Elaine Summers - To Judson Dance Theater

To Judson Dance Theater

Summers was born in Perth, Australia and grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. She came to New York in the 1950s and became part of the workshop-group originally initiated by Robert Ellis Dunn that would later be referred to as the Judson Dance Theater in its second term 1962, together with a.o. Trisha Brown, Ruth Emerson, Fred Herko, Sally Gross, Edward Bhartonne, Carolee Schneemann, Gretchen MacLane, Deborah Hay, David Gordon, and Valda Setterfield.

At Judson, Summers shared in the ongoing experiments with chance methods and pedestrian movement as part of the interest in expanding the then accepted methods of creating and performing dances. However she also embraced the more theatrical part of the collective (Aileen Passloff, John Herbert McDowell and others). Summers expanded dance into other disciplines, experimental film, visual art, and body work. In the later phase of the Judson Dance Theater she created dances that would to work with the entire environment of the performance space. She also initiated five of the total of 16 concerts of the group, one at Turnau Opera, Woodstock NY (Concert #2) and one series (Concerts #9-#12) at the Gramercy Arts Theater in New York City.