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within stillness. This is where techniques of nonviolent protest intersect with postmodern dance techniques, even though each emerged out of distinct traditions with speci‹c social and political demands. Although the overwhelming majority of dancers involved in the early years of contact improvisation were white, and likely more socially “free to fall” than people of color in 1970s America, they too were ambivalent about their relationship with gravity , interested in exploring what King called “the co-presence of mobility and immobility,” along with the many falls that exist within any vertical stance.29 Learning to Fall In The Book of Exultation, written in 1925, the dance critic A. K. Volinsky discusses verticality as a fundamental principle of classical ballet. To explain why ballerinas dance on their toes, and to make a case for why “everything in ballet is straight, upright, as a taut string that sounds a high note,” Volinsky argues that people’s impressions vary, depending on whether they see something horizontal or vertical.30 He states, “In the ‹rst case [the horizontal ], the psychic sensation is restful and regular, without strong emotion; in the other [the vertical], his soul is made to feel exalted.”31 Volinsky refers to churches, obelisks, columns, and mountains, all as drawing the soul upward. He even uses the evolutionary claim that man moved from living horizontally to standing vertically, a process Volinsky calls the “greatest bloodless revolution in the history of mankind.”32 He concludes by claiming, “Only in ballet do we possess all aspects of the vertical in its exact mathematically formed, universally perceptible expression.”33 A. K. Volinsky is not alone in his fascination with ballet’s virtuosic engagement with gravity. Although ballet’s lightness actually is achieved by rotational downward motion, classical ballet has prized verticality, as did most people writing about Western concert dance before the 1970s. In “Classic Ballet : Aria of the Aerial,” Lincoln Kirstein explains that ballet “accentuates the area of air,” using legwork in an attempt to deny gravity.34 The end goal, of course, is ›ight. Ballet’s upward striving reaches its pinnacle in the air, exempli ‹ed repeatedly in dance history books by Nijinsky’s leap. In contrast, modern dancers such as Isadora Duncan and Doris Humphrey were curious about the ground as much as the air. Doris Humphrey even founded her technique upon the principles of falling and recovering . According to her writings, as well as commentary by John Martin, Bodies on the Line 101 Humphrey set out to discover the body’s structural proclivities as distinct from emotional reactions. She found that falling constitutes one of the body’s primary movements. Humphrey explains: “If you stand perfectly still and do not try to control the movement, you will ‹nd that you will begin to fall in one direction. You will fall forward or, probably backward, because you have less to hold you up. This seemed to be a very simple discovery, and yet a tremendously important one, if you’re going to start a new technique based on body movement.”35 Friedrich Nietzsche profoundly in›uenced Humphrey, especially with his discussion of the con›ict between Apollonian and Dionysian impulses in man. The tension between a desire for stability and the ecstasy of licentiousness and abandon captivated Humphrey.36 This tension appeared in Humphrey’s dance of fall and recovery, with the Apollonian dance of balance and equilibrium matched with the Dionysian fall. In Humphrey’s “My Approach to the Modern Dance” she explains: Falling and recovering is the very stuff of movement, the constant ›ux which is going on in every living body, in all its tiniest parts, all the time. Nor is this all, for the process has a psychological meaning as well. I recognized these emotional overtones very early and instinctively responded very strongly to the exciting danger of the fall, and the repose and peace of recovery.37 The oscillation between falling and recovering is evident throughout Humphrey’s choreography, most strikingly in dances such as Two Ecstatic Themes (1931), in which Humphrey performs a dance of two parts—the ‹rst a slow, circular descent to the ground; the second an angular ascent to standing , ending with arms stretched upward to the sky, reminiscent of Volinsky’s upward striving. While Humphrey was curious about the risks involved in the act of falling, discourse surrounding her technique generally discusses the fall as yielding or submission, while describing recovery as an act of mastery. When observing Humphrey’s choreography, or...

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