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

ut not into the unknown. His fall is a deliberate act; eyes wide open he acknowledges his
role before blinding himself for the future.
The final choreographic movement of the dance is also a fall. Jocasta has faced
and relived her past and now can complete the act contemplated at the beginning of the
ballet -- her suicide. Drawing a rope around her neck she tightens it and falls backward.
In perhaps the most literal representation of falling in the dance, she hangs herself. This
final falling sequence emphasizes the downward thrust of gravity, minimizing the upward
resistance, and thus establishing dramatically her surrender to mortality. In Blood
Memory Graham describes the ending. "There is a moment of simulated strangling, and
she [Jocasta] does a back fall. She does not land in a position. She lands in a figureless
sprawl, a blot on the ground, like one of those Rorschach blots. She lies there in
nothingness." 5 The metaphorical death that Graham confronts in all the fall sequences
becomes literal here. The dancer will not rise. Giving in entirely to the forces of gravity
Jocasta is without hope of rebirth, or ascent.
After the fall on ten counts I learn the fall on four, then the fall on three, then two
and finally on one. A contraction momentarily suspends my body before I surrender in a
daring rush to the ground, followed by a glorious ascent upwards, on a single count.
Here in the safety of the studio, I am able to risk everything. I have experienced a sense
of my own mortality, and the power of dancing to renew my spirit. I am ecstatic.
1 The movement descriptions throughout are based upon the author's memory of exercises taught at the
Martha Graham School in the 1950s and 1960s when she was a student.
2 Martha Graham, Blood Memory, p. 258. Also as quoted by Linda Hodes in Martha Graham, Steps of a
Giant, Insiders' Stories. Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Bruno
Walter Auditorium, January 4, 2003.
3 Martha Graham. "A Modern Dancer's Primer for Action," in Dance: A Basic Educational Technique,
Frederick R. Rogers Ed. New York: Macmillan, 1969.
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