In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

[39] F A L L I N G . . . on screen International Journal of Screendance, Spring 2011. The expression, “fall from grace,” becomes an impossible statement when falling itself is experienced as a state of grace. —Nancy Stark Smith By the time she wrote these words as part of an editor’s note for the fall 1979 issue of Contact Quarterly, nancy Stark Smith had been practicing falling for seven years. From 1972 and the beginning performances of contact improvisation at the John Weber gallery in new York City until 1979, her body had learned to experience the momentum of a descent without clenching up or contracting with fear. She had internalized the trained reflexes of extending one’s limbs to spread the impact over a larger surface area and was able to adapt instinctually to seemingly endless variations of the passage from up to down. This essay traces falling—that passage from up to down—on screens and in contemporary dance by looking at examples of screendance from the last three decades of the twentieth century in order to think about the meaning of falling at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The genesis of my inquiry comes from a larger project on contemporary embodiment called Gravity Matters. in what follows, i focus specifically on the representation of falling as a state of being suspended between earth and air, the finite and the infinite. i am interested in how falling on screen can help us see the moments of a fall that are often unaccounted for in live performance, and how the visualization of that “gap” can be theorized. As nancy Stark Smith suggests: falling . . . on screen 361 Where you are when you don’t know where you are is one of the most precious spots offered by improvisation. it is a place from which more directions are possible that anywhere else. i call this place the gap . . . Being in a gap is like being in a fall before you touch bottom. You’re suspended—in time as well as space—and you don’t really know how long it’ll take to get “back.”1 Because screendance is able to visualize that suspension in time as well as space, it may, in fact, help us to think about aspects of falling off the screen, in situations where gravity really does matter. What i share with my screendance colleagues whose writing is included in this inaugural issue of the Screendance Journal is an interest in delineating the interconnected spheres of screen technologies and dance. indeed, the parallel development of early cinema and modern dance at the beginning of the twentieth century highlights their mutual influence. As many books and articles attest, both art forms shaped new ways of seeing the kinesthetic dimensions of a visual experience. oddly enough, at the turn of the twentieth century, even as new technologies of editing and distribution were making screendance ubiquitous, an anachronistic nostalgia for the presence of a live unmediated body took hold in some areas of the dance field and set up an unfortunate opposition between “real” dancing bodies and their filmed images. My research in both early and late twentieth-century dance has convinced me that this attitude does not account for the important and fruitful exchanges of movement information between the two genres. i believe that screens can influence how we think about live bodies just as the dancing bodies have revolutionized movement on camera. one of my purposes here is to chart the ways that film and video help dancers see what they are doing, making visible moments of a fall that were previously unavailable to analysis . This iconography of the space in between up and down is elaborated by an approach to falling on screens that shifted historically from act (in the 1970s), to impact (in the 1980s), to suspension (in the 1990s), to a leveling out of the difference between up and down (in the 2000s). The evolution of nancy Stark Smith’s falling paralleled the development of contact improvisation. in 1972, when a crew of assorted college students and dancers (including Smith) were experimenting under the guidance of Steve Paxton, contact improvisation looked like an exercise in throwing and catching bodies that mostly crashed to the ground on the large wrestling mat. By 1979, the form had evolved into a major influence on contemporary dance, with a professional group of teacher/performers and an ever-expanding collection of skills—falling being a primary one. During...

Share