Elaine Summers' Intermedia

Elaine Summers' career has taken many forms, from choreography, somatic practice and film-making... to Intermedia, as early as 1962, at the Judson Dance Theater.

Elaine Summers reports that her first experience of Intermedia dates back to Concert of Dance # 11, held at the Judson Memorial Church on July 6, 1962. It featured a screening of her film Ouverture2, in front of which she danced3. Even though historiography makes no mention of this, McDowell ’s description quoted by Sally Banes still evokes an early form of Intermedia4 : “The first dance, by Ruth Emerson, began at 8:30 p.m. sharp. Just as the film was about to end, about 6 people came out of the wings, and the film dissolved into the dance(...)”5. In the interaction between Ruth Emerson's choreography and Summers' film, the latter's body acted as a screen and provided a new kind of merging between medias.

Still at Judson, Elaine Summers’ most recognized Intermedia performance is Fantastic Gardens6, shown for Concert # 18 in 19647.
This is the first recognized manifestation of Summers' concept of Intermedia which she defines as a work “where elements as different as dance, music, film and other media blend together to create a new medium, rather than remaining separate layers that form only coincidental congruences (referred to as multimedia).”8
To support her definition, she compares it to the rainbow: “A rainbow is an optical and meteorological phenomenon that causes a spectrum of light to appear in the sky when the sun shines on droplets of moisture in the earth's atmosphere. Like the rainbow, Intermedia art needs two elements to create a third; in my case, it's dancers combined with a projected image.”9
In this way, she explores the “multiplicity and interpenetration of forms”10 in performances such as Walking Dance for Any Number, 1968, Windows in the Kitchen, 1976, Crow’s Nest, 1980, Flowing Rocks/Still Waters, 1981, SkyDance/SkyTime, 1982, Hidden Forest, 2008, etc.

The practice of Intermedia being an important axis of her performances, Elaine Summers founded the Experimental Intermedia Foundation in 1968.
The foundation's mission was to bring together artists working in the field of Intermedia, to promote them and to glean grants to finance their projects. The foundation has attracted the interest of prestigious organizations such as the New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation, which indicates a successful entreprise.

However Elaine Summers’ definition has been established since her performance of Fantastic Gardens in 1964, the notion has been highly discussed in the art’s community since artists and art historians all have their own interpretation of what Intermedia is, starting with Dick Higgins11. Because Intermedia was at the heart of preoccupations in the art scene, Summers therefore contributed with the Experimental Intermedia Foundation to organise two festivals in 1980 and 198212, whose objectives were to discuss the concept through conferences and performances.1314 On these occasions, Summers presented two of her Intermedia works, Crow’s Nest (First Intermedia Art Festival) and SkyDance/SkyTime (Second Intermedia art Festival).

The First and Second Festivals of Intermedia raise what was at the stakes in the art world and the difficulties faced by artists, especially those working with performance and video.

Finally, one can define Summers' practice of Intermedia as a political statement related to its historical context. Indeed, the emergence of this new means of artistic expression that combines art and science is contemporary with the civil rights movement and feminism15, and “for the first time, women were able to have a pioneering role in the development of a new art form”16. However, although Summers claims to be one of the first to have worked in the field of Intermedia, she ultimately received little recognition in the field.17
This phenomenon of invisibilizing women in favor of men has been frequent throughout art history, and highlights the fact that the intersection of art and new technologies is a common interest from the late 1960s onwards.

“The history of twentieth-century performance art is the history of a permissive, open-ended medium with infinite variables.18
Since it draws freely on a wide range of disciplines and media - literature, poetry, theater, music, dance, architecture, video, painting - performance art is faced with a difficulty of definition19. This is the same difficulty faced by Intermedia.

In view of the multiple possibilities offered by performance, Intermedia practice can be seen as the natural evolution of the performance medium. Intermedia is perhaps the point at which all the media to which performance can converge. Elaine Summers' use of various technological media- films, video projections, surveillance systems20, installations, the Internet, etc.- is a practice still being explored in contemporary art.

1 MARX, Kristine, « Gardens of Light and Movement », PAJ : A Journal of Performance Art, vol.30, no.3, 2008, p. 25.

2 CROCE, Arlene ; VAUGHAN, David ; CORNFIELD, Robert, « Judson, A dance chronology », Ballet Review, Vol. 1, n.6, 1967, p.54.

3 KORTVÉLYESSY, Thomas, « 40+ Years of dance, Intermedia, and empowerment, The magic of Hidden Forest and The Improvisational Dance Score Book », in Journal of Dance Research in the Netherlands, Vol 5, 2008.

4 BANES, Sally, Democracy’s Body, 1962-1964, p.40.
5 WARING, MCDOWELL, DUNN, et. al., « Judson : A Discussion », p.37 ; Michael Rowe et Amanda

Degener, Interview avec John Herbert McDowell, New York City, 19 février 1980, BCJP.

6 BANES, Sally, « Democracy’s Body, Judson Dance Theater and Its Legacy », Performing Arts Journal, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1981, p.101.

7 CROCE, Arlene ; VAUGHAN, David ; CORNFIELD, Robert, « Judson, A dance chronology », op. cit., p.61.

8 KORTVELYESSY, Thomas, op. cit. 1

9 MANGOLTE, Babette, et. al., « Being Contemporary », PAJ : A Journal of Performance and Art , vol.34, no.1, 2012, p.54.

10 WOOSTER, Ann-Sargent, op. cit, p.60

11Dick Higgins, who reuses Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s concept, defines it as follows: « son usage pour moi est ce qui permet à un lecteur, à un regardeur ou un auditeur d’entrer dans l’œuvre qui est intermédiaire. »,

soit des hybrides qu’il est difficile de classer. See HIGGINS, Dick ; DREYFUS, Charles, DONGUY, Jacques, ‘Intermedia’, Inter, p.37 and HIGGINS, Dick, « On Intermedias », Something Else Newsletter, 1966.

12 Upon the invitation of Hans Breder and Wallace Tomasini, two professors from the University of Iowa interested in interdisciplinary practices.

13 LIVIO, Antoine, « Le mariage fou de l’art et de la technologie », Tribune de Lausanne, March 2nd 1980.

14 Some of the conferences were given by art « celebrities » like Jack Burnham, David Antin, Allan Kaprow, Gregory Battcock, Germano Celant et Gillo Dorfles, Jean Pierre Van Tieghem, Pierre Restany, to name a few. Cf fond d’archive Elaine Summers, The Jerome Robbins Library for the Performing Arts, New York, « First Intermedia Festival program », b.37, f.3.