Standing fall -a Graham exercise

On October 27 2012, I met with former students from the first year of Danish school for contemporary dance. The occasion was that this year it was twenty years ago that we had started training together. It was a very moving and wonderful evening. During the evening we tried to reconstruct an exercise we had in Graham technique classes. It succeeded only partially. The morning after the party I woke up with pictures in the head of some of the things I was not able to reconstruct the night before. Within 10 minutes I was able to come up with a reconstruction of the exercise which seemed very credible.

So it is an exercise of the great pioneer of contemporary dance Martha Graham. We learned it from our teacher Christel Wallin, who herself had been a student of Martha Graham in Graham's later years. The exercise has almost the character of a religious ritual, somewhat self-sacrificing, a prayer, an expression of affection. It will probably be very bombastic for a contemporary dancer of today or a audience of today, but that again could be said about many of Martha Graham's exercises. At the same time I think there is something valuable -something very strong and beautiful about this exercises. Christel used it to end the class. 

Another special thing about the exercise which helped to highlight the ritual sense of it was that you were not doing it to the right and then to the left which you would normally do with every exercises. This one was made only to the one side. The exercises was called "Standing fall".

When I describe the exercises I use words from Martha Graham's vocabulary without explaining them any additional. Words like contraction, release, high-release, spiral, plié, etc. It will probably make it a little hard to follow for a non-dance expert, but ... yes you can not accommodate all every time. (And who cares anyway :-)).

I'm not sure of the counting, but has concentrated on reproducing the movement. An attempt of reconstructing the counts could go like this:

Spiral 1 to 8

Plié 1 to 8

Down on the floor and unfold to high-release 1 to 8

and then the corresponding back up again.

The trick than was that after having done this on 1 to 8 the tempo doubled so we did the same movements on 1 to 4 and then on 1 to 2. Finally, you then did the whole fell down in only one count and all the way back op again in the next count. This lightning-fast version was done a few times. 

It is possible that I am not entirely correct in terms of the counts, but that is the general idea.

STANDING FALL

1. In parallel facing front.

2. Contraction while head back up towards the ceiling while spiral toward the right. The spiral starts from the top and propagate down through the body. As the last rotated right leg out so your feet no longer are parallel, but right foot pointing more toward the right. left arm goes in front of the torso and meet with the right arm on the right side of the body. Hands grab hold of each other.

3. Now start a plié movement knees bent torso sinks towards the floor. The spiral continued in its inner intention even when it reached a point where you physically can not go any further. Left knee follows the spiral movement so that it now also pointing over towards the right corner of the room.

4. Put left knee down on the floor.

5. Continue the spiral, but now in a manner where the upper body tilts forward towards the floor and towards the outside of the left leg. Left foot changes so that it is no longer "on the walk", but the back of the foot is against the floor.

 6. Now we have pelvis as close to the floor that it is not hard to tip the entire body so that the pelvis gets contact with the floor and immediately after this the entire torso is slided out on the floor still in a spiral.

 6. The next movement was made fairly quickly and explosively even in the slow versions of the exercise as I recall. The entire torso is swiped around to a high release with chest opened halfway upwards towards the ceiling and right arms stretched diagonally up to the ceiling with "cup'ed hands".

 7. Now the exercise reached its extreme point of the down way. From here the movement is reversed. As far as it is possible you go the same way back again.

 8. The entire torso swipes back towards the legs. Right arm fingertips touch the floor above the head, and thereby draws a semicircle during this movement. (As I recall the head looks behind the movement.. in the direction of the left shoulder).

9. In the swipe-around you should seek to get the wight of your torso as much as possible over the knees and the feet because the next step is getting op on the feet again (with as little as possible help from the hands ;-)) so you can start to rise.

 

10. Up on your feet in spiral.

11. Up from plié legs stretched quietly and continuously out. Heels get down on the floor. Still spiral.

12. Spiral back to parallel.

13. Back in the starting position.