On Falling

And finding alternatives

Still from RainForest

“Falling is one of the ways of moving.” – Merce Cunningham

Back when I was in college, my dance history and theory class took a field trip to Columbus to see the Merce Cunningham Dance Company perform at Ohio State University. I want to say we saw the signature RainForest, first performed in 1968, in which the dancers share the stage with Andy Warhol’s silver mylar balloons, but I can’t say if this is a true memory or something false born from photographs (see above). A look at the Cunningham performance archive confirms that they did perform RainForest at OSU that winter, on a bill with Inventions and Pictures, but whether my class was in the audience for that program or for the previous night’s performance (August Pace, Fabrications, Cargo X) I can’t say for sure. Regardless, here in the first paragraph, I digress.

What I do remember, specifics be damned, is that I didn’t quite understand it. Cunningham, one of the greatest modern choreographers of the twentieth century, famously championed the value of movement as movement, stripped of emotional or narrative intent or affect. His work embraced pedestrian gestures, absurdity, and chance. His technique emphasized virtuosic control and seemingly illogical sequencing, in which dancers’ legs and torsos twist and extend and tumble at odd angles and at odds with each other. Unlike ballet, with its eternal drive for height, dancers perched on pointe or doing barrel turns in the air, Cunningham kept his dancers planted on the ground to balance, kick, lunge, fall, rise, roll, spiral, reach, and fall again. 

He was a famous collaborator – with his longtime partner and love John Cage, of course, but also with artists like Warhol, Rauschenberg, Johns, and, in later years, the likes of Sonic Youth and Sigur Ros. These collaborations were notoriously a form of parallel play. Cunningham would create a dance, Cage would create some music, Rauschenberg or Johns or whoever would design a set, and it would all come together at the last possible moment. Those mylar balloons? Warhol already had them floating around the Factory – and they’d had a gallery installation, called Silver Clouds, in 1966. Adding them to the dance to drift about the stage, added a new layer of randomness, as on top of everything else the dancers had to now navigate these unpredictable obstacles. In an brief excerpt published in the defunct magazine Dance Perspectives in 1968, Cunningham describes his process as follows:

“It is an anarchic process of working, a number of people dealing in their separate ways with a common situation, and out of it can come a whole: an evening of dance; a museum event; a program of music; a lecture-demonstration with movement, sound and light; a seminar; a sudden change of program (given the immediate illness of a dancer) from three works to a dance event lasting two hours, a process where the incapacity of one does not impoverish the whole, although his addition would have enriched it. Out of this comes a whole not dependent upon one thing; each person and the work he does is independent, and he acts with the others, not competitively, but complementarity. It is an interdependence that brings about what you speak of as intensity. Each person, observant of the others, is allowed to act freely.”

As a student I loved this on the page, but when I saw the company in person I was confused. It was one thing to intellectually appreciate the liberatory philosophy underpinning the work, but in the absence of narrative or character, or music, costume, and lighting cues designed to work in concert with and punctuate the dance, I didn’t know what to think. 

Which is, of course, the point: you have to make the meaning yourself. 

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I’m in week four of recovery from my fall. Last week I went back to the orthopedist and was graduated from a cast to a compression sock-and-boot combo, which is nice because at least now I can take a bath without wrapping my right leg in a Target bag. The bone is healing well, I’m told – ahead of schedule, even though the ultrasonic “bone stimulating” device prescribed in November to activate cell development in this blood-starved part of the foot was only the other day approved by my insurance. 

While I’m happy that all healing systems are on track, I am still on crutches for another few weeks, with all weight-bearing activity strictly off the table. The muscle of my right calf has atrophied to half its previous size, while the big muscles of my left glute and quad are getting a novel workout.  As I navigate around the house I hop and pivot on one foot; I balance to retrieve milk from the fridge and execute one-legged squats to descend to the ground to put on my shoe. Rolling to my knees and rising up again, core engaged, right leg aloft, I pivot again in search of a chair, a sock, my phone. It is its own dance, detached from meaning, functional choreography moving me from A to B and task to task, without affect or narrative.

As I recover I’ve been reading a book by my former dance professor, the one who took us to Columbus. How to Land: Finding Ground in an Unstable World, is a book for dancers but it is also a book about how integrating somatic experience and an acceptance of ourselves as embodied can be a tool for staying grounded politically, socially, and emotionally in an ever-more disorienting world. Building from the devastating and destabilizing death of her nephew from an accidental fall, Ann Cooper Albright draws so many deft connections between the embodied and metaphoric experience of falling that I wound up underlining like mad. 

Tracking the trajectory of falling-as-failure to falling-as-lapse, for example, she writes:

“In an overly determined slippage that quickly moves from literal to metaphoric, women are seen as ‘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).” 

Noting the classic slapstick of a proud figure slipping on a banana peel she goes on to conclude, “In most situations in our culture, falls are always already falls from grace.”

Turning to economics, she continues: “The language of precarity is corporeal in nature” – as we who struggle to get by are perpetually “falling short” “losing our footing,” required to be “flexible” and “nimble.” She quotes the theorist Jack Halberstam, author of a book titled The Queer Art of Failure that Duke University Press describes as “about finding alternatives”: “Under certain circumstances,” Halberstam writes, “falling, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world.” 

Albright talks a lot about proprioception, or the ways in which our bodies unconsciously respond to stimuli that tell us how we are moving and where we are in space. It is our three-dimensional awareness of the world – especially the unseen world that sits behind the small of our necks, or under our feet –  and it becomes more and more finely tuned the more it is thrown off balance. This, again, is the foundation of so much modern dance technique and of endeavors like capoeira, parkour, and contact improv, a form of dance invented at Oberlin by a former Cunningham dancer.

But I was struck when, in the midst of a discussion of the importance of cultivating “proprioceptive awareness,” she turned to the art critic John Berger, of Ways of Seeing fame. In an essay on Rembrandt, Berger urges the reader to leave the museum and go to an emergency room. In the ER, Berger writes: 

“Each one is living in her or his own corporeal space, in which the landmarks are a pain or a disability, an unfamiliar sensation or a numbness…. Pain sharpens our awareness of such space. It is the space of our first vulnerability and solitude. Also of disease. But it is also, potentially, the space of pleasure, well-being and the sensation of being loved.”

As I hop around the house in my (re)broken state, I am constantly finding new pathways by which my body can move through space. I scoot backwards on my loaner knee scooter hyperaware of every wall and chair, and crawl from the bedroom to the bathroom, feeling the cool floor beneath my palms because I’ve forgotten to place the crutches at the foot of the bed. I’ve lived in this space for eleven years, but on one leg it is a daily surprise, as is so the space of my own body, my corporeal space, cast back to a place of vulnerability and solitude but also of pleasure, as I find these new pathways, and of love, as I allow myself again to be cared for. I may have slipped on my own banana peel, but I do not feel deprived of grace.

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Back in college, I tried to put some of what I was learning in theory into practice by choreographing my own small work. I flipped coins to sequence a pastiche of movement phrases, some ripped off in homage from Cunningham or Yvonne Rainer, and one hip thrust-and-lunge move in particular stolen from George Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments. (Balanchine, by the by, was pleased by dancers who fell, feeling that it meant they were trying.) I enlisted my friend John – back then already well on his way to fame – to write the music, and then to his horror stitched a Johnny Cash song onto the beginning of his percussive, electronic work. I made a plain jersey tunic on a borrowed sewing machine and my boyfriend did the lights. Voila! Collaboration. In the grainy, blown-out video that exists of this event, the seams are evident, but for having just two rehearsals with all the elements, honestly, it holds up. Or at least it makes me smile. 

Cunningham was a difficult collaborator at times, and his work was scorned by some as soulless and austere. But in How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run, another Cunningham work I’ve never seen save on video, a small group of dancers moves to their own inner rhythms as one, or sometimes two, people sit at a small table downstage, sip champagne, and read funny snippets from the writings of John Cage.  A 1968 Time magazine review of the piece that describes Cage – at that performance himself the reader – with pitch-perfect period shade as the choreographer’s “friend,” assesses the piece thus: 

“The text had no clear connection with the skittery maneuvers that Cunningham & Co. were carrying out onstage, and none of it had any bearing on how to pass, kick, fall or run with anything. But everyone seemed to be having a ball.”

In an era of collapse of climate and of democracy; of food systems, energy grids, journalism,  health care, and commonly understood notions of community and accountability, to dance with friends while your lover quaffs bubbly and tells funny stories may sound frivolous. But as the ground slips beneath our feet and we search for creative, surprising alternatives to ways of being in the world, it still strikes me as a wonderful, utopian thing to do with a life.

I hope we can all make space in our collapses to have a little bit of a ball in these coming weeks.