1 When Your Heart Falls: The Drama of Descent in Martha Graham's ...

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there is almost always some sense of struggle, followed by temporary surrender and recovery. I have learned the fall on ten counts, the first in the series of standing falls. On the count of one, I plie in first position. On two my body hollows out in a contraction, lifting the weight of my upper body up without disturbing the thrust of gravity downward through my legs. On three the descent begins; the contraction deepens and my torso spirals so that the upper body is twisted against the lower as I shift the center of my weight into the left hip, freeing my left foot from the floor and allowing me to sit onto my left hip, careful never to let the bony parts of my body hit the ground. From this seated position I spiral the upper body even further on the count of four, and place my left shoulder onto my left knee. The right shoulder is directly above my left, my body curled into a ball, held firm by the intensity of the contraction. Uncurling the body on the count of five, I slide the left side of my body along the floor in a smooth line; the knees remain bent so that my lower legs extend at a right angle along the floor. On the count of six I surrender momentarily to the forces of gravity, using a contraction to roll my body onto my back. Then begins the recovery. My body releases on seven, the back arced like a bow. On eight a contraction knits my body together into a tight ball, ready for the rise. A release on the count of nine brings me to a kneeling position and on ten I rise. "My dancers fall so that they can rise," Graham stated. 3 The sense of drama in fall sequences (as in all else in the Graham technique) is part of the classroom presentation. The standing falls, for example, are classically taught only on the left side, because the heart is on the left side. The dancer falls as the heart falls. At other times Graham noted that the left side was the sinister or dark side and that 4
in falling the dancer surrendered herself into the darkness, into the unknown. Seemingly contradictory, these explanations have an inner consistency -- impulses of the heart are often dark and sinister in Graham choreography. Of the many images presented during the 1950s and 1960s, when I was a student, was the idea that the floor rises to meet the descending dancer. "Let the floor come up to you." For example, in the split fall the dancer begins in a standing position. The power of the contraction lifts the dancer's weight, allowing one leg to slide forward, while the body descends between both legs, the torso gradually becoming parallel to the floor. The body finds a triangular base of support as it approaches the ground; at the completion of the fall the dancer's legs are in a wide fourth position on the floor, the torso making contact with the ground. The image of the floor rising -- in contrast to the body descending -- is accomplished through the act of suspension; in the descent the body hangs, not upon any external object, but through its own virtual forces. The floor indeed rushes up to meet the dancer, who maintains a suspended upward thrust until the final moment. Images that relate to the forward fall begin with exercises on the floor where the student is directed to imagine the space around herself as an abyss, a chasm, an unknown field over which her torso may be suspended. Standing exercises in which the torso is suspended in positions parallel to the floor build upon this. A variation of the forward fall begins from an arabesque. Rather than work for the stability of the ballet penchee, the dancer here deliberately moves off the standing leg so that the weight is thrust forward, the body put at risk while outstretched arms reach across an imaginary divide, before finally making contact with the ground, as if at the other side of an enormous chasm. 5
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Page 7 and 8: As she slides into the ground all t
Page 9: 4 Based upon the author's experienc

1 When Your Heart Falls: The Drama of Descent in Martha Graham's ...

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