About Continuum Movement Arts
The somatic practice of Continuum Movement has inspired and informed the lives of artists in a variety of media and infused their artworks with sensuality, aliveness and innovation. The Continuum Movement Arts website offers a vibrant virtual gallery for these artists, their works, and Continuum, in the spirit of fostering a more embodied, creative and compassionate world.
Emilie Conrad and Continuum Movement
Founder, Continuum Movement
Emilie Conrad’s unrelenting quest for a life unfettered by cultural constraints led her to create Continuum Movement. As a dancer who had transformational movement experiences, Emilie looked to the biology of the body for guidance and found that all life was movement, the movement of fluids.
Emilie’s passion for discovery was central to her movement investigations. Recognizing life as ongoing movement, she embraced an inquiry method as the basis of Continuum Movement. Augmenting her movement explorations with breaths and sounds, Emilie forged a path for herself and others to a direct experience of human life as part of the planetary process of evolution.
Emilie Conrad taught hundreds of workshops worldwide as well as classes in the Santa Monica, CA, studio that continues to be the home base of Continuum. Throughout her life, Emilie created dance and dance theatre projects. She brought much of the scope of her work together in her autobiography, Life on Land: The Story of Continuum, published in 2007.
Known for her radical vision of human possibilities and her ground-breaking work with persons with spinal cord injuries, Conrad has been a leader in the field of somatic movement. Authorized Continuum Movement teachers now share this work around the world. Continuum is relevant to a wide range of concerns including, but not limited to, trauma, vision, neuroplasticity, bodywork and artistic expression.
Of the many ways to describe how Continuum explorations with breath, sound and movement support creativity, we have chosen to name four principal categories, as follows:
- Cultivating fluidity
- Increasing sensation based experience
- Developing attentive awareness
- Expanding sense of time and space
For more information about Continuum, as well as Continuum classes and workshops with authorized teachers around the world, please visit www.continuummovement.com.
… Elaine Colandrea
Curator, Continuum Movement Arts
Elaine’s interest in creating a world informed by the sensibilities of Continuum Movement has led to the creation of Continuum Movement ARTS. In 2014, founder of Continuum Movement Emilie Conrad enthusiastically supported Elaine’s interest in creating a Continuum arts movement.
In another time and place, Elaine would be a temple dancer, but in this world she is an authorized Continuum Movement teacher, dancer/choreographer, massage therapist and originator of the Deeply Restorative Workshops, Moving for Health, Dancing for Health and The Intelligent Body series. Based in the Hudson Valley of New York, Elaine also offers workshops in southern Italy in the caves of Basilicata.
Elaine’s artistic expression often combines her passion for the somatic practice of Continuum Movement with choreographic projects; an ongoing theme is the parallel between the human body and the natural world. Dance reviewer Linda Diamond wrote that Elaine is a “wizard of new dance forms,” in response to On the Nature of the Body, a 2012 gallery dance installation.
The transforming effects of movement have always guided her and led to the study of many forms of dance, the creation of original dance theater productions (Venus, 2009; The Field, 2004; Marsh Dreams, 2001; Fool’s Journey, 1999) and the study of various movement and bodywork practices. Elaine has an M.A. in dance from Columbia University (1982) and was certified as a massage therapist by the Muscular Therapy Institute (1988).
Major Influences
Emilie Conrad (Continuum Movement), Susan Harper (Continuum Montage), Judi Bachrach (who first introduced Elaine to Continuum), Lenore Latimer (Limon dance technique), Robert Ellis Dunn (choreography), Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen (Body Mind Centering), Irene Dowd (functional anatomy). Clients and students as well as health challenges have served as primary teachers.
Priscilla Auchincloss
Advisor and Content Editor
Priscilla Auchincloss wanted to be a ballerina when she was little and spent her early twenties studying modern dance and ballet in New York City. Believing then that she would never master pirouettes she decided to let her intellect dance, eventually earning a Ph.D. in physics. She had a substantial career in academia before finding her way back to dance, yoga, and theater improvisation.
Continuum, as any true movement practice, provided the means for Priscilla to reclaim the more authentic, elemental and physical life that her soul was craving. Leaving the university, she began teaching Continuum and created PHYSIKOS, a studio dedicated to contemplative and somatic movement arts, from 2006-2013. Priscilla says, “I studied physics to understand the world, but when I heard Emilie Conrad speak, certain things fell into place, like the fact that we are part of an unfolding, evolutionary process. Continuum taps into the consciousness of that unfolding, in a way you can feel. So my teaching and writing is a weave of the analytical approach of physics and the intuitive approach of art.”
Today, Priscilla continues to teach and write about movement. “Continuum has given me a way to relate to the world. Emilie Conrad often said that the question that propelled her was how to live in society without being bound by it. Continuum offers me a way to access the profound sanity of simply being, and from this elemental experience has come an ongoing percolation of ideas and inspiration.”
Influences
Deborah Raoult (who brought Continuum to Rochester), Emilie Conrad (Continuum), Augusto Boal (Theatre of the Oppressed), Olivia Corson (Body Tales), and Susan Harper (Continuum Montage).
Graditudes
Gratitude to Emilie Conrad
In celebration of her life artistry, Continuum Movement Arts dedicates this site to the founder of Continuum Movement Emilie Conrad, on the occasion of her 80th birth anniversary, June 14, 2014.
Gratitude to Barbara Mindell
In celebration of painter and Continuum Movement teacher Barbara Mindell, whose artistic expression exemplifies Continuum Movement Art and brings life to the site.
Gratitude to Donnalea Van Vleet Goelz
Continuum Movement executive director, Donnalea Van Vleet Goelz, for her heartfelt support of the Continuum Movement Arts initiative.
Gratitude to Lauren Devon
Lauren Devon generously offered her incomparable photographic portraits of Emilie Conrad to The Spirit Soars. www.laurendevon.com.
Gratitude to Phillippa Ewing Weiland
Phillippa Ewing has lent her considerable skills in creative problem solving and marketing to the creation of Continuum Movement Arts. www.phillippaewing.com