In Em Moves, filmmaker Hanna Heiting creates a poetic tribute to the life and work of Emilie Conrad, visionary founder of Continuum Movement. Hanna's artistic decisions are those of an insider who lives the movement she is filming. Her visual compositions, her informed stillness, her directorial attention, all mirror and follow Emilie Conrad's life-long exploration of movement in an unfolding call and response. There is a pulsing life rhythm to the film's orchestration that awakens the viewer's own somatic awareness.

The film captures the full range of this somatics genius by juxtaposing Emilie's movement with her healing work. The contrasting scenes of her reading original works on Kafka, Callas and Nijinsky, walking around her Brooklyn neighborhood remembering childhood pains and leading Continuum workshops with intoxicating enthusiasm, create a sense of the full complexity of her personality and the passion of her vision.

Em Moves is an intimate love letter to a life-long teacher, an astute commentary on life and art, and an intellectually sophisticated tribute to the vision of this extraordinary pioneer. Em Moves is for people who know Continuum, for people who want to know Continuum, and simply for people who want to stay alive. Em Moves invites the mystery of the unknown, the inhale and exhale that are the heartbeat of Continuum, to live on screen. This stunning film will inspire anyone who walks and breathes on this planet.


Rebecca Mark
Professor of American Literature at Tulane University

The Art of Renewal: The Fluid System

The central teaching of Continuum is that ALL fluids of the body - whether circulating blood, the tides of cerebrospinal fluid, the pump of the lymph system, the net of membranes or the swirl of viscera and brain - function as fundamentally ONE undulating stream of intelligence.

Although Continuum has many aspects, all based upon fluid movement, our work can be seen as a macrocosm of the essential motif of the cell. The fluid within the cellular matrix changes from gelatinous to watery. It is this exchange that allows the necessary cellular plasticity needed for movement and communication. These cyclical movements produce a coherent network of chemical signals and messages.

Similar to the cell, the human body is designed to reflect the same restructuring and movement. Maintaining changes in our own fluid mobility is essential for the life of the body, its optimal health and self-renewal. All fluids, whether in the cell, the body or the planet, function as a resonant intelligent whole and can never be separated.

In Continuum, we refer to this entirety as the fluid system and recognize its essential and ancestral role in healing, movement and fundamental wisdom. We invoke the fluid system internally by creating a mix of interpenetrating cues and signals. These signals become wave motions that are carried through the watery substances of the body, softening our defenses and arousing the life force in the matrix of every tissue, bone and cell. By amplifying wave motion through movement, our entire body resonates as a fluid, vital whole. All of Continuum's teachings are designed to quicken and enrich the fluid system, invoking its genius to transform structure and foster the art of self-renewal.

"The primary characteristic of any fluid system is its ability to keep transforming itself."
-Emilie Conrad


Intellectual property of www.continuummovement.com

Hanna Heiting came to New York from Israel to study Philosophy and Film at Columbia University. She worked in the film industry in New York and Los Angeles for 12 years on feature and documentary films.

In 1983, Hanna started making her own personal films:
Innkeeper 1984 (Big Sur)
Landlight 1988 (Los Angeles)
Improvising the Love Story 1997 (Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Daikinis 2000 (Amsterdam)

In that same year, her personal growth work with Continuum began.

In 2009, she published Rite de Sortie, a book of poems primarily about her relationship to her family's holocaust history.

EM Moves 2011 is a tribute to Emilie Conrad and Continuum in appreciation for the philosophy and practices that supported Hanna to develop a deeper understanding of her life and creativity.

Emilie Conrad's understanding of culture, body and the cosmos has changed my own philosophical investigation, but as a filmmaker, I am fascinated with her unique gifts of communication. Emilie conveys information, both scientific and mystical, in all the myriad artistic means she commands. The fluttering of her articulate fingers, her passionate resonance with Nijinsky and her unpredictable bursts of humor transform every presentation and demonstration into a divine ancient and modern theatrical art.

In classes as well as performances, her life story brought me back to myself, just as her sound frequencies affected mine before I did any sounding or movements of my own. The making of the film was not about documenting the precious fleeting moments, but rather a continuation of the movement that I felt inside me while watching her.

My interests lie not in talking about Continuum but in finding ways to express as honestly and simply as I can what touched me most about it as a transformative and creative process.

The film attained its form and structure when I made editorial decisions about the parts of her powerful and triumphant story that I chose to focus on, but it felt complete only when I was watching it for the thousandth and one time and found myself moving and breathing with it.

The initial sales will go to a special fund to provide financial assistance for individuals who wish to pursue healing and creative work with Emilie Conrad.

EMILIE CONRAD, the founder of Continuum is considered a somatic visionary whose work is incorporated by an International audience of professionals from many fields. such as Rolfing, Zero Balancing, Hellerwork, CranioSacral, Osteopathy, Physical Therapy, Dance, Psychoneuroimmunology, and Physical Fitness.

Emilie Conrad was born and raised in New York City where she studied ballet and Afro-Haitian dance and she spent five years as a choreographer with a folklore company in Haiti furthering her interest in Haitian dance.

Her love for movement inspired her to discover the essential, primary movements common to all life forms that lie beneath cultural influence. These fundamental movements are a "cosmology" of life, where form is fluidly mutable, dissolving and shaping itself anew.

In 1974, she pioneered a protocol for spinal cord injury. In 1963 she moved to Los Angeles where she began teaching at the Actors Studio. Her novel approach to movement enriched the performing artist and led to choreographing and directing many plays and performance works art of performance.

From 1974 to 1979, Emilie was Movement Specialist in a research study conducted by Dr. Valerie Hunt at UCLA. This groundbreaking study demonstrated that fluid, primary movement is essential in our ability to innovate. Enhancing these fundamental movements has a potential to create a rich intrinsic environment that brings forth new insights in our understanding of the human body and its potential to create alternate systems.

Emilie's capacity for innovation has become an inspiration to the field of Somatics, movement education, and physical fitness. She has originated a dynamic workout that strengthens by incorporating multiple angles in gravity to facilitate developing diverse muscular and skeletal relationships.

Emilie tells us: "becoming aware of the primordial- cosmic flows of information can be instrumental in diffusing our cultural inhibitors, helping us to move beyond our stifling adaptive patterns, ultimately becoming a resource for health and creativity." Emilie is the author of "Life on Land" recently published by North Atlantic Press.


Intellectual property of www.continuummovement.com