Falling Through Dance and Life

This book is significant because it creates the space for more diverse considerations of falling—a space to reflect on previous experiences while opening readers’ eyes to possibilities yet to catch their attention. * Dance Chronicle * Falls in the time of concurrent disasters are metaphors, material and the means whereby we recalibrate what it means to be alive. Emilyn Claid’s immensely readable writing offers readers a vertiginous ride and an encounter with limits. Inviting moving off the page, her call to incorporate the experiential, the reflective and the psycho-somatic through revitalising our attention to how to fall freely, badly, carefully and madly invigorates dance and performance scholarship through sensuous and dynamic critical engagement. Emilyn’s compelling kinesthetic story is woven through her history of dance’s relationships with gravity, making this an illuminating and deeply moving biography of the fall. * Carol Brown, University of Melbourne, Australia * This writing pulls us into a multitude of rewarding and revealing falls. Slowly, carefully, and somatically as we sink into Emilyn’s unravelling of dance’s conflicting histories of resisting and relinquishing to gravity, and vertiginously as we tumble between decades of memories that elaborate the politics and pleasures of collapse. * Martin Hargreaves, London Contemporary Dance School, UK * Part historical account, part philosophical inquiry, part cultural critique, Falling through Dance and Life investigates falls both physical and metaphorical, intentional and accidental, humorous and tragic, to illustrate the significance of encounters with gravity along the lines of gender, race, sexuality, class, nationhood, and economics. Covering ground ranging from modern dance to circus to personal and national trauma, Claid provides an engaging account of the possibilities and enduring perils of falling. * Janet O'Shea, UCLA, USA * This honest and thought-provoking book portrays Emilyn’s lived experiences as a dancer, choreographer, academic and psychotherapist interweaving vivid descriptions of dance with moving personal experiences. The practical exercises which illumine her approach to falling are interspersed with themes including ageing and dying, diversity and inclusion and support and shame. We are encouraged to explore our embodied relationships and experiences of falling physically, psychologically and metaphorically as a resource for building resilience, living with uncertainty and as a source of vitality and presence. * Lynda Oborne, Psychotherapist UKCP *