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41. Falling
- Wesleyan University Press
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[41] Falling Performance Research 18, no.4 (August 2013). Falling is predicated on a slippage through time and space. Marked by the trajectory between up and down as well as before and after, falling refers to what was while moving toward what will be. This is true whether you fall on ice or fall in love. Crossing over literal and metaphoric states of being in the world, falling opens a threshold between the past and the future. Falls knock us off our feet, confusing our sense of the world’s order. These radical shifts in orientation register in our connective tissue as well as our psyche. Falls can be traumatic to be sure—disorienting at the very least. But because they stretch across a liminal space in which the present is suspended, falling can also inspire new orientations, including ones that challenge our expectations of economic stability and social success. i have been thinking a lot about falling these days: falling buildings, falling planes, falling economies, falling governments, but most particularly falling bodies. over the course of the first decade of the twenty-first century, we have witnessed a series of spectacular and horrible falls that have had both global and local repercussions. From the sudden and horrific collapse of the World Trade Center towers to the economic recession and its resulting slippages in employment, from the cyclical plunges in housing values to the periodic crashes of the stock market (not to mention the latest fiscal cliff), we live in a state of almost constant anxiety about things falling apart and our bodies reflect that. in this essay, i want to explore the interconnected realms of the theoretical and the practical. That is to say, i will trace both the cultural rhetoric surrounding falling and the physical experience of moving from up to down. What do these two different perspectives on falling have to say to one another? or, perhaps more precisely, what can the intentional practice of falling teach us about how to survive personal and social crises? i ask these questions not only to underline the importance of embodied experience in talking about historical events, but also because i want to think seriously about the physical practices that might help us survive this cultural moment. instead of nervously trying to avoid falling in a world in which so many aspects of our social, political, and economic environment are being turned upside down, i believe we need to learn how to fall intentionally. Taking a falling 371 lesson from the contemporary movement form of contact improvisation, we can practice ways in which to move with and through the descent, channeling the vertical momentum of a fall into the horizontal expression of a roll. The experience of falling can teach us a great deal about resiliency— physical as well as emotional and even economic resiliency—helping us, in turn, to mitigate the vague panic that seems to have permeated almost everyone’s being these days. As a cultural metaphor, falling carries a pretty heavy symbolism in the West. Whether we are talking about the hubris of icarus or the evil of Satan, the collapse of stock markets or the public stumbling of the latest politician to lose his integrity on the internet, falling is generally seen as a failure, a defeat, a loss, or a decline. in short, a fall charts a passage from the lofty heavens of stardom to the grit of the earth. Socially, it is a perilous journey: not only do boys, angels, and men fall, of course, but women have also been doomed by this cultural hegemony of the vertical. in an overly determined slippage that quickly shifts from literal to metaphoric, women are dubbed “fallen” when they lose their virginity (and therefore their chastity and moral innocence). This gendered scenario is no doubt connected to that first spectacular fall from Paradise—for a woman’s fall from vertical to horizontal retraces in one fell swoop the physical, cultural, and spiritual damnation of Eve (or one of her many updated prototypes). in most situations, falls are always already falls from grace. interestingly enough, the first definition for the word fall in my American Heritage dictionary is largely removed from the cultural baggage that implicates failure in a fall. here fall is simply: “to move under the influence of gravity.” now this is a phrase that dancers and choreographers can relate to—for we know in our bones that every movement is, in fact, a dance with...