Falling Through Dance and Life

Emilyn Claid

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350075733
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

This is a book about falling as a means of reconfiguring our relationship with living and dying. Dancer, choreographer, educator and therapist Emilyn Claid draws inspiration from her personal and professional experiences to explore alternative approaches to being present in the world. Contemporary movement based performers ground their practices in understanding the interplay of gravity and the body. Somatic intentional falling provides them a creative resource for developing both self and environmental support. The physical, metaphorical and psychological impact of these practices informs the theories and perspectives presented in this book. As falling can be dangerous and painful, encouraging people to do so willingly might be considered a provocative premise. Western culture generally resists falling because it provokes fear and represents failure. Out of this tension a paradox emerges: falling, we are both powerless subjects and agents of change, a dynamic distinction that enlivens discussions throughout the writing. Emilyn engages with different dance genres, live performance and therapeutic interactions to form her ideas and interlaces her arguments with issues of gender and race. She describes how surrender to gravity can transform our perceptions and facilitate ways of being that are relational and life enhancing. Woven throughout, autobiographical, poetic, philosophical, descriptive and theoretical voices combine to question the fixation of Western culture on uprightness and supremacy. A simple act of falling builds momentum through eclectic discussions, uncovering connections to shame, laughter, trauma, ageing and the thrill of release.

1

Falling Apart

A REMEDY

I dedicated a week to intentional falling, in a dance studio, in 2013. For three hours each day, I fell down: slowly at first, then gradually getting faster, then tumbling, crashing and sliding, my body finding its confidence and becoming looser and freer as the week progressed. I fell while standing still, from chairs and from walking, running and rolling down stairs. I felt tired, bruised but exhilarated. After five days I stood still in the studio and imagined myself falling, remembering in my body the distance, energy, impact and sensations of dropping to the ground. I did not need to keep falling to know I could fall. I was standing up, but with the sensations of letting go always present. My body, gravity and the ground were interconnected. I experienced a state of continuously dropping while standing still. Falling was now ‘imprinted and distilled as a sense and remembered on my body as potency’ (Claid 2018).

‘Potency’ is a term I appropriate from homeopathy and homeopathic remedies. The British Homeopathic Association describes homeopathy as ‘a form of holistic medicine … based on the principle of “like cures like” – in other words, a substance taken in small amounts will cure the same symptoms it causes if it was taken in large amounts’ (Hahnemann [1842] 2001). The amounts are, in fact, minuscule. The remedies are diluted and vigorously shaken until the original substance has all but disappeared, a process called ‘potentization’. A homeopathic remedy is a form of potency.

My week in the studio led me through a similar process of potentization. As the week continued and I fell less, I was diluting falling until I was left with an infinitesimal sense of surrendering my weight to the force of gravity. I was forming a potency – diluted from extensive repetitions – as a remedy for my fears of falling. Living with the potency of gravity as an embodied experience mitigates my psychological fears, especially as I get older, and helps me reconsider the top-down polarity of values enshrined in many linguistic metaphors.

UP IS GOOD

‘Falling’, as a verb, adjective and noun, infuses the English language, conceptually, metaphorically and psychologically. The addition of another word creates meaning other than literal, physical falling: falling apart, falling asleep, falling ill, falling over yourself, falling pregnant, falling about laughing and falling in – and out of – line. Falling in love conjures the notion of swooning: passing out, fainting or being overcome with emotion.

Through a metaphorical, conceptual medium – such as the English language – ‘we understand things in terms of other things. Concepts are metaphorically structured … Every experience takes place within a vast background of cultural presuppositions’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 56–7). In English, the conceptual understanding of space is often framed by human motor functions. Perhaps the most basic example is that standing is up and falling is down. Emotions are also often processed through metaphor, especially those where motor functions serve as vehicles for conveying meaning. Because falls are considered by definition dangerous and painful, falling is both metaphorically and conceptually associated with negative emotions. In Western culture, as a result, standing up is happy, falling down is sad (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). These spatial orientations structure other sets of binary values: good is up, bad is down, brightness up, gloom down, rationality both up and good, emotional behaviour both down and bad. Linguistic theorist Zoltán Kövecses develops the theme: ‘Control is up, lack of control is down: I’m on top of the situation. He is under my control. That was a low-down thing to do. She’s an upstanding citizen, the discussion fell to an emotional level. He couldn’t rise above his emotions’ (2000: 36).

Synchronized with language, Western culture persists in an endeavour to rise, to resist falling, to strive towards institutional control, upwardly focused verticality, linearity and steadfast uprightness, pinned up by morality, spirituality, propriety and virtue. The metaphorical binary from rising to falling infiltrates aesthetics, religion, psychology, economics and race relations. Being bigger, stronger, more knowledgeable, and moving forward in time are associated with growing up and considered to be life-giving and positive. Upward-ness is structured through social hierarchies; getting to the top is the goal, associated with pride, class, economic success. Rise to new heights, aspire to lofty status within halls of academia, achieve flights of excellence, become high flyers. Western culture is immersed in positive rising. Heights of wealth and happiness are measured in rising pop charts, commodity sales, wealth registers, interest rates, careers and each country’s economic status.

Contrarily, sinking to the lowest of the low, feeling down in the dumps, being down-and-out or dirt-poor, plumbing new depths, being labelled as a fallen woman, falling from grace – these phrases appropriate falling as a metaphor for failure and shame. Economic depression is inundated with falling metaphors: crash, deflation, downturn, plunge, collapse, slump, plummeting demand. Social, political and economic success depends on rising, not falling, and a persistent binary of positive/negative flourishes between the two terms.¹

Within the confines of Western civilization, there is universal agreement, a world view, a cosmology, that up is good and down is bad. This cosmology is deeply embedded in religious mythology and metaphor. Christianity abounds with falling myths – Adam and Eve, Satan – and narratives that foster a notion of a good self as pre-existent, divinely created, an essence given by God. Across the world, East and West, goodness – god-ness – has been associated with sun, sky, moon and stars. Most readers will agree that religions have developed underworld narratives, where evil, dark and hellish events occur. In religious art, failing goodness is depicted as falling, affirming goodness as transcendent.

These values are consistently reinforced through linguistic repetition and in turn influence people’s daily lives and outlook, movements and social interactions. Embodying upward-ness as a life well led, means falling is smeared with fear, failure, vulnerability, uncertainty and shame. Minds and bodies are trained not to fall, producing fixed resistance in human bodies to their otherwise fluidly kinaesthetic responses to gravity and the environment. Through the entwining of body and language, movement and metaphor, Western culture has developed an attachment to physical and psychological upward-ness that denies the potential of falling and failure as creative sources for being present in the world.

An acknowledgement of the perpetually interwoven relations between language, metaphor and human movements, and a reconsideration of ways of moving, can potentially both influence language and reconfigure the values given to up and down. Change is happening. For instance, the North American phrases ‘getting down’, a metaphor for enthusiastic engagement with something, and ‘I’m down with that’, meaning positive agreement, have now entered the English lexicon. Both emerge from black American culture and demonstrate not only the relationship between movement and metaphor but also the importance of creative interdependence of cultural differences, as ways of changing the values given to linguistic metaphors.

The earth is indifferent to falling and rising. It doesn’t care to rise and fall. It rises and falls all the time – mountains, cliffs, coastal paths – but it doesn’t have a feeling about this. That’s what we bring to the equation.

HALLETT and SMITH 2017: 30

SUPREME FEATS

I arrive in Manhattan in 1969, plunging into a marijuana-flowering, hippie-wandering, bedraggled, hot, multi-cultural Lower East Side. I lodge in a nineteenth-century tenement block. Six heavy locks decorate the front door; the kitchen sideboard hinges upwards to reveal a bath; dark sweltering rooms are divided with bead curtains. Cockroaches chatter incessantly every dawn and dusk, tut-tutting about sharing space with humans. I had been offered a scholarship at the Martha Graham School: free dance classes in return for looking after Martha’s garden – the school backyard. Apparently, English girls know about gardens. I had mentioned something about tying daffodil stalks together when they finish flowering so that the plants grow straight up the following year. That had been enough to award me the scholarship.

In the daily class, I am wearing leotard and footless tights, sitting on the floor in a studio – with pieces of Noguchi furniture stacked in the corners. Martha is teaching. We begin with our feet drawn in, knees dropped outwards, hands clasping ankles, furiously contracting our torsos, spines curved over, eyes focused on the pelvis. Martha speaks. ‘As you release, you call out I AM.’ We all obligingly release our spines upwards, stretch our legs out wide to the side, feet pointed, knees locked, buttocks clenched. We open our arms out the side, palms up, backs arched, chests to the ceiling. In high release, pushing off the floor with all our earnest might, we murmur ‘I AM’. We repeat the gesture again and again until the room resounds with voices proclaiming ‘I AM’ in coordination with movements of ecstatic physical release. The idea that I can take up space in this way is an adrenalin-filled and seductive scenario after years of classical ballet. I am struck by how muscular tension and gestural power inspire me with a sense of agency.

Embodying daily imposed ritualistic movements of individual hedonism is how I learnt Martha’s falls, which she worked on for fifty years: ‘refining complex ways to descend and ascend … they grew astonishingly beautiful, varied and complex’ (de Mille 1991: 101). To execute Martha’s classic fall requires momentous effort, technical rigour and an ability to retain complex choreography, as the following description suggests.

Begin standing with feet in balletic first position. Take a deep plié (knee bend), arms lifting sideways to overhead. In plié, contract your pelvis, and as you contract, your left knee turns inwards to meet the right knee and your hands clasp overhead. Turn your left foot over so that the instep meets the floor and reach high into your clasped hands. Remain in contraction and lower your body onto the left hip and thigh, but do not let your knees touch the floor. Deepen your contraction while folding your upper body over your folded legs, arms sweeping down to complete the curve. Release by lengthening your torso flat like a plank on its side, knees bent, arms down, one under your body, one above. Contract again, curving your back onto the floor, knees still bent, arms stretched out parallel to your body with hands cupped. Your head is arched back onto the floor so that you are looking to the ceiling. This is the lowest point of the fall. From here a further series of complex movements bring you back up to standing. The final movement is a lunge forward onto your left leg on a diagonal, foot parallel, weight shifted into left hip. Your body turns to face front, twisted in opposition to your left leg and you look backward towards your right foot.

Graham technique has standing, sitting and travelling falls, as well as forward, back, side and split falls, all requiring different physical requirements (Graff 2004). There are attack falls, which hit the floor, and dramatic falls where narratives affect their quality. There are knee falls and ‘dead man’ falls – four stilted zombie-like walking steps before a split fall – and the spiral fall. Even though Martha writes that ‘no real dancer I know learns counts’ (Graham 1991: 243), in class these falls were practised on counts, each count dictating a shift in gesture towards, and away from, the ground, emphasizing the control required to accomplish a successful fall.

No movements in the Graham technique yield to gravity without excessive resistance in the opposite direction. ‘The body’s energies are never (or rarely) allowed to seep into the floor, but remain gathered, mobilized for a quick recovery, a renewal of the power of the dancer. In Graham technique, the fall is rarely a true surrender’ (Graff 2004: 3). By 1969, when I was there, falls had been incorporated into training, practised in isolation, set apart from other phrases of movement, usually at ...