Dancer, Choreographer. A pioneer of modern dance, she shall be remembered for using movies to enhance dance performances and for 'Kinetic Awareness', her approach to the science of body movement. Born Lillian Elaine Smithers, she was raised in Boston by her mother, studied dance from a young age, graduated from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, then in 1951 moved to New York City where she studied at Juilliard and in the 1960s became a founding member of the Judson Dance Theater, a Greenwich Village based avant garde ensemble that fused ballet technique with modern composition. Early-on Elaine saw the potential of film as a medium for preserving dance and making it more accessible and thus began creating her own pieces and committing them to celluloid. Founding the Elaine Summers Dance & Film Company, she produced a number of works that mixed cinematic projections with live dancers, among them 1964's "Fantastic Gardens", the 1973 "Two Girls Downtown Iowa", the ongoing project "Skytime" (1995), and 2008's "Gallumphing". Elaine taught at her Kinetic Awareness Center and elsewhere, was honored on multiple occasions by the National Endowement for the Arts, and remained active, her final endeavor, "Moon Rainbow", coming in the last year of her life. She died of the effects of a fall suffered at her home.
Dancer, Choreographer. A pioneer of modern dance, she shall be remembered for using movies to enhance dance performances and for 'Kinetic Awareness', her approach to the science of body movement. Born Lillian Elaine Smithers, she was raised in Boston by her mother, studied dance from a young age, graduated from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, then in 1951 moved to New York City where she studied at Juilliard and in the 1960s became a founding member of the Judson Dance Theater, a Greenwich Village based avant garde ensemble that fused ballet technique with modern composition. Early-on Elaine saw the potential of film as a medium for preserving dance and making it more accessible and thus began creating her own pieces and committing them to celluloid. Founding the Elaine Summers Dance & Film Company, she produced a number of works that mixed cinematic projections with live dancers, among them 1964's "Fantastic Gardens", the 1973 "Two Girls Downtown Iowa", the ongoing project "Skytime" (1995), and 2008's "Gallumphing". Elaine taught at her Kinetic Awareness Center and elsewhere, was honored on multiple occasions by the National Endowement for the Arts, and remained active, her final endeavor, "Moon Rainbow", coming in the last year of her life. She died of the effects of a fall suffered at her home.
Bio by: Bob Hufford
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See more Summers memorials in:
Records on Ancestry
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