NEWSLETTER #1

Either the well was very deep,
or she fell very slowly,
for she had plenty of time as she went down
to look about her and to wonder
what was going to happen next.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

The legs we stand on and the notion of how they might fail us, has been an important theme in storytelling throughout history. While doing research for the new performance A CURSE POEMI've come across a large number of oral stories referring to the legs as "loci of (dis)empowerment". The notion that strength and power reside in the legs is manifest in both Greek (Oedipus) and Icelandic (Grettir) stories, and the Masai, Wakulwe and Kuranko cultures refer to the knee as a part of the body from which powerfull beings are born. In a Khoisan myth, "Wounded Knee" is a supreme being, capable of repeated rebirths and resurrections. Many stories also speak of a firstborn son who cannot walk and whose mother is the force of his transformation to eventually become a hero. The contemporary phrase "to stand on your own two feet", speaks of responsibility and adulthood.

I am reluctant to attribute a single meaning to these stories – rather I see the notions of walking and falling as metaphors of power. Rebecca Solnit speaks of the different experiences walking can offer, depending on one's gender and race*. When I was working in Copenhagen, a black woman told me how she took part in a performative walk, created by a white artist, in which boundaries of public and private spaces were crossed. She pointed out that this ended up being a very different experience for a black person than it was for a white, as a black man or woman jumping a fence ís perceived differently to a white man or woman doing so, as it is bathed in prejudiced storytelling.

Walking always happens in a specific "storied space" and both story and space have a mutual impact. No story stays the same in different spaces and different spaces facilitate or exclude certain stories. Let's think of spaces as not only delineated by buildings or walls or natural boundaries, but also those created by a sense of belonging and territory, through mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. A brilliant take on walking and its relation to storied space (i.e. public space) is offered by artist Mark Bradford, in his piece Niagara. I won't write much about the work here, except I found it to be a mesmerizing watch.

What about falling?

Two years ago, I was diagnosed with a frozen shoulder, a painful chronic disorder with an unknown cause and it typically takes about two years to recover from it. One symptom of a frozen shoulder is the loss of mobility of the arm it supports. A side-effect I found remarkable is the amount of times I seemed to fall. One day a friend gave me a firm but not overly forceful pat on the (other) shoulder, and I fell from my chair. Holding up my bicycle with one hand, I briefly lost my balance and fell. Testing my son's skateboard, I fell twice (although my rudimentary skating skills might have contributed to that too I realise). Because I wasn't able to find the balance offered by two well-functioning arms, I had to learn to compensate for this imbalance. I challenge anyone to immobilise one arm for a day and see how this effects their balance.

This made me think about falling a lot. Is falling always a negative experience? The older one gets, falling tends to hurt more, yes. But on several occasions I actually enjoyed the event, bizarrely. My memory of each fall was always different. At times I could perceive the detailed circumstances of the moment clearly, as if time slowed down. Scientists attribute this to the adrenaline release in our bodies induced by the fall, which has an effect on the capacity of the the brain to process information. Time seems to slow down because more "data" than normal is received and memorised by the brain during any given timespan. A long time ago, I witnessed a young man committing suicide by jumping off the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland, barely 6 feet to my side. I remember clearly noticing his clenched fists and hearing a brief cry, before he disappeared into the depths 100m below. Being witness of such an unlikely event slowed time for me as well. I like to imagine a hyperbole here, an exponential correlation between the relase of adrenaline, the perception of details and time slowing down. Perhaps by jumping, the man reached a peak in a time curve, it came to a standstill and he experienced total clarity of vision. Perhaps, if we witness somebody's unexpected high fall, we can also see the details of the moment so clearly and our time slows down. Could this be another reading of Icarus' fall, an alternative to the moral imperative tIcarus should not transgress and must stay close to his father Daedalus, and his authority?

An image of a falling man from one of the World Trade Centre towers became one of the most iconic one of the 9/11 attacks, partly because the man in the frame "appears relaxed, hurtling through the air", despite plunging to his death from a great height. In an article for Esquire, Tom Junod describes the complexicty of this image, the impact of its story on the public conscience, contrasted with the private horror bestowed on the man’s family. Not so long after 9/11, artist Eric Fischl, who lost a friend in the WTC towers, created the sculpture 'Tumbling Woman' as a homage to the victims, but it was removed after just one week of exhibiting it. At the time, for many, a sculpture of a woman tumbling, was seemingly too provocative a work to handle.

Falling can be frightening, but also liberating. We all know the game of falling over backwards and letting someone we trust catch us. It is as exhilarating as it is frightening. Who or what should you trust falling from a building, or cliffs?

Two artists I admire, addressed the notion of falling in their own distinct but different way. Bas Jan Ader's tongue-in-cheek films show him riding his bycicle into canals in Amsterdam, falling from a roof, from a tree, and on the pavement. Steve McQueen's film Carib's Leap on the other hand is about Carib Indians fiercely resisting European colonisation and oppression. Some of the last surviving Caribs chose to jump to their deaths rather than submit to the Europeans, in an ultimate act of rebellion that is said to have occurred on a cliff in the Caribbean town of Sauteurs. Falling can be an act of resistance, by taking a subversive stance against hierarchy and power. I am enthralled by both artists’ take on the subject.

I would like to end this letter with an image from 'Alice in Wonderland', which depicts Alice sitting among the animals and listening to a mouse's tale. "Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well.", Lewis Carroll writes. But once she is falling, time changes and she starts to see things in a different way. She ends up talking to a mouse and a rabbit, a caterpillar and a dodo, and so on. I imagine us humans falling, caused by our hubris or as an act of resistance, and we find ourselves talking with animals and inanimate objects, once more.

Peter

* For a more complex understanding of the concept "race", read "Race is a social construct, not a biological reality" by Sanne Blauw