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

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.
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