solo Storm “produced oddly frozen posés set against a scene of tarlatan tundra, suggesting the bleakest desolation.” Also on the program were two other pieces by Alum: The Offering, a trio with religious overtones, and Nightbloom, a quartet with nature imagery.

The Cellar, shown the following year, was his breakout piece. A dark, compressed solo, it premiered on the Inside Modern Dance series at the New School for Social Research in 1967. It turned a limited vocabulary into a nightmare of claustrophobia, packing an emotional punch in a mere eight minutes. Both sound and sight were unnerving. A fast-ticking noise by Polish film composer Wojciech Kilar sometimes escalated into what critic Don McDonagh called “mechanical screeching.”[13] Alum crunched his body into a tight ball, signaling self-protection, a return to the womb, or sheer paranoia. Then he stretched up tall with big, precarious shapes. It was difficult for some audience members to sit through, but for some, the extreme imagery got burned into the memory.

First page of series in TDR, Spring 1969

One image in the Photo Interpretation series © Max Waldman,

Clive Barnes saw the solo figure as a man “imprisoned by his own agony.”[14] Don McDonagh wrote that it had “a compelling, obsessive quality like a Poe short story.”[15] Tom Borek, commenting in Dance Magazine, said it “almost reaches the breaking point of madness;” he proclaimed it “an outstanding piece itself in the entire field of dance.”[16]

The Cellar was so visually stark that The Drama Review published an unprecedented twelve-page photo essay by the legendary Max Waldman. The images show, in Waldman’s famously black-and-white, grainy texture, Alum grasping himself in a fetal position. With fingers splayed open and feet turning inward, the images suggest extremes of fear, despair, and loneliness. This seems like a figure just after birth or just before death.

While Alum could always rely on his own electric performances for solos, choreography for ensemble works required a different skill set, which he developed quickly. He premiered Palomas (the Spanish word for doves), an anti-war piece for six women wearing pale grey, with the Northern Westchester Dance Company, where he’d been teaching. He later set it on Sanasardo’s company, and it also appeared on the first full evening of Manuel’s own work at the 92nd Street Y in 1970—the year he started his company.

Felicia Norton, a lead dancer in Alum’s company, remembers the ballet well. In her solo section, she said, it “felt like a plea for peace, and I remember at times opening my costume skirt fabric to allude to the wings of a dove or a prayer flag and hovering over the earth and opening to the sky.” She also remembered a particular fall that all six dancers did: “We opened out into a full body straddle, arcing back to one’s full extent, and then we fell [forward] flat to the ground…It was as if the whole body screamed and then descended with impact to the earth.”[17]

Felicia Norton in Palomas, 1974, Courtesy Felicia, ph unknown

When Clive Barnes saw Palomas at the Y, he called the dance “a true beauty.”[18] In fact, he was so impressed with the entire concert that he announced that it “marked the arrival of a potential major force in modern‐dance.”[19]

While Palomas pled for peace, Era (1970) gave a picture of rebellion. The ten dancers gradually became rambunctious, running around and bothering each other, either attacking or protecting someone else. With music by Penderecki contributing to a growing sense of anxiety, the group broke off into pairs of combatants. As Norton said, “It was the feeling of unrest in the world.” To give it a sense of spontaneity, Alum changed the order of the solos each time. According to Germaine, “You were out there pacing around and crisscrossing everybody, and Manuel…he’d run around and weave through and tag somebody. Then that person had to do their little improvised solo and tag somebody else. You never knew who he was going to tag and when.”[20]

For a while, the artistic relationship between Sanasardo and Alum was mutually beneficial. Doris Hering, premier Dance Magazine writer, effused about both of them as choreographers when she saw their concert at Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1971. After giving a poetic evocation of Sanasardo’s work as “a darkening pond,” she wrote, “What I like most in the choreography of both Sanasardo and Alum is the deep sense of responsibility. It extends them beyond themselves. More than that it affects their beautifully trained and obviously committed company. It also frees their choreography.”[21]

Just as Sanasardo was instrumental in Alum’s artistic growth, the younger dancer was instrumental in the older dancer’s choreographic career. Alum not only lent his gifts as a performer to many Sanasardo works, he ultimately contributed eight ballets to the company’s repertoire.

Sanasardo Dance Company brochure, with Alum’s name featured, BAM, 1971, photo of Sanasardo ©Max Waldman

As often happens in the dance world, mentor and disciple became lovers. Sanasardo was not by nature monogamous; relationships were messy. Blackstone described the situation: “There was a lot of drama, and Manuel was very sensitive and very vulnerable. He was a wounded person. So the tension with Paul didn’t help that at all. There was a lot of harshness and a lot, a lot of trauma. Drama-trauma.”[22]

All this was destabilizing for Alum. Germaine tells of a time when he went AWOL while working on his first solo. He was upset with Germaine for not readily coming to watch his rehearsal. But there was a larger issue. In his hand he held a small crucifix that was possibly a gift from Sanasardo. (More about religious symbols later.) With that crucifix, according to Germaine, he punched his fist into the window of the studio and ran downstairs and into the street. It took a while for Germaine and her fellow dancers to calm him down. Perhaps this was a case of vulnerability being strength, because that very woundedness ultimately contributed to his unique movement vocabulary.[23]

One of the more durable dances that Alum contributed to the Sanasardo rep was Nightbloom (1966), originally for Willa Kahn, Mark Franko, Joan Lombardi, and Alum. It opened with the four dancers on their backs, feet cycling in the air like budding stamens and pistils at warp speed to music by experimental Polish composer Kazimierz Serocki. Willa Kahn, a luscious mover, had a slow, deep bodied solo that added an element of pathos. While kneeling, she reached out and upward, stretching over to the side until she swooped into a fall, then dragged herself along the floor, as though in the trenches. At the end, all four reached up high as they sank to the floor. They all arched back as one, then folded forward as one, ending in a serene heap of blooming dominoes.

Nightbloom, by Alum, a later version, at Henry Street Settlement

Twenty-three years later, Alum made an expanded version for the apprentice company of Ballet Hispanico, calling it Nightbloom II (1989). He replaced the original music with a soundtrack that mixed birds chirping with classical music. One of the ten dancers from that version, Omonike Akinyei, gave a presentation at the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center in 2022, in which she looked back on her time with Alum in awe: “The Manuel Alum who had choreographed Nightbloom II was vibrant and mysterious. He entered the studio dressed in white, like a sort of Jedi knight, he seemed to be on a quest that was deep and secretive from the very start. His socks and dance shoes were laced to his feet as if to hold in the energy and keep it from bursting into the air.”[24] About the version he created for them, she recalled that “Our feet cackled like busy bats making noise until silenced by the wind. We were close to the ground and would fall and recover, not by listening for the counts in the music, but through a sense of timing based on the feeling of the people around us on stage.[25]

Judging from the video, this version was choreographically more cogent that the original quartet. Of course, it wasn’t danced as well because these teenagers were students, but the group patterns flowed more organically and it felt closer to nature.

Alum in Feathers c. 1969, ph Zachary Freyman

One of Alum’s early teaching stints was at Ballet-Théâtre Contemporain, based in Amiens, France, in 1969. Among the dancers were Malou Airaudo and Dominique Mercy. For Airaudo, his teaching was a breath of fresh air. “Manuel was not like this kind of ballet kitsch,” she told me, referring to the kind of ballet she was seeing in Europe. “It was so simple, so pure, for me. I fell in love with the way he moved. The simplicity was incredibly beautiful.”[26] She arranged a leave of absence from her French company and followed him to New York. He had told her—and it was true in his mind—that he had a company. However, for European dancers, then and now, a “company” means a contract, a reasonable schedule of daytime rehearsals, and a paycheck. In downtown New York, a “company” may mean a casual arrangement of rehearsing at odd hours and getting paid only for performance. For Airaudo, there was no company.

Malou Airaudo and Felicia Norton in Palomas, Washington Square Church, 1974

Another unpleasant surprise was that she found an attitude that bordered on verbal abuse. Although she felt that both Alum and Sanasardo were “great artists,” she had to figure out how to get over the negativity: “Manuel would say to me, ‘You could be the best dancer in New York, but you dance like a truck. You have to put your head together, [not be] crazy all the time. I’m not your father, I’m not your friend, I’m not your boyfriend.’ He was very, very hard on me.”[27] In Airaudo’s case, she admits that he “pushed me to be a better dancer,” partly by sending her to study with Maggie Black. But in the meantime, she found his derision hard to take. (My personal perception: When I heard how she was treated by Alum, it echoed the way I witnessed Sanasardo treating Alum himself in technique class. Although Manuel was beautiful and disciplined, his mentor would denigrate him in front of the rest of the class.) This negativity applied to choreographic efforts as well. Blackstone recalled that when she and her fellow dancers showed their early choreographic efforts to Sanasardo, they were usually met with “harsh criticism.”[28] Of course, this negativity was not limited to Sanasardo and Alum. It was baked into dance training at the time. It was the old-school approach that believes that if the teacher castigates people in class, they will knuckle under and work harder.

In 1969, Sanasardo established the School of Modern Dance at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in upstate New York, with Alum as assistant director. For five summers the Paul Sanasardo Dance Company was in residence. It was in the summer of 1972 that Alum brought the two dancers he met in France—Airaudo and Mercy—to join the company’s three-week residency. To add to the international mix, Sanasardo invited Pina Bausch, whom he had worked with when she’d been a Juilliard student in 1959-60.[29] For those four weeks, Bausch, Alum, Airaudo and Mercy lived in a house together and became close friends. The following year, Bausch started her company in Wuppertal. Airaudo and Mercy became foundational members of her new company, which ultimately became world famous. She may have also invited Alum to join her company, but he wanted to stay in New York to choreograph. They remained close friends, and whenever she came to New York to perform at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, she stayed in his loft on White Street.

That summer Alum made A Woman of a Mystic Body, Pray for Us for Airaudo. In the video, she stands with a head-to-foot white veil, like the cloak of Mother Mary (or like Ruth St. Denis dressed as the “White Madonna”). On the first note of Verdi’s “Ave Maria,” she throws open the veil/cape and falls forward to the floor. Then she runs, exultant, cape billowing behind her. At one point, she bends over to put on a high-heeled shoe, which she tosses aside abruptly. She’s an angel, a nun, the mother of Jesus, but maybe she wants to try on what real life is like, the role a woman has to wedge herself into. Critic Jennifer Dunning wrote that Airaudo “progresses from stately sorrow to frenzied agony.”[30]

Clive Barnes gave both the choreography and the dancer high praise. He wrote that the solo showed an “unusual ability to build up a cumulative choreographic effect. It was also most exquisitely danced by Miss Airaudo, a statuesque young woman of eloquent dignity.”[31] Village Voice critic Deborah Jowitt, however, used this performance to register an overall complaint. After hailing Airaudo’s “virtuoso performance of emotional and physical pyrotechnics,” she wrote, “but I felt awful about the piece.”[32] She went on to explain that, while she appreciated the excellent dancer and Alum’s choreographic talent, she found the work lacking in development. “For myself, I just wish all his dances lived up to the brilliance of their first few minutes.”[33]

Another person who felt uncomfortable about that solo was Airaudo herself. She was in her early 20s when Alum made it for her. She remembers the characterization of this mystical woman blurring with her own circumstances: “This woman, she doesn’t know really what she wants. This confusion between religion and the woman that I am—what’s happening in the body, the sexuality and the love—and I was so lost in New York, and Manuel was in this feeling of believing [in god]. We never spoke about it.”[34]

That summer of 1972 in Saratoga was also when Felicia Norton, who was to remain a lifelong friend, entered Manuel’s life. A trained ballet dancer with a lovely demeanor, she immediately gravitated to him, and he to her. He gave her solos that took advantage of her long lines and high extensions. A student at Kirkland College when she started dancing with him, she had to finish a year of college before she joined the company in 1973. Her positive reaction to him was immediate: “He was so gorgeous to watch and so clear,” she told me.[35] “His class was beautiful, very deep, a lot of presence. He had clear balletic lines when he moved. He always said, ‘Move with a good feeling. Feel good when you move. Put good energy into every move you make.’ He was so sincere, really heartfelt—and demanding.”[36]

Manuel and Felicia (dagger in hand) in El Tango, 1976, ph Lois Greenfield, Courtesy F. Norton

The rehearsal periods in New York were intense. Because the Sanasardo studio (which had, in 1964, relocated two blocks away and changed its name from Studio for Dance to Modern Dance Artists) was packed with classes, Alum’s group rehearsed in the evenings, sometimes till midnight. Like Airaudo, Norton recalled his negative aspects, but she felt closer to him as a friend: “He was intense, demanding…He was uncompromising in what he wanted. It was hard for me. I didn’t have a lot of dance experience. But he and I had a very close relationship. We were friends. We did everything together…. To me he was very kind, very loving. In the studio, he had a good sense of humor.”[37] She felt she was part of his family. The following decade, when Bausch came to visit, Norton often ended up babysitting her son Solomon.

Felicia Norton in Yemaya, 1974

In the summer of 1974, the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College offered Manuel a new challenge: a commission to collaborate with a composer as part of its music-and-dance (“MAD”) project that summer. All four chosen choreographers were fairly well known— Jennifer Muller, Nancy Meehan, Bella Lewitzky, and Alum—and all compositions were to be played live by the fifteen-strong Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. Alum was paired with Ira Taxin, a young atonal composer who held an assistantship at Juilliard. Together they created Yemaya, a story based on the healing orisha, or goddess of the sea, who, in Yoruba culture, cleanses people of their sins. Taxin came to rehearsals at the Sanasardo studio, improvising on the piano, guided by Alum’s sense of story. In a recent conversation, looking back fifty years, Taxin recalled that during the process Alum was intense, focused, and fast. Taxin’s music, using strings and percussion, supported the energy changes in the choreography. As the dancers passed around a piece of fake seaweed, they each reacted differently to this symbolic sprig of life. When the action became more frenzied, Taxin gave them a rhythmic percussion section. At the end, the whole group waved arms high up, drifting slowly off stage. Taxin created a floating effect with just flute, piano, and a humming vibraphone. The Village Voice music critic Tom Johnson proclaimed their collaboration the most successful of the four. He praised the score for its expressive range, especially the percussion section and the final quiet section.[38] At the premiere, critic Rose Ann Thom wrote about their final exit, “Their effortlessness and complete lack of tension created the illusion of spiritual and physical release.”[39]

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In the late 1970s, Alum felt a yearning to explore a different part of the world. With a fellowship from the Japan/U.S. Friendship Commission—the first dancer to be so honored—he traveled to that country to study dance forms there. Intuitively, he felt an aesthetic connection to things Japanese. In an interview in 1987, he said, “I think there must’ve been a Japanese part of me in another lifetime because it made a lot of sense.”[40] Comparing his focused time abroad with his busy life in New York, he recalled his time there with pleasure:

The first time in my life I didn’t have to worry about money because it was a wonderful, generous grant and it was like “solo time.” All I did was study, choreograph, dance, lecture, teach. I was busy doing my thing. Here, I have to sit in my desk doing a lot of paper work all the time. In Japan…I could concentrate on the things that interested me. That was the old things. I found the old Edo, Zen-related arts, more modern than what was going as modern there today…I found that there was a sensibility that I had here before. So it was universal.[41]

Alum told Jennifer Dunning of the New York Times that what was called “modern” there was very dated, with people “running around with scarves to Ravel, dressed in the latest styles of leotards.”[42] (One wonders if he saw any Butoh, the “dance of darkness” that developed during the American occupation after World War II. He might have felt an affinity for the intense concentration and distortions of that genre.) He studied briefly with one of the most revered traditional dancers, Daisuke Fujima. The two planned a shared program in Tokyo, in which they would each perform several solos as well as a new collaborative duet. But the duet never happened. According to Alum, Fujima’s advisors counseled him against it.[43] Alum was “a bit frustrated.”[44]

The video of that shared performance at Noh Theater, Kanazawa, Japan, performed in 1979 and broadcast in 1980, shows that after Shojo, Fujima’s first, slow, ritualistic solo, the traditional music continued playing while Manuel danced his first solo. This suggests that he was willing to engage in Japanese aesthetics without a pretense of having mastered the traditional form. In another performance, at the National Educational Theater (Toranomon Hall) in Tokyo—where he was the first foreigner ever to appear—he received thunderous applause after performing The Cellar.[45]

On a different occasion, Manuel performed Gette no mai, A Moongarden Dance in the International House Garden in Tokyo. It was hard to see in the dimness of the nighttime video, but Alum seemed sensitive to the plant elements, fitting himself into the crook of a tree, running through the garden like a gazelle. Sound pioneer Akio Suzuki played live, probably a Japanese flute —shakuhachi—as well as percussive instruments that sounded like a washboard, a kalimba, or just sticks clacking. It was all very evocative of a nature poem come to life.

Upon his return to New York, Manuel presented Made in Japan (1980), which he called a “kinetic diary,” at Japan House. In the first of three sections, wearing all black (head scarf, leotard top, flared trousers to the knees, and calf warmers), he began dancing above the audience on a hanamachi, the traditional ramp used in Kabuki theater, then staggered down the incline to the main performance area. He wove together various movements: running with arms wide open, turns, leaps, big tilts, and smaller moves like squatting with a hand or foot circling, as though isolated from the body. At one point Alum bowed repeatedly, accelerating until he was maniacally bobbing and jittering off balance. After changing into a white outfit, his dancing gathered momentum. A Kuroko (a black-clad, Noh-style assistant) entered to wrap a cloth around Alum’s knees, making him hobble wildly until the Kuroko returned to remove it. The first three sections broke through the usual decorum of Japanese classical dance. In the final section, he appeared resplendent in white organdy ceremonial robes and mask, designed by the Belca House of Kyoto, while brandishing a fan. The sound by Fluxus-inflected sound artist Yoshi Wada, ranged from long tones, traditional Japanese voice with wood block and bell tones, to vocal rasps and growls.

Made in Japan, Japan Society 1980, ph O. Honda

Writer/editor Francis Mason raved about the piece in his slot on WQXR Radio, saying he witnessed an “inward journey” of this “astonishing dancer.”[46] Mason referred to the various sections that were named in the program notes: “He involves us in a series of collages about rice fields, salutation, Hiroshima, Japanese gardens, Martial Arts, Kabuki, Nō, earthquakes, Zen tea ceremony and other things he saw and learned.”[47] Lillie F. Rosen, reviewing for Dance News, wrote that he showed “all his former talent and appeal plus an added sensitivity and rhythmic shading, a distinctive inner probing that proved the catalyst for a rare and beautiful evening of creativity.”[48] The choreographer Muna Tseng, who was also in the audience, observed that Alum’s Made in Japan “was stunningly magnificent and subtle, like a strong silk cloth.”[49] The performance was so well received that Japan Society invited him back for a return engagement in March, 1981.

Made in Japan, Jacob’s Pillow, ph Stephan Driscoll, 1981

 Made in Japan was repeated at Jacob’s Pillow in July, 1981. For this production of Made in Japan, he wrote a foreword, calling the piece “a diary made up of observations, reactions, imagery and impressions that Japan revealed to me.”[50] In the video in the Pillow’s Dance Interactive, we see that he again built a hanamachi. To sustained tones by Yoshi Wada, he vibrated his whole body, then staggered downward on the long hanamachi toward the regular stage.

The icing on the cake of his trip to Japan was that shortly after he returned, the Japanese composer Minoru Miki hired him to perform the role of the Actor, a female character, in the opera An Actor’s Revenge. Billed as a “kabuki opera,” it was produced at Opera Theater of St. Louis in June 1981. To prepare, Alum trained with Kinnosuke Hanayagi of the Hanayagi classical tradition. For Alum, “This satisfied my ambition to work with the two major schools of Japanese classical dance: Hanayagi and Fujima.”[51]

Alum’s Japan experience helped him extricate from the negative aspects of his relationship with Sanasardo. Dance artist Phyllis Lamhut, who directed him in her quartet titled MAN in 1989, told me, “His creativity was too dominated by the presence of Paul. Paul had a huge ego…Eventually, Manuel got his act together … and he felt his creativity was worth something, not put under the rug by Paul’s constant critique.”[52]

Ellen Kogan in Alum’s Somewhere Between Hours, ph Stephan Driscoll, Courtesy Kogan

To go back to that 1981 program at the Pillow, he also made a new solo for fellow dancer Ellen Kogan with music again by Suzuki. According to Kogan, Somewhere Between Hours (first titled Somewhere Between 9 and 5) “follows a woman who momentarily steps outside the demands and rituals of ordinary life to confront the private, thwarted, and deeply honest impulses of her inner world.” In a recent email, she told me how valuable her experience with Manuel was:

Manuel taught me to show my concentration, not my technique. He taught me to journey inward, to articulate, to carve space, and—above all—to be real. He was a no-nonsense choreographer: no excuses, no self-doubt, no hesitation, no boundaries…Each movement had its own arc in space, its own sense of time, its own energy, its own power. He was relentless in his pursuit of purity and clarity, insisting on an unobstructed view of movement in its truest form. Some people thought it was too much, too tough. I didn’t. It worked for me because he worked with me. He pushed me to think about what I was showing—what it looked like, not just what it felt like.[53]

Manuel was gaining traction in making work for others. Another instance is his major group work Monte (1987). Exuberantly danced to Mozart’s delightful Divertimento in E Flat Major, it had none of the darkness he inherited from Sanasardo. It was so successful that Ballet Hispanico asked to mount it the following year. In the video of that company performing Monte, one can see that the dancers swept across the stage in an organic flow, reaching peaks of joy along the way. The opening section swirled with pools and eddies of motion that, in their uplift, were worthy of Mozart. A motif of planting in the earth recurred throughout, along with the more airborne soaring, reminding us that all life starts in the earth. The second, quiet section, with one woman sitting alone as others make a chain around her, deepened the sense of humanity. The third movement ended with strong, energetic moving tableaux that lavished attention to individuals as well as the group. New York Times critic Jennifer Dunning called Monte “a rich, churning chain of movers toward the light.”[54]

When asked about the origin of Monte, Alum spoke about the spirituality of Mozart and mountain:

I listen to Mozart always as more like being in a  mountain…There are certain truths that are universal, that people all share no matter where they’re from, what country, or what they do. There’s a spirituality that a mountain has, the spiral ascending. I also had read about that from Jetsun Milarepa, the eleventh-century philosopher, who spoke a great deal about this spiral ascending. [Constantin] Brancusi also spoke a great deal about that. I’ve always been attracted to that. It is spiritual because it shows people dealing and living and working and having deep joy and having sadness, experiencing all the odd experiences. Putting that together and then trying to make a community of it was an interesting thing and I felt the music of Mozart was perfect for what I had in mind. Actually, I think my early dances had the seeds and I’m just right now growing, blossoming those early seeds. So there is a signature in all the more than fifty pieces that I have done, they all have the same kind of, as I say, religiosity.[55]

From what I’ve seen, Alum embraced two kinds of religiosity in his works. One kind, as in Monte, is connected with nature and/or music. The other strain is more specifically aligned with religious symbols. An example is The Offering (1969), in which the central male figure is lifted up by his two white-garbed (angelic) female assistants. When he spreads his arms wide, he’s the suffering Christ figure. In the many lists Alum made in his notebooks, the crucifix and Christianity crop up often. Other hints are words like pieta, confessions, Magdalena, La Penitentas, purgatory, and angels. As he wrote in his notebook, certain pieces deal directly with religion, whether his own or faiths of different cultures. Those he listed are The Offering, East to Nijinsky (1970, which is danced to a Hebrew chant), Yamaya (based on a Yoruban deity), Woman of the Mystic Body, and Of Wings I Lack (with the aforementioned crucifix).”[56]

Max Waldman’s Photo Interpretation, TDR, page 10

I would submit that when Alum’s spirituality is engaged with nature, as in Monte or the much earlier Nightbloom, the piece is more successful than when his spirituality is more literally about Christianity or other religions. Although his notebooks are filled with lists of religious references and events, he has also compiled lists of words like homophobia, abortion, sexual freedom, and sexual hypocrisy. He had a fraught relationship with the church, as would any gay Catholic man, especially during the AIDS epidemic. In 1986, he may have already been diagnosed with AIDS; if not, he certainly had friends who had been. In his notebook he wrote the following dedication for his solo, Saeta al Gran Poder:

I dedicate this work to those that, today, when they most need compassion, in the face of death, are told by the dominant voice of the religious community that their “disease” is punishment for a sinful way of life. As well as the 30,000 persons that were tortured and killed in Argentina [during the military dictatorship 1976–1983], the millions of the holocaust of Nazi Germany and to many throughout history that looked up for help to the church while it stayed silent.[57]

This solo, which he performed in 1987 at Washington Square Methodist Church on the same program with Monte, was not visibly about AIDS or any other form of affliction. But he wore a very different look than earlier solos; he allowed his Hispanic heritage to seep through. Instead of wearing a form-fitting leotard as in most of his previous solos, he wore a black head scarf, loose-fitting ruby red shirt and black pants, looking like a Latino youth you’d see on the street. And it’s one of his best solos. His arms hang loosely and his shoulders start to shake to the recorded voice of Manolo Caracol. He gradually builds, letting each movement change from the inside, sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly. There’s a truth to this solo—no dancerly posing, no conquering the space—that makes it satisfying to watch, even on video—which is unexpectedly ironic considering the tearing realization that the church betrayed the people afflicted.

Undated photo from Facebook page of Image Quilt Cinema

The following year, 1988, Manuel decided to explore his Latino heritage further. He premiered C.O.C.A. (Collage of Central America), as part of Hispanic Heritage Month at the Triplex Performing Arts Center at Borough of Manhattan Community College. The six countries he focused on were El Salvador, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico. In his notebook he sketched a floor plan for each. According to Jack Anderson’s review in the New York Times, there were scenes of beggars, revolutionaries, and prisoners.[58] Alum dedicated this piece to “all hostages, prisoners and innocent people who are incarcerated daily throughout the world.”[59] In his notebook, he referenced the Mexican revolution of 1910, which had been reflected in Mexican artist Diego Rivera’s murals. Related to that, he jotted down this equation: “Sex, machismo, tragedy = Mexico.” The notebooks reveal a restlessly active, enquiring mind, and the courage to confront suffering head on.

One further observation about his notebooks: Voluminous lists of action verbs, of physical qualities, and Concepts and Ideas, show flecks of humor. One list includes “Yemaya to Mountain,” “Spontaneity with precision,” and “Blow job and women’s diagonal.” He also sprinkled his jottings with references to artistic figures like painters Marc Chagall and Odilon Redon and literary figures Henry James and Ezra Pound.

I’ve discussed only a few of Alum’s more than fifty works. To give you an idea of the diversity of his full oeuvre, I point to a smattering of other titles: ToGetHer (1976), an inventive duet that was both combative and tender;  Deadlines (1975), a romp to Bach wherein the lead male dancer dons a dress; Roly Poly (1970), which depicts the dancers as children with many toys; and a stream of dream pieces called the R.E.M. series. Some of these are haunting in their slow, unaccented, dreamlike quality.

While Alum was not at all part of the post-moderns, he felt an affinity with experimental composers like Pauline Oliveros and Yoshi Wada, who were influenced by John Cage’s philosophy that any sound can be music. Manuel applied that concept when he made Steps — A Construction (1979), in which he used the jarring, scraping sounds of a huge Alexander Calder sculpture being moved from one place to another. The composer he met in Japan, Akio Suzuki, was a pioneering sound artist.[60] Like Cage, Suzuki uses objects—a bottle, a funnel, a slinky—to make sounds. Manuel did not follow the Merce Cunningham/John Cage method of separating the creation of music and dance, but he liked composers who were adventurous with finding new sounds.

Another way that Manuel departed from the Sokolow/Sanasardo lineage is that he occasionally used improvisation in performance. Improvising onstage was common with jazz musicians, but not with dancers. The only dance groups that improvised regularly in the Seventies were the Grand Union, made up of Judson postmoderns,[61] and Dianne McIntyre’s Sounds in Motion, which united dancers and jazz musicians. You may recall that Sybil Shearer, the modern dance soloist who inspired Alum, was an improvisor. Possibly with her example as a challenge, he improvised for a small audience at Washington Square Methodist Church in Greenwich Village in 1974. His collaborator, Eugene Lester, who had accompanied dance classes and composed for Sanasardo, played the organ. From the video, one can see that Alum explored the spaces of the church and Lester’s music with great imagination.

Poster for BAM, 1973

Why has Alum, so talented and transcendent in some ways, fallen into the “forgotten” bin of dance history? Going back to Barnes’ conjecture that this young dance artist had major potential, what happened to that potential? He choreographed more than fifty works, which elicited a range of responses. The many videos from his choreographic trajectory show that his craft, range, and audacity were sustained consistently. But most of the works, except for The Cellar and Monte, did not have a lasting impact. It has occurred to me that he could have used a guiding voice or dramaturg to strengthen his choreography. In fact, some critics have suggested something similar. Kitty Cunningham said the program she saw at Jacob’s Pillow “needed some judicious pruning.” Jennifer Dunning, writing in the New York Times, pointed to a “lack of focus” in his later works.[62] Aaron Cohen, writing for Gaysweek, was fascinated by Alum’s short Dream R.E.M. pieces, but felt the program as a whole didn’t quite work. “He can undoubtedly use a friendly adviser out front to counsel him about the overall arc of his program.”[63]

Another factor was that there was a shift in aesthetics around that time. The explosion of experimentation known as Judson Dance Theater, just a few blocks south of the Studio for Dance, questioned the existing aesthetics and structures of modern dance. As audience taste shifted away from the expressionism of Graham and Sokolow (just as, in visual art there was a shift away from Abstract Expressionism toward Minimalism), they were drawn toward either Alvin Ailey (loosely labeled “Black dance”) or Merce Cunningham (loosely labeled “abstract” dance). The expressionistic, angst-ridden style of Graham and Limón eventually was perceived as heavy-handed. Twyla Tharp and Trisha Brown were coming up at that time, each with a different mode of distinctive contemporaneity. Alum’s work, along with that of many modern dancers, started looking strained compared to the looseness of Tharp and Brown.

To my eye, his solo Saeta al Gran Poder, opened a fresh approach, with a more relaxed body carriage and an improvisational attitude. Part of the tragedy of Alum dying so young is that it’s possible he could have developed further in that direction. Although he had a distinctive movement vocabulary, his pieces were sometimes perceived as following in the style of Sanasardo, whose work threw a blanket of sometimes sinister darkness over everything. As Borek suggested in his 1971 Dance Magazine review, “I hope that Alum’s choreographic pursuits do not forever parallel Sanasardo’s notion of dance, powerful though it is, but that he arrives at a more unique expression of himself.”[64] A counter opinion to Borek’s perception was held by Diane Germaine, who felt that Manuel’s work was basically physical while Paul’s work was basically theatrical.[65] In any case, I think that after Alum had been to Japan, his work acquired new influences. During a lec-dem in Japan, he said, “Pure movement can be the subject itself. Just moving through space can say something that words cannot.”[66]

———————

In the late 1980s or early ’90s, Alum was stricken with the AIDS virus. In that condition, he still pulled off his last commission. He was sent by the Asia Society to Malaysia in 1991 to produce a dance, as he had done after his Japan visit a decade earlier. For Made in Malaysia: A Shamanic Journey, he gathered Malaysian performers and basically allowed them to dance as they would in their communities. The New York Times critic Anna Kisselgoff reviewed the piece, which appeared as part of the 1991 New York International Festival of the Arts: “Mr. Alum selected the artists in Malaysia and collaborated with them on a performance that used their idiom as an expressive language extended into a contemporary presentation.…the traditional-contemporary fusion was somewhat self-conscious but never less than beautiful.”[67]

Manuel Alum photo Zachary Freyman for Dance Magazine, 1969

Margaret (Margie) Beals, Alum’s neighbor and friend, visited him in his loft. In this Vimeo she tells her story about Manuel:  “In his exotic mode, he served me a Japanese cup of tea and told me that he was sick and wouldn’t survive.”[68] She was surprised that he took on the Malaysia project when he was so frail. She knew he needed to rest, so she offered for him to stay at a large empty house her family owned in Cape Cod. He enjoyed it there, soaking up sun and sand in his weakness. Then she arranged for Manuel to go home to Puerto Rico to his mother. She received this postcard, written on his 50th birthday: “Dear Margie, I spoke to you from Puerto Rico. I hope you heard me. It was beautiful, strange feeling, difficult. For me, 1993 is made of 525,600 minutes, and I intend to make the most out of each one of them…God is within me, for I made it so far, and I know I will make the most of it.”[69] And then he seemed to be inviting her to come down to Puerto Rico: “Come on Margie, Come. Time is short! And life is so amazing!”

¶¶¶

Special thanks to the dancers I interviewed and to Denivia Rivera an Khara Hanlon. And of course, thanks to the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the NY Public Library for the Performing Arts, which holds such treasures in relation to Manuel Alum and many other dance artists.

Selected Bibliography

Franko, Mark. Excursion for Miracles: Paul Sanasardo, Donya Feuer and Studio for Dance (1955–1964).

Footnotes

[1] Margaret Beals, Pathways: Manuel Alum, 1998. Website video.

[2] Mark Franko, Excursion for Miracles: Paul Sanasardo, Donya Feuer and Studio for Dance (1955–1964), 176 N 23.

[3] Zita Allen, “Alum: the precision of a falcon,” The Chelsea-Clinton News, January 1972.

[4] Linda Winer, “Alum: A Wizard of Mind and Body,” Chicago Tribune, January 16, 1974.

[5] Franko. Excursion for Miracles, 176 N 23.

[6] Jennifer Dunning, “A Choreographic Collage ‘Made in Japan,’” New York Times, October 31, 1980.

[7] Lecture demonstration, Tokyo, 1979, MGZDIF 7752.

[8] Marguerite Oerlemans-Bunn, “The Body Cannot Lie: Manuel Alum on the Creative Process,” 80 Grados Prensasinprisa, Publicado, 11 de Abril de 2020, accessed August 20, 2024.

[9] Quoted in Franko, Excursion for Miracles, 30.

[10] Franko, Excursion for Miracles, 10.

[11] Franko, Excursion for Miracles, 87.

[12] Lecture demonstration, Tokyo, 1979, MGZDIF 7752.

[13] Don McDonagh, “Manuel Alum Offers Dark‐Hued Dances With Hint of Humor,” New York Times, August 18, 1974, 40.

[14] Clive Barnes, “Dance: New Choreographer Arrives,” New York Times, November 23, 1970, 47. Accessed August 23, 2024.

[15] Don McDonagh, “Manuel Alum Offers Dark-Hued Dances.”

[16] Tom Borek, review, Dance Magazine, January 1971, 74.

[17] Email to author, September 27, 2024.

[18] Barnes, “Dance: New Choreographer Arrives”

[19] Barnes, “Dance: New Choreographer,”

[20] Phone interview with author, September 30, 2024.

[21] Doris Hering, “A Darkening Pond: Paul Sanasardo Reviewed,” Dance Magazine, August 1971, 73.

[22]  Phone interview with author, October 1, 2024.

[23] Phone interview with Diane Germaine, September 30, 2024.

[24] Omonike Akinyei, “Manuel Alum…Close to the Earth,” a presentation at the NY Public Library for the Performing Arts, December 4, 2023.

[25] Akinyei, “Manuel Alum…Close to the Earth.”

[26] Zoom with the author, October 3, 2024.

[27] Zoom meeting with author, October 3, 2024

[28] Phone interview with the author, October 1, 2024.

[29] At the age of 18, Pina Bausch had a government grant from Germany to study at Juilliard for one year. Antony Tudor, one of her teachers there, suggested that she might like to work with Sanasardo. So in the fall of 1959, in addition to a full load at Juilliard, she went downtown to rehearse, and even collaborate with Sanasardo and Feuer. She performed in their evening at the 92nd Street Y in December, 1959. She extended her time in New York an additional year. For more on that crucial period in her life, see my historical essay about Pina Bausch in that period.

[30] Jennifer Dunning, “Alum Dancers at BAMspace offer ‘W.O.M.B—Pray for Us,’” New York Times, December 3, 1973.

[31] Clive Barnes, “Dance: Alum Company,” New York Times, December 16, 1972, accessed June 8, 2024

[32] Deborah Jowitt, “I Ate the Whole Thing,” Village Voice, December 28, 1972, 24-26.

[33] Jowitt, “I Ate,” 24.

[34] Zoom with the author, October 3, 2024.

[35] Phone interview with the author, June 14, 2024.

[36] Phone interview with the author.

[37] Phone interview with the author.

[38] Tom Johnson, “The American Dance Festival at Connecticut College,” Village Voice, August 1, 1974, Courtesy Ira Taxin.

[39] Rose Ann Thom, “Innovation or Inundation,” Dance Magazine, October 1974, 22.

[40] Oerlemans-Bunn, “The Body Cannot Lie.”

[41] Oerlemans-Bunn, “The Body Cannot Lie.”

[42] Quoted in Jennifer Dunning, “A Choreographic Collage.”

[43] Henry Scott Stokes, “Manuel Alum Discovers a Difference in Cultures,” Special to the New York Times, October 21, 1979, 60. Accessed October 6, 2024.

[44] Stokes, “Manuel Alum Discovers.”

[45] Call number *MGZIC 9-4849, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, NY Public Library for the Performing Arts.

[46] Francis Mason, broadcast of “New York at Night,” WQXR Radio, November 2, 1981, found in Manuel Alum Papers, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, NY Public Library for the Performing Arts.

[47] Mason, “New York at Night.”

[48] Lillie F. Rosen, “Reviews,” Dance News, February 1981, 11.

[49] Originally posted on Facebook, confirmed on email to author, November 13, 2024.

[50] Jennifer Dunning, “A Choreographic Collage.”

[51] Dunning, “A Choreographic Collage.”

[52] Phone interview with author October 7, 2024.

[53] E-mail with author, February 12, 2026.

[54] Jennifer Dunning, “Dance: Alum’s ‘Monte,’” New York Times, June 26, 1987, C10.

[55] Oerlemans-Bunn,“The Body Cannot Lie.”

[56] Manuel Alum Papers, c. 1970–1991. (S) *MGZMD 95-3, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, NY Public Library for the Performing Arts.

[57] Manuel Alum Papers.

[58] Jack Anderson, “Central American Tensions,” New York Times, November 14, 1988. Accessed October 18, 2024.

[59] Quoted in Anderson, “Central American Tensions.”

[60] An example of Akio Suzuki’s music was recorded at Issue Project Room in 2016, accessed November 11, 2024.

[61] Wendy Perron, The Grand Union: Accidental Anarchists of Downtown Dance, 1970–1976. Explains how this legendary improvisation group emerged from Judson Dance Theater.

[62] Jennifer Dunning, “Alum Dancers at BAMSpace.”

[63] Aaron Cohen, “Hype, Hope, and Hooray,” Gaysweek, March 5, 1979, 13.

[64] Tom Borek, review of Manuel Alum, Dance Magazine, January 1971.

[65] Diane Germaine interview with the author, September 30, 2024.

[66] Lecture-demonstration in Tokyo, 1979.

[67] Anna Kisselgoff, “Dance View: Extraordinary Experimentation from Overseas,” New York Times, June 30, 1991.

[68] Interview with the author, September 23, 2024.

[69] Quoted in “Pathways: Manuel Alum” by Margaret Beals, 1998,

As a young dancer with recurring back spasms, I sought relief with various physical therapies. Around 1971, Sandra Neels, a longtime Merce Cunningham dancer, told me about Elaine Summers’ approach to somatic healing. Teaching only a few people at a time, Elaine would pay deep attention to our physical tendencies and give us time to sprawl out on the floor, with rubber balls placed underneath areas of tension or pain. With her pleasant face and gentle voice, she could almost talk our clenched muscles into letting go. She was always delighted by our discoveries about our own body holdings. When I started dancing with Trisha Brown in 1975, I was happy to see that she used the balls also. Trisha once told me that one of the reasons she invited me into her company was that she knew I’d studied with Elaine. Only later did I learn of Elaine’s artistic innovations. And only after digging into this research did I realize how much her multi-faceted work influenced the trajectory of the groundbreaking Judson Dance Theater.

“You should not make an effort to ‘see,’ but to let everything flow to you. I feel the choreographer and the dancers are having [a] conversation with the audience.” —Elaine Summers [1]

Elaine in her loft on Third Street, Ph Dan Budnik.

Elaine Summers was a founding member of Judson Dance Theater, the historic band of renegades that re-routed modern dance into post-modern dance. But she did not make her name as a choreographer like her peers Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and Lucinda Childs. Rather, she became a leader in somatic practice while also becoming a key player in the new field of Intermedia (investigating the space between defined media) Her healing system, Kinetic Awareness, which uses rubber balls to target tension, is used by many dancers today, usually in diluted form. She also one of the first to combine experimental film and dance. In everything she did, she applied John Cage’s principles of art and life being inextricable and of chance as a method of composing. Her enduring contributions to the dance and art worlds were filmdance (where film and dance are necessary to each other), Intermedia, and Kinetic Awareness. To these three, I would add a fourth: Summers actively brought people of color into the Judson fold of early post-modern dance.

Summers was born in Perth, Australia, as Lillian Elaine Smithers. The family moved to Boston when Elaine was 5, and she started begging for dance lessons at 6. While she was attending the Academy of the Assumption in Wellesley Hills, one of the nuns teamed up with the janitor to teach an Irish jig—a memorable treat for the young Elaine. She went on to ballet lessons at Miss Hall’s School in Pittsfield, where she encountered Senia and Regina Russakoff. This married couple had been Russian ballet dancers in Saint Petersburg; Senia had performed in Pavlova’s company and also on the American Vaudeville circuit. Because her parents did not support her dance fervor in any way, Elaine earned the money for classes by babysitting and selling hats on weekends. Nor did her mother encourage her to go to college, but two good friends urged her to apply to the Massachusetts School of Art (now the Massachusetts College of Art and Design). There she encountered a teacher who was important to her—Priscilla Nye. Nye believed that everyone has uniqueness within them, an idea that became a cornerstone of Kinetic Awareness. Nye also introduced Elaine to the teachings of psychologist Carl Jung.[2]

After graduating with a degree in art education in 1947, Elaine married a student named Warren (sometimes Dan) Spaulding, who was going to school on the G.I. bill. The couple moved to St. Louis, where she taught art and continued taking ballet lessons. In the summer of 1952 she went to Alfred University to take an advanced ceramics course. There she met visual artist Carol Summers, who became her second husband. They came to New York, where Summers studied at the Martha Graham school and then attended Juilliard as an extension (non-credit) student. There, she took ballet with Antony Tudor, modern dance with members of the Martha Graham Dance Company (mostly Yuriko), and composition with Louis Horst.[3] Among her classmates were the choreographer Paul Taylor, the exquisite Cunningham dancer Carolyn Brown, and Donya Feuer, who later collaborated with Paul Sanasardo.  She studied with dance artists outside of Juilliard too, most notably Janet Collins, who, in 1951, became the first Black ballerina to perform at the Metropolitan Opera House. Collins had been in Lester Horton’s company in Los Angeles. Her technique was equally dazzling in modern dance and ballet, inspiring younger Black dancers including her cousin, Carmen de Lavallade, and Alvin Ailey. In 1949, Dance Magazine named Collins “The Most Outstanding Debutante of the Season.”[4] Collins headed a short-lived touring company in the mid-50s that included Elaine. According to Summers’ friend Daryl Chin, it was her experience with Collins that gave her the awareness that a dance company could/should be racially integrated.[5]

While training intensively at Juilliard, Summers developed osteoarthritis in her right hip—“sheer agony,” she said.[6] She told her psychotherapist, a Jungian named Renée Nell, about a dream she had of being able to dance pain-free. Nell suggested she consult with Charlotte Selver, a disciple of Elsa Gindler.[7] A leader of somatic practice or “physical re-education” in Germany, Gindler countered the mechanistic nature of traditional calisthenics by encouraging students to shed their habits of tension. She guided them to investigate movement with a sense of discovery, bringing consciousness to the “experiments.”[8] For Summers, learning Gindler’s approach was “revolutionary to me…It was especially difficult for me to give up cultural body images and the ballet dancer’s body image.”[9]

Elaine Summers on a NY Street, Elaine Summers Papers @NYPL

After two years with Selver, Elaine studied with Carola Speads, another Gindler master student, for about five years. (Both Speads and Selver, being Jewish, had fled Germany.) About her first class with Speads, Summers said, “Satori! I realized I was a dancer but didn’t know anything about the body except what to tell it to do.”[10] From Speads, she learned to slow down and listen to the body, to be aware of “how our body loves to move… to feel the deliciousness of being in touch with all the senses of our kinetic self.”[11] To understand Selver and Speads’ work in context, she started reading books like Mary Ellsworth Todd’s The Thinking Body (1937) and Wilhelm Reich’s Character Analysis (1933), in which he introduced the concept of body armor.

When speaking about Selver (who was a Buddhist), or Speads, Summers could wax mystical: “Those teachers are part of this wonderful underlying overhead magic that there is more than we can see, but the evidence is there. I love the idea that what we do as teachers and artists is we make evident the invisible.” [12]

In developing her own healing system of Kinetic Awareness, Summers combined the subjective experience of sensing the body with an “objective” knowledge of anatomy and physiology. “I would read anatomy as if it was candy,” she recalled.[13] Her goal, as quoted by her disciple Ellen Saltonstall, was “to move every part of the body all the ways it can go, easily, any time you want, with as much or as little tension as you want, at any speed.”[14]  Thomas Körtvélyessy, who manages the Elaine Summers Dance and Film site, says, that KA has been  “a tool for training our bodies, enabling us to also incorporate teachings from other kinds in a very safe, self-empowered way.”

Summers never promoted one way as the way. As dancer/choreographer Juliette Mapp remembers, Elaine was open to other sources of information. She wanted the students to collect their own array of sources, to follow their curiosity.[15]

Elaine Summers, 1975. Ph Davidson Gigliotti.

During the late ’50s, she continued taking and teaching dance classes. She was studying with modern dance heavies like Mary Anthony (she liked the breathing exercises) and Don Redlich (for his attention to alignment). She took Merce Cunningham’s classes, including his weekend workshops in repertory. In her own teaching gigs, she encountered widely divergent student bodies. At the Hawthorne School in Westchester County (probably the Hawthorne Cedar Knolls School, which shut down in 2018), she was dealing with students plagued by mental health and substance abuse issues, while at a school in Roslyn, Long Island, the students were from privileged families. With her eternally curious nature, she absorbed all of the problems and learned from them.

Elaine with film camera, NYPL Digital Collections, 1960–1969, Jerome Robbins Dance Division.

In 1959, at Haystack Mountain, an experimental School of Crafts in Maine, she met avant-garde filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek, who had been at Black Mountain College when Merce Cunningham and John Cage were bubbling up with different ways of organizing performance. He experimented with collage and with creating immersive film environments, both modes that can be seen in Summers’ later work. Also that summer, Elaine recalled, “Somebody was giving a talk about John Cage’s chance method, which I, of course, thought was really ridiculous.”[16] (Needless to say, she reversed her opinion with what came next.)

In the fall of 1960, Robert Dunn, at the bidding of John Cage, offered classes in dance composition at Merce Cunningham’s studio in the Chelsea neighborhood. Among the first five students were Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, and Simone Forti. Word spread. To understand Dunn’s approach and how fertile it was, I offer these thoughts from Dunn himself, which he wrote while looking back twenty years later:

My general attitude in teaching was influenced by several somewhat disparate factions. I was impressed by what I had come to know of Bauhaus education in the arts, particularly from the writings of Moholy-Nagy, in its emphasis on the nature of the materials and on basic structural elements. Association with John Cage had led to the project of constantly extending perceptive boundaries and contexts. From Heidegger, Sartre, Far Eastern Buddhism, and Taoism, in some personal amalgam, I had the notion in teaching of making a ‘clearing’, a sort of ‘space of nothing,’ in which things could appear and grow in their own nature. Before each class, I made the attempt to attain this state of mind, with varying success of course…[17]

At that time, when young dancers perceived Graham’s emotionality and Limón’s noble groundedness as old hat, Dunn’s approach opened up a fresh avenue of creativity. Students felt freed by Dunn’s openness and lack of judgment. Instead of declaring whether a study was good or bad, he would ask the students, “What did you see?”[18]

Elaine, interviewed by Tony Carruthers of the Bennington College Judson Project, c. 1980.

Summers had just started experimenting in film with VanDerBeek. For her, film was a logical outgrowth of dance: “Exploration of light and movement naturally led me to filmmaking. Film to me is another form of dance: Camera movement and editing are another form of choreography.” She felt that film gives the eyes a certain power. When interviewed by Tony Carruthers of the Bennington College Judson Project, she said, “Film gives you as the audience, or you as the choreographer, wild eyes, like an animal that can come up to you [going right up to Carruther’s face] and see your whiskers in your beard.”[19]

She was also entranced by the light of a film projector. “What’s magical about film is that … you don’t see [its light] until an object goes in front of it…a floating image you don’t see until you put your arm through it.”[20] She started shooting pedestrian traffic and manipulating the footage—changing the speed, the angle, the framing. “Filmmaking allows me to exploit the motion within the image and edit the film as if it were a dancer.”[21]

By the time Summers enrolled in Bob Dunn’s classes, the roster included Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Ruth Emerson, Deborah Hay, and others. The assignments were not only chance procedures, but other approaches too, like Make a Dadaist cut-up, where you cut up something old to make something new, or, Do a dance that is stripped down to utter simplicity—“one thing.”[22]

Dunn encouraged students to value the ordinary, rather than dressing things up to be fancier or more “interesting” than necessary. They were going for natural movement, rather than trained or stylized movement. Part of the rebelliousness of Judson Dance Theater was they didn’t want to “reassure the audience”—Summers’ words—that they would provide the conventions of professionalism.[23] Shedding ballet mannerisms, which was a goal in the sensory awareness work, was also a goal at Judson. Using chance mechanisms, like rolling the dice and making a chart of corresponding actions, helped make that happen. You might be assigned to move a body part in a way you’ve never done before. For Summers, “It was an expansion of how you thought about dance and ways of structuring dances that would help open the prison of your mind.”[24]

Summers remembers the feedback for her first dance, which she had made as part of a film project:

I was working on my first film with Eugene Friedman and I made a dance for it based on the legend of Ondine. Steve Paxton said very kindly—not unkindly—to me, “Well, I didn’t like that much,” … It was my first dance. I got puzzled, so I went home and thought about how I could change it. I thought: I like it, and I like what I’m thinking about in this piece. So, I did it again—fixing a little but not much. When I finished, Steve said, “Well, I don’t like the dance any better, but you sure danced the hell out of it.” Wasn’t that a lovely thing to say?[25]

Elaine, having been involved in Christian Science growing up, always put a positive spin on things.[26] Paxton, on the other hand, made it his practice to dispense with the veneer of societal decorum.

Summers appreciated the environment that Bob Dunn fostered: “How could a man of such a gentle elusive presence be so direct, cutting to the core of our imaginations? Explaining, lighting pathways, with no effort to control, only to expand our consciousness.”[27] In terms of the Cage-inspired method Dunn was teaching, she connected it to her arts training at Mass College: “He was teaching us the chance method, an extraordinary teaching method. It makes you lay out in front of you all of the elements—what is possible for you to choose from. I had art school training, where you tried to deal with elements, the Bauhaus tradition. If you were dealing with ceramics, you tried to deal with the clay itself. With all creative work, you need to understand the elements.”[28]

After about a year and a half, the students felt they had enough work to show to the public. (The Cunningham studio was on the top floor of a building owned by the Living Theatre, so they occasionally showed their work downstairs in that studio. But it was a small space and they needed something larger, though still intimate.) For more on how they auditioned for the 92nd Street YM-YWHA—the 20th century’s bastion of modern dance—and how they arrived at Judson Memorial Church, see my account of all that.

Contact sheet of photo shoot, c. 1962, of Elaine with Rudy Perez, the beginnings of Take Your Alligator With You, found on Rudy Perez Dance, gift of Elaine Summers, photographer unknown.

The church gave the young dancers performance space, rehearsal space, and help with mailings. Summers felt like the Church was giving them a grant, and the icing on the cake was their emotional support. (It seemed to Elaine that Carmines and Moody actually liked the dances.) For the first concert, held on July 6, 1962, the fourteen participating dance artists created twenty-three pieces, and Dunn oversaw the whole sequence.

The opening number on that first evening, “A Concert of Dance” (later named Concert #1), was not actually a dance. It was Elaine’s film collaboration with composer John Herbert McDowell and filmmaker Eugene Friedman. Titled Overture, it tossed together 16 mm images that McDowell had collected from old W. C. Fields films with footage Friedman and Summers had shot. “We put bits and pieces of film in a brown paper bag and used a telephone book as a ‘chance’ mechanism.”[29] The film collage was projected onto a curtain that the audience had to walk through in order to get to their seats. Dance scholar Sally Banes observed, “So from the moment the concert started, the irreverent trespassing of artistic boundaries was present.”[30]

The New York Times critic Allen Hughes wrote that “The overture was perhaps the key to the success of the evening, for through its random juxtaposition of unrelated subjects—children playing, trucks parked under the West Side Highway, W. C. Fields, and so on—the audience was quickly transported out of the everyday world where events are supposed to be governed by logic, even if they are not.”[31]

Also on the program were two live dances by Summers. The first, Instant Chance, was a loving, though possibly too-cute, spoof of the chance method. Noticing that sometimes a chance score was hidden, or not legible, Summers wanted to make her score really obvious. The seven dancers threw bulky foam “dice” into the air, each one about the size of a beachball, and when they landed the dancers would get their cues for what task to do. The color determined the speed and the number governed the rhythm—say a 2/4 or a waltz. Later iterations included options of types of actions, for example tensing, or swinging, or rippling.[32] For the second, The Daily Wake, Summers used the front page of The Daily News as a map for the dance. She taught the dancers (including one non-dancer, the composer John Herbert McDowell) positions she saw in the paper. These included “swimming, an umpire, soldiers, a handshake, Rockefeller, a bride, graduation, and a Panino advertisement.”[33] She also gave them numbered phrases and a floor pattern similar to a newspaper layout.

Elaine and Rudy Perez in his “Take Your Alligator with You,” 1963, Judson Sanctuary. Ph Al Giese.

Other choreographers that first night included Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Ruth Emerson, David Gordon, Fred Herko, and Deborah Hay. It was a long program, but the choreographers, dancers, and the audience, who had crammed into the church in ninety-degree heat, felt it was the beginning of something new. In her memoir, Feelings Are Facts, Rainer described the elation:

We were all wildly ecstatic afterward. As the audience enthusiastically applauded at the end, I clasped Judy [Dunn] around the waist, hoisted her in the air as we both exclaimed, “It’s a positive alternative!” The church would become our home, its basement gymnasium available for weekly workshops and additional performance space, an alternative to once-a-year hire-a hall mode of operating that had plagued the struggling modern dance before. Here we could present things more frequently, more cheaply, and—most important of all—more cooperatively.[34]

The high after that first concert generated energy for the next two years. Elaine had been teaching at the Turnau Opera House in Woodstock, New York, and she decided to bring a bunch of her dance pals up there for “Another Concert of Dance” (later called Concert #2). This concert comprised Overture, The Daily Wake, and works by Ruth Emerson, Liz Keen (a Paul Taylor dancer whom Elaine met in Speads’ class), and Summers’ new Suite. This last was a takeoff on Louis Horst’s course in Pre-classic Forms, which he developed in the 1930s in order to impose structure on the messy new genre of modern dance. She followed his format, choosing as her pre-Classic dances the Galliard and the Saraband—and the Twist. It was a brilliant decision to claim a current social dance as a hallowed court dance, thereby democratizing the forms. To further democratize, she invited the audience to twist along with the dancers.[35]

Theatre Piece for Chairs and Ladders, 1960s, with Al Hansen and Phoebe Neville. Ph Terry Schutté in Dance Magazine

Dunn taught the weekly sessions for two years, sometimes assisted by his wife Judith (Goldsmith) Dunn, who was a dancer in Cunningham’s company. Then there was a hiatus, during which the students continued workshops and discussions in Yvonne Rainer’s new loft.[36] When the basement of Judson Church became available on Monday nights, they held workshops there. At that point, Dunn dropped out as a teacher and the group was on its own. Now a leaderless collective, they adopted Ruth Emerson’s suggestion of making decisions by consensus, Quaker-style.

The democracy of the feedback sessions appealed to Summers: “One of the rules was that there was no president. We were all equal and we sat in a circle.”[37] She described how each week a different person was responsible for the method of critiquing. During Paxton’s week as facilitator, she recalled, “Steve said, ‘You may each say one thing you actually saw take place in the dance and it will be one sentence long and that’s it.’ ”[38]

Although Summers had been developing Kinetic Awareness since the 1950s, it wasn’t until Concert #6, in June 1963, that she made a dance based on her practice. In Dance for Carola, she simply moved from standing to squatting—taking almost ten minutes to do it. Carola Speads had taught her the benefits of slow motion, and Dunn had given the assignment of “one thing.” Summers thought her colleagues would hate it, but they surprised her with their enthusiasm. Rudy Perez, who had danced duets with her, sighed, “Ah, that is so beautiful.”[39] He said he liked it so much it could have gone on longer. (In another interview, she said Rudy was jumping up and down.[40]) When Perez created his extraordinary solo, Countdown (1966), in which he rose from a chair in slow motion to the Songs of the Auvergne, he may well have been influenced by Summers’ slow-motion Dance for Carola. (The haunting Countdown was later performed by the Ailey company—probably the only Judson dance ever taken into a major company’s rep.)

Summers asked Bob Dunn to create music for a dance she was making during the summer of 1963, when four Judson performances were held at Gramercy Arts Theater. (These concerts, #9–#12, were also organized by Elaine.) Treating the theater a site-specific opportunity, she made a piece about entrances and exits, with dancers entering from the audience, from a trap door, or from a ladder connecting a side balcony to the stage. Dunn decided that the music would be lines from Oscar Wilde’s plays, spoken by the dancers. The title, Country Dances, came from one of these lines. For a trio section in which one woman, held in the air by two men, her feet never touching the ground, was saying lines like “Love changes one.” Her brazen exploration of the theater spaces, plus the chance element of Dunn’s “music” created a certain frisson. John Herbert McDowell remembered that “there was a lot that happened up in the air. Ruth Emerson saying something about German grammar while hanging from the ceiling.”[41] (In journalist McDonagh’s memory, she was hanging upside down.[42])

Fantastic Gardens,1964. From left: Sally Gross, Carla Blanc, Tony Holder, Ruth Emerson, Sandra Neels. Ph Dan Budnik.

Short pieces were the order of the day at Judson. The idea was to experiment, not to make a masterpiece. However, Summers spent three years planning for her evening-length Fantastic Gardens (1964), combining dance, film, sculpture, and music‑—and mirrors. (Until that point, the only other single-choreographer evening at Judson had been Yvonne Rainer’s Terrain in 1963.) The everything-at-once extravaganza deployed sixteen dancers, two composers, five visual artists, eight 16-mm projectors, four Super-8s, three projectionists, five photographers, and a tree made of metallic junk. She wanted to spell out the non-hierarchical relationship was between choreographer and dancers, so she wrote on the program notes, “Elaine Summers is the choreographer of the dances. She has provided the dancers with a framework—movement scores—within which they are able to improvise, as individual dancers.”[43]   Among the photographers was Billy Linich, who was also painting everything silver at Andy Warhol’s Factory.[44] More than a year in advance, Elaine asked Sarah Stackhouse, a beautifully expressive member of the Limón company, to dance in a film that would appear next to her dancing life. In Fantastic Gardens, Stackhouse danced in front of the film to create a meshing of live and filmed body parts.

Summers was delighted when the audience took her mirror idea and ran with it:

We gave the audience little tiny mirrors. I had discovered if you put a mirror at the lens of a projector and you move the mirror, you…can move the image.…The film projector was on the floor. They were supposed to…use the mirrors to light the way to their seats. Then they caught on, and they started signaling each other across the space, which was absolutely gorgeous.[45]

This was a typical reaction of Elaine’s. She loved when a chance occurrence opened the possibility for something else to happen. Another example was when she noticed that the apartment across from hers had a neat row of garbage cans out on the fire escape, which gave her the idea of watering the cans to become a “fantastic garden.”  She created a recurring story within the otherwise random collage of film. It involved Fred Herko, a trained ballet dancer (with a face that is eerily reminiscent of Rudolf Nureyev’s) periodically emerging from that apartment to water the garbage cans as if they were a garden. He was clothed differently each time—jeans, a fur coat, a bikini. Finally, with the last watering, a bunch of huge plastic plants popped out of the cans. Springtime in a fantastic garden!

Jonas Mekas, the Village Voice film critic and experimental filmmaker, raved about the performance:

Fantastic effects were produced by using a split screen, a screen made of several dangling strips of white material which moved and separated, and there were human figures appearing through the partings, moving into and out of the screen, submerging, disappearing into it, participating in it, so that at times one didn’t know…what was the photograph and what was the real live presence. Actions of images overlapped or repeated or extended actions of dancers and people—the same figures, often, appearing on the screen as in the dance arena or around the balcony.

All this worked as an artistic unity…there was an attempt here made to produce an aesthetic, soul experience consisting of a variety of feelings, motions, and emotions. It came close to an audiovisual-spatial symphony that moved us and involved us in strange and beautiful ways, new ways, never before experienced ways, something that contained amazement and glimpses of not yet familiar beauty.[46]

With multiple projectors, the filmed images spilled out onto the walls, ceiling, and floor. There was so much going on that one couldn’t possibly see or hear it all. Jill Johnston, the Village Voice dance critic at the time, got into the groove: “Not straining to get it all, one could bask in the total atmosphere, which was off-beat and romantic, like an elegant garden party gone somewhat haywire… Miss Summers’ mélange was an unusual and provocative affair.”[47] Years later, Jennifer Krasinski, an editor at Artforum, called Fantastic Gardens “a watershed moment in the evolution of intermedia art.”[48]

Homemade by Trisha Brown. Ph VIncent Pereira.

One of the people influenced by Fantastic Gardens was Trisha Brown, who later became perhaps the most well-known American post-modern choreographer. She had been studying with Elaine and the two were close friends. Trisha not only absorbed Elaine’s teachings about body awareness as a lifelong practice, she also admired Elaine’s techno experiments. Two years after Fantastic Gardens, Trisha created, Homemade (1966), a solo for which she wore a projector on her back, the encumbrance being a collaboration with theater artist Robert Whitman. Her movement splashed the filmed images all over the house—the walls, ceiling, floor, and audience. As art historian Susan Rosenberg has pointed out, Homemade had a lot in common with the Fantastic Garden’s mode of images spilling out everywhere.[49] In fact, I would wager that Brown’s famous series of equipment pieces (1968–1974) might not have happened if she hadn’t witnessed Summers’ experiments.

Steve Paxton’s Flat (1964), ph Tom Brazil

The cross stimulation that happened at Judson is something Summers particularly enjoyed. Another example: Summers was amused when she saw Paxton’s Flat (1964), in which he disrobed and hung garments, one by one, on hooks that he had affixed to his skin. It made her think about “our bodies as holders of clothing”—and about technology:

I made a dance called To Steve With Love, where people were actually dressing and undressing and had little speakers. One had a speaker on her forehead, another on his belly button, and another had a radio beside him because I was also intrigued with the coming of the portable radios. We were all playing with media. Like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, dancing [with] music in the park, now everyone could have a full orchestra when they danced in the park.[50]

She was ahead of her time. Now, of course, most Broadway performers wear tiny microphones on their foreheads. Summers was always thinking of ways that dance could partner with technology.

The term Intermedia was popularized by Dick Higgins, who, like Robert Dunn, had been a student in John Cage’s famous course in Experimental Music at the New School. That course blew open existing definitions of the separate disciplines. In his first Intermedia newsletter, Higgins declared, “Much of the best work being produced today seem to fall between media.”[51]

Embracing the term, Summers formed the Experimental Intermedia Foundation in 1968. It provided organizational support for her own productions as well as those of others genre-defying artists including Trisha Brown, composers Malcom Goldstein, Philip Corner, Carman Moore, and composer/filmmaker Phill Niblock, who took the helm in 1985.[52]

One of Summers’ first productions under EIF was the three-hour version of Energy Changes at the Museum of Modern Art in 1973. The dance traveled through several stages that started very small internal movements and gradually worked up to a commotion of interaction—as slow as Dance for Carola. Corner had hung objects like cymbals and gongs along the path for the audience to play with. Summers had given the audience instructions, asking them to stand near one dancer and quietly move to another dancer. Don McDonagh of the New York Times found the prolonged event pleasant but underwhelming: “The only problem was that the movement invention did not sustain constant interest. Perhaps it was not meant to.”[53]

To the point. One wonders how rambling Summers intended it to be. Her purpose was certainly not to produce a good artwork. Perhaps, like Kinetic Awareness, the idea was to look at the inner and outer landscape with fresh eyes. She would probably agree with her collaborator, the composer Pauline Oliveros, who has said, “I have never tried to build a career. I’ve only tried to build a community.”[54]

Undaunted by middling reviews, Summers organized the first Intermedia Arts Festival in 1980. The schedule of eight performances at the Guggenheim Museum was augmented by seminars, workshops and an international symposium at other venues. It was a way to extend the 1960s fervor for defying categorization. The artists included Summers, Higgins, Allan Kaprow, Kenneth King, Joan Jonas, Meredith Monk, Ping Chong, and Nam June Paik, the “father of video art.”

LIVE Performance Art magazine (an offshoot of Performing Arts Journal), celebrated the ten-day series by printing statements from some of the artists. Elaine used her space to say that women had not been recognized for their role in this pioneering field. Dick Higgins, pointing to forms that erupted in the 1960s such as “visual poetry” and “happenings,” asked, “Between what two media does this work lie?” Joan Jonas, one of the few women who achieved prominence in the field, wrote that, “the desire to move suddenly from one space to the next, continuously breaking the spell (illusion)” allowed her to create alternative identities. Kenneth King, who called his dance-and-text pieces “transmedia,” predicted that “the computer will be able to deal with many different channels or tracks of information simultaneously.” (Remarkably, King had been predicting the centrality of the computer since 1974 with his piece The Telaxic Synapsulator—which I danced in.) Meredith Monk wrote, “By placing one thing against or with another makes each element become more mysterious and the whole more luminous.” Allan Kaprow, the “father of happenings,” dismissed the term intermedia as nostalgic.[55]

Not included in this compendium of definers was Hans Breder, who had left New York in 1966 for a job at the University of Iowa. Determined to replicate the downtown ethos of defying boundaries, he started an Intermedia program in Iowa City. Breder defined intermedia “not as an interdisciplinary fusing of different fields into one, but as a constant collision of concepts and disciplines.”[56] (Among his most famous students were Ana Mendieta and Charles Ray.) He was important to Summers in that he invited her for residencies and made space avaiable to her, specifically a large loft with a ladder in it. And his students were available to her for some of her films. This included the captivating, dreamlike Iowa Blizzard (1973), where clusters of black-clad students are tromping through the snow. On closer inspection, one sees that each cluster is actually one person with overlays—a four-way superimposition that Breder’s students, with Summers’ encouragement, came up with in the lab.[57]

During that first Intermedia festival at the Guggenheim, Summers premiered Crow’s Nest, a collaboration with avant-garde composer Pauline Oliveros, who had studied with her. What Oliveros and Summers shared was an idea of deep listening and a love of nature. Sites that were captured by Summers’ camera included Lake Placid, Jupiter Island, and Joshua Tree, making for a beautifully lush two-dimensional environment—which appeared three-dimensional because fluttering strips of white fabric created an environment that dancers could enter. For Alexandra Ogsbury, longtime Summers dancer in the ’70s and ’80s, Crow’s Nest was her favorite piece to perform. “It really came together in terms of all the different things she had been experimenting with. The dancers moving in and out of the silk panels, I thought was brilliant.”[58] Crow’s Nest actually started, unofficially, in Summers’ loft in 1979, then went to the piazzas of Italy before reaching the Guggenheim. It was later repeated at the Hunter Museum in Tennessee in 1998 and again in Boston’s Cyber Festival in 2006.

Another work that relied on the visuals was Solitary Geography, a large piece specifically for the Performing Garage in 1983. (Solitary Geography began as a dancefilm solo in 1977.) The Village Voice critic Deborah Jowitt described the extraordinary performers Min Tanaka and Suzushi Hanayagi, but felt the overall action was formless. Instead of condemning it, however, she drew on her past insights about Summers to say, “If this piece is about anything, it’s about Summers’ love of kinetic images in inanimate nature and the power that resides in sensitive human movers.” New York Times critic Jack Anderson praised Pepón Osório’s set that suggested a natural landscape, Jon Gibson’s music that also hinted at nature, and the overall “harmonious mingling of art forms.” The only  choreography he commented on was when Min Tanaka “crossed the stage on a sputtering motorcycle.”[59]

In 1984, Summers returned to the Guggenheim for the Second Intermedia Festival, with Skydance/Skytime, which continued the open-air event Skydance from 1982, again collaborating with German artist Otto Piene. A huge red flower atop the museum’s roof alerted tourists that something funny or absurdist was going on. Indoors, Carman Moore’s ensemble of musicians, complete with a gong and wind sounds, played as another Piene contraption—a large snaky inflatable—puffed up, uncoiled, and rose upward. But the hooks and wires kept getting stuck along the way and had to be hurriedly fixed by a team of workers. Jowitt wrote that the performance had an “aura of magic that no technical hitches dispel.”[60] Jennifer Dunning went so far as to call the technical crew the “real heroes of the evening.”[61]

Elaine teaching at Memphis State University, 1988. Ph © David Horan

Meanwhile, Summers work as a somatic teacher continued to deepen. To give an idea of how her approach could help heal the whole person, I quote Merián Soto, a notable dance artist who studied and danced with Summers from 1978 to 1983:

“In my memories of Elaine, she is a guide leading her students toward inner realms, where, like archaeologists on a dig, we explore in fine detail the mysteries of our bodies. In her role as guide, she is free of all agendas save a generous, listening presence. She exudes a deep respect for our uniqueness as individuals, sitting beside and supporting us as we delve into the aliveness of our moving bodies. Through her words and quality of presence, she guides us in a practice of noticing: our emotions, memories, and the evolution of ideas within our flesh…I trusted her completely, and because of this, I learned to trust the truth of my body, senses, and movement…. as a Puerto Rican woman …I was on a quest to decolonize my body/mind/psyche from assumptions and patterns…of thinking, being, and moving that blocked inner knowledge.”[62]

Summers’ interest in body awareness and her interest in choreography started to flow into one river. Advanced students like Soto became her dancers. As they were concentrating on breaking habits to free their bodies, they were also developing ways to participate in Summers’ spectacles. One of the scores she gave, according to former student and current multi-media dance artist Frances Becker, was “1 + 1 + 1 + 1,” which meant you could never repeat a movement but always had to come up with new movement.Becker explained this score in an article in CQ Unbound. [63] In both chance procedures and Kinetic Awareness, the goal was to expand consciousness.

To give you an idea of how KA could consume time, Becker tells of her first visit to a KA class in 1978: “Elaine very cheerfully told me to lie down and take 45 minutes to warm up and then take half an hour to stand up. She would come and see who made it up in time. She disappeared behind a door.”[64] Becker then proceeded to spend five years studying with Elaine before being asked into her company.

While entering into Kinetic Awareness with Summers was a rich, transformative experience, being involved in rehearsals could be frustrating. About working with her on The Illuminated Workingman in the ’70s, Soto wrote, “While Elaine was wildly enthusiastic, her process was chaotic. She would change unison movement for a large group section moments before the show, leaving dancers confused and unable to achieve the intended unison. But it was enormously fun.”[65]

What wasn’t fun, as I’ve hinted, was the sexism in the art world. Summers felt women were under appreciated in the field of Intermedia, and that she had to ignore “the ‘put-downs’ women often experience in the male-dominated world of technology.”[66] Men like Dick Higgins, who had his own printing press, seemed all powerful, making her feel that “I didn’t have a chance.” Summers also talked about psychological demons, like the inner critic demanding that you raise your leg higher or tighten the structure of your choreography. “Unconsciously in your mind, those demons are nibbling away at you and you’re quietly trying to do the dance that you have to do and be in touch with yourself.”[67] She was aware, too, of another set of demons, specifically about our bodies. In a profile in Ms. Magazine, she said, “I want to get rid of the built-in criticism about our bodies that we all carry around with us, the accumulations of negative body attitudes and tensions that are no longer appropriate.”[68]

Rehearsal for Illuminated Workingman in Buffalo. Elaine at right, Robert Coe in center. Found in clipping file, Jerome Robbins Dance Collection, Library for the Performing Arts.

Yet she always presented an optimistic picture. Playwright and journalist Robert Coe, who performed in The Illuminated Workingman (1979) in Buffalo, likened Summers to a “buoyant innocent kindergarten teacher.”[69] The language she used to describe her work was often cheerful. Mapp recalls a flyer posted on Summers’ door with a schedule for weekly classes. The first week focused on “Your Fabulous Head and Neck,” the second week on “Your Great Shoulders & Arms & Hands,” the third week on “Understanding Your Incredible Spine,” and so forth.[70] While Mapp was charmed by this cheerful language, she sensed it would lead to a deeper mission.

Ogsbury, who danced with Summers from around 1969 to 1984, felt by the end of that period, that there was a disconnect between what she called the “flamboyant” language, which she felt was “unreal,” and the actual work of Kinetic Awareness, which she called “real, real, real.”[71] And Summers wasn’t always so sweet and flowery. Coe had this memory: “Elaine had a laugh that came in soft bursts, and she was always smiling, but just as The Illuminated Workingman was ending that last night in Buffalo, she got into one of the greatest angry screaming matches I have ever been privileged to witness. Elaine literally got nose to nose and toe to toe with one of the dancers she had brought in from New York.”

Although Summers did not write a lot—except for endless grant applications—she sometimes use language that revealed her observational powers. This is clear in her descriptions of a few of her students who became prominent dance artists.

Each dancer is an entire universe. I think of Suzushi Hanayagi, whose dance energy and imagination is powerful, intense and daring. She seems a samurai warrior let loose. Dana Reitz who is a laser beam of sheer LIGHT. Eva Karczag, a vertical brook, she contains all the possibilities of white water rapids, and still pools. Then there is the hummingbird vibration of Min Tanaka’s high tension, and Trisha Brown’s silky ambiguity and complete innocence concerning the existence of gravity.[72]

This generosity of spirit cut across racial lines too. Summers was “ahead of her time” in that she was a white woman who actively sought out people of color as dancers, musicians, collaborators. Her experience with Janet Collins in the 1950s brought into focus how important it is that Black people and other non-whites have opportunities. She hired and/or nurtured a number of artists of color at different points in their careers. Elaine met Rudy Perez, who was from a Puerto Rican family in the Bronx, at a studio she rented in midtown. She invited him to perform in her piece The Daily Wake on the first Judson program. Perez started making works himself, notably, the much-photographed duet for himself and Elaine called Take Your Alligator With You (1963). She also cast him in Fantastic Gardens, pairing him with Cunningham dancer Sandra Neels. He went on to become a major post-modern choreographer in New York and Los Angeles.

She hired Edward Barton (later spelled Bhartonne), who had some gymnastics training, probably after seeing him in James Waring’s ballet class (Barton is visible in the section of Judson Fragments where Waring is teaching a ballet class) or in a large piece by John Herbert McDowell, Elaine’s frequent collaborator, in Concert #6. Then in Concert #10, he performed his own spiffy novelty act, Pop No. 1 and Pop No 2, which were each about two minutes long. He simply blew up a balloon, tied it to his waist, did a back flip, and popped it when he landed. For the second edition, he landed, flipped over, and then popped the balloon. After performing in Summers’ Country Dances, he continued as a member of the Elaine Summers Film & Dance Company for years.

After Judson, Summers pulled in Pearl Bowser, whom she knew from Janet Collins’ company, to perform in her piece Dance for Lots of People (1963) at Judson Church. With Elaine’s encouragement, Bowser turned toward film. This began when Summers asked Bowser to help edit the film recording of Trisha’s Walking on the Wall.[73] Bowser became a prominent historian/curator of Black films.

In 1977, Elaine made a solo for the stunning dancer Matt Turney, who had retired from the Martha Graham’s company, for her film and performance called Windows in the Kitchen. (The film part of it is posted here.)

Matt Turney in the Kitchen

Summers’ most frequent collaborator was African American composer Carman Moore. He played live with his group of musicians for Energy Changes, Illuminated Workingman, and countless other projects. Moore has become a legendary artist who defies musical categories.

Summers’ commitment to diversity was one aspect of her vision of collectivity, which ultimately manifested in her many iterations of the Skydance idea. As Juliette Mapp said Summers’ last decade, “She was inspired by the Internet, the possibility for collectivity, that we’d all be looking at the sky at the same time.”[74] An early version of Skydance was produced by Hans Breder at the University of Iowa in 1982. The performance was outdoors in a meadow, with many students ferrying inflatables that shot up to the sky. Recently, with the coming of the Internet, her dream became more doable—or maybe just more dreamable:

“I want to have an ongoing web piece, artwork, that continues and pays for itself.… My dream…is to have the real whole Skytime being done all over the world all the time, continually, making money by doing the thing you want to do.”[75]

Mapp also pointed out that Summers used her camera to document the work of her peers—another form of collectivity. She shot Yvonne Rainer’s Room Service in 1963 at Judson; Steve Paxton’s Deposit (1964) in upstate New York; Trisha Brown’s Planes (1968), her first equipment piece; and Brown’s Walking on the Walls at the Whitney in 1971. It was her way of sharing, of participating in the collective, of preserving the work of her peers, so these are now valuable archives.

Video stills from Steve Paxton’s Deposit, Kutsher’s Country Club, Thompson, NY, 1965. Deborah Hay and Steve Paxton, filmed by Elaine Summers, used in “Judson Fragments” (1965). Courtesy of the heirs of Elaine Summers and the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, NY Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Trisha Brown’s Walking on the Wall, filmed by Summers, Whitney Museum 1971.

Elaine met video art pioneer Davidson Gigliotti, who became director of video at EIF—and her third husband. (Carol Summers had moved to California in the 1970s.) Elaine and Davidson worked on many projects together, including a stint in Florida (Elaine loved the beach) at the Sarasota Visual Art Center in the 1990s.

Summers produced many other works than those named above, with titles like Hidden Forest, Dance for Lots of People, Secret Dancers, Theatre Piece for Chairs and Ladders, and Galumphing. There were more than thirty over all, but it’s hard to count them because she recycled pieces and titles. Her influence seeped into Judson Dance Theater in both of her two main areas: Kinetic Awareness and Intermedia. In terms of the first, Judson choreographers like Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, David Gordon, and Meredith Monk all studied with her. They wanted not only to heal their bodies, but they were looking for an escape from presenting the self in a theatrical way, a way that performers called “selling.” They were forging, as a collective and as individuals, a more intimate way of coexisting with the audience, sometimes inviting the audience in. What came out of this was a more interior, sensing-the-self kind of presence, animated by a more experimental attitude. And this new aesthetic opened the door for post-modern dance to walk through and thrive.

Elaine kept her creative juices going even in her last years. In 2009, Elaine Summers Dance & Film presented an evening of her films at Anthology Film Archives called “Making Rainbows.” Summers was fond of saying, “The best intermedia effect is the rainbow because it’s a combination light and water, and it exists only when those things combine in that particular way.”[76] It included films from the 1960s and ’70s like Illuminated Workingman, Walking Dance for Any Number, and Crow’s Nest. And she participated in the Danspace Project “Platform 2010: Back to New York City,” curated by Mapp. I love this quote from Elaine that appeared in the platform booklet: “Ideas are out there, waiting for someone to make them visible. The world is full of ideas. You get your instructions, but if you don’t act on them, it’s just a dream.” Included in that program was Two Girls Downtown Iowa, which showed two women rushing to greet each other on a sidewalk, shot in slow motion. Roslyn Sulcas, writing in the New York Times, called it “a remarkable conflation of kinetic effect and almost painterly moment-by-moment composition.” In the fall of 2014 Elaine’s films were shown in Berlin and Amsterdam.

Summers’ plan for Skydance was the most utopian vision of all. The last iteration of Skydance was Skytime 2014/Moon Rainbow. Presented by Solar One in Stuyvesant Cove Park, it involved Kiori Kawai as co-choreographer and dancer and two of her favorite composers—Carman Moore and Pauline Oliveros. Among the dancers was the Dutch dancer and impresario Thomas Körvélyessy, who has brought Kinetic Awareness to the Netherlands.

Screen shot of Kiori Kawaii and Thomas Körtvélyessy in an improvisation with Summers film footage, Berlin, 2023.

I conclude with a memory from dance artist Douglas Dunn, who lived in a SoHo building near Elaine’s. He recalled a moment when he saw Elaine, fallen on the street, close to where they both lived. In her 80s, she was weakened by osteoarthritis. He stopped to ask if he could help her up:

“Don’t touch me!”, with ardent fury she shrieked. There was a toughness, a profound autonomy in the tone of her screech. (There was a grit that underlay her always upbeat radiant friendliness; or, more accurately, her always upbeat radiant generous lovingness. It was impossible for me ever to be in her presence without feeling that I had been appreciating life far too little, and that I should work harder to emulate her unabashed, big-hearted joie de vivre.)[77]

¶¶¶

Special thanks to Thomas Körvélyessy, who, as executor of Summers’ estate, manages the website  Elaine Summers Artistic Estate. Also thanks to Dan De Prenger and Bill Crowley, who were grad students of Hans Breder, and to Juliette Mapp.

¶¶¶

Selected Bibliography

Banes, Sally. Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–1964. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.

Eddy, Martha. Mindful Movement: The Evolution of the Somatic arts and Conscious Action. Chicago: Intellect, 2016.

Saltonstall, Ellen. Kinetic Awareness: Discovering Your Bodymind. New York: Kinetic Awareness Center, 1988.

Notes

[1] Quoted in Anna Kisselgoff, “Elaine Summers, Who Meshed Dance and Film, Dies at 89,” New York Times, January 15, 2015.

[2] Martha Eddy, Mindful Movement: The Evolution of the Somatic arts and Conscious Action (Chicago: Intellect, 2016), 55.

[3] Elaine talked about the Juilliard training often, and her short stint as a Juilliard student is mentioned in all her biographical material. But neither her maiden name nor either of her married names shows up on the enrollment lists. The name Elaine Weil appears on the list of extension students, for the fall of 1952. She had already separated from her first husband, Warren Spaulding, and had just met her husband to be, Carol Summers, so I’m wondering if she made up a surname at random.

[4] Yaël Tamar Lewin, Night’s Dancer: The Life of Janet Collins (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press), 137.

[5] Email to author from Daryl Chin, December 20, 2014.

[6] Oral History Project Interview Transcript, 168.

[7] Ellen Saltonstall, Kinetic Awareness: Discovering Your Bodymind (New York: Kinetic Awareness Center, 1988), 16.

[8] Saltonstall, Kinetic Awareness, 19-24. By the way, a new book on Gindler, by Rebecca Loukes, has just been published.

[9] Quoted in Eddy, Mindful Movement, 57.

[10] Bennington College Judson Project interview. This Project was initiated by me and co-directed with Tony Carruthers, who conducted this interview, c. 1980. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, NYPL. “The Judson Project” NYPL Digital Collections. 1983. *MGZIDF 5872.

[11] Quoted in Eddy, Mindful Movement, 56.

[12] Eddy, Mindful Movement, 176.

[13] Eddy, Mindful Movement, 191.

[14] Quoted in Saltonstall, Kinetic Awareness, 27.

[15] Interview with the author, December 10, 2014.

[16] Oral History Project Interview Transcript, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, NY Public Library for the Performing Arts, *MGZMT 3-2626, 139.

[17] Robert Dunn, Movement Research Performance Journal #14: “The Legacy of Robert Ellis Dunn,” guest edited by Wendy Perron, 1997, originally published in Contact Quarterly, 1980.

[18] Quoted in “Why Dance in the Art World?” Performa.

[19] Bennington College Judson Project interview. Posted here by Elaine Summers Artistic Estate.

[20] Bennington College Judson Project interview.

[21] Quoted in Susan K. Berman, “Four Breakaway Choreographers,” Ms. Magazine, April 1975, 40.

[22] Sally Banes, “Choreographic Methods of the Judson Dance Theater,” Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader, eds Ann Dils & Ann Copper Albright (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 353.

[23] Bennington College Judson Project Interview.

[24] Bennington College Judson Project interview.

[25] Samara Davis, “Judson at 50: Elaine Summers,” Artforum online, 2012, accessed October 4, 2024.

[26] Oral History Project Interview Transcription, with Elaine Summers, MGZMT 3-2626 Pages 1-99, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, NY Public Library for the Performing Arts, 89.

[27] Elaine Summers, Movement Research Performance Journal #14, guest editor Wendy Perron, “The Legacy of Robert Ellis Dunn (1928-1996),” 1997, 3.

[28] Bennington College Judson Project interview.

[29] Elaine Summers, “Infinite Choices: Improvisation in Choreography & Filmmaking,” Contact Quarterly, Fall 1987, 34.

[30] Sally Banes, Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–1964 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 40.

[31] Quoted in Banes, Democracy’s Body, 41.

[32] Banes, Democracy’s Body, 47

[33] Banes, Democracy’s Body, 53.

[34] Yvonne Rainer, Feelings Are Facts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, paperback edition, 2013), 223.

[35] Quoted in Banes, Democracy’s Body, 72–76.

[36] Elaine Summers Interview, OHP Library, transcript, p. 222.

[37] Bennington College Judson Project Interview.

[38] Bennington College Judson Project Interview.

[39] Quoted in Oral History Project Interview, 157.

[40] Um, I forget where I read this.

[41] Quoted in Banes, Democracy’s Body, 156.

[42] Don McDonagh, The Rise and Fall and Rise of Modern Dance (New York: New American Library, 1970), 276.

[43] Program notes for Fantastic Gardens.

[44] Billy Linich designed lights for many Judson dances. Known as Billy Name in the Warhol milieu, he was the person responsible for furnishing The Factory with stuff found in the street and for covering the inside in silver—either tin foil, mylar, or silver paint, causing Warhol to comment, “It was the perfect time to think silver.” Source: Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol ’60s (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980), 63-65.

[45] Bennington College Judson Project interview.

[46] Jonas Mekas, “Movie Journal,” Village Voice, February 27, 1964.

[47] Jill Johnston, “Summers Gardens, Village Voice, March 12, 1964, Clippings file, *MGZR.

[48] Jennifer Krasinski, “Royal Flux: A book captures the creative impermanence of the Judson Dance Theater,” Bookforum, accessed December 6, 2024.

[49] Susan Rosenberg, Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual Art (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2017), 38.

[50] Bennington College Judson project interview.

[51] Dick Higgins, “Intermedia,” The Something Else Newsletter, Vol. 1, No. 1, February 1966.

[52] Niblock started a concert series under EIF in 1973. Since 1985, when he took the helm, EIF has presented numerous American and international artists and created many recordings. Niblock died in 2024.

[53] Don McDonagh, “Summers Dance Joined by Audience in Museum Garden,” New York Times, September 23, 1973, 62.

[54] Daniel Weintraub, dir. documentary film, Deep Listening: The Story of Pauline Oliveros (2023).

[55] All statements about the Intermedia Festival, made in LIVE Performance Art #3, 1980, 12–17.

[56] Quoted in William Grimes, “Hans Breder, Who Broke Artistic Boundaries, Dies at 81,” New York Times, June 23, 2017.

[57]  The complete film (twelve minutes) by Elaine Summers, camera and special editing by Bill Rowley, dancers: students of the department of Intermedia, Iowa University, ©1973, 2015 (renewed) Artistic Estate of Elaine Summers, the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, NYPL, accessed January 13, 2025.

[58] Interview with the author, December 17, 2024.

[59] Jack Anderson, “Dance: Solitary Geography, Mixed Media Ode to Nature,” New York Times, July 16, 1983.

[60] Deborah Jowitt, “Heat Record,” Village Voice, July 10, 1984, 71.

[61] Jennifer Dunning, “Dance: Mixed-Media Performance,” New York Times, June 10, 1984.

[62]  “How Does This Body Want to Move?: Dancing the Legacy of Elaine Summers,” by Merián Soto, Contact Quarterly, Vol. 44 No.2, summer/Fall 2019

[63] Frances Becker, “Remembering Elaine,” CQ Unbound, accessed December 22, 2024.

[64] Becker, “Remembering Elaine.”

[65] Becker, “Remembering Elaine.”

[66] Maria Harriton, “Elaine Summers: New Forms, New Ideas!” Dance Magazine, September 1970, 66.

[67] Bennington College Judson Project Interview.

[68] Susan K. Berman, “Four Breakaway Choreographers,” Ms. Magazine, April 1975, 39.

[69] Email to author, November 13, 2024.

[70] Juliette Mapp, “Stardust to Stardust: Learning from Elaine,” Movement Research Performance Journal #46, April 2015, 18.

[71] Interview with the author, December 17, 2024

[72] Elaine Summers, “Infinite Choices,” 35. To identify these dancers: Suzushi Hanayagi was a classical Japanese dancer who came to NYC with a scholarship to the Graham school, then got involved in Judson, and went on to choreograph for fourteen productions by experimental theater director Robert Wilson. Reitz is a solo improvisor and faculty member at Bennington College. Eva Karzcag, an extraordinarily fluid dancer in Trisha Brown’s company in the 1980s, is an educator who incorporates Kinetic Awareness in her teachings. Min Tanaka was a Butoh improvisor with an international reputation.

[73] Email from Thomas Körtvélyessy, artistic executor of the Elaine Summers estate, December 19, 2024.

[74] Phone interview with the author, December 10, 2024.

[75] Oral History Project Interview transcript, 307.

[76] Quoted in Anna Kisselgoff, “Cooking with Intermedia,” New York Times, February 18, 1977.

[77] Douglas Dunn, “In Celebration of Elaine Summers,”  February 20, 2021, accessed December 12, 2014.