As a professional contemporary dancer, I’m a master of falling so it is ironic that the love of my life died of complications from falling.

As a dancer, I find it thrilling to launch my body into space. It is a complex act in which you monitor your weight at each moment, intuit the speed of your fall and anticipate the recovery. All the while, you revel in the sheer joy of being off-balance, off-kilter, wild and free as the air hits your skin. Perching on a diagonal is a defiant act in a world that often asks us to remain complacently in verticality.

Both my husband and I embraced living on the edge – but for different reasons. It wasn’t until we walked through the Garden of Exile in the Jewish Museum Berlin that I understood how chaos shaped his relationship to the world. Designed by Daniel Libeskind, the garden gives the present-day visitor a kinesthetic experience of the disorientation the Jews might have experienced during the Holocaust. Forty-nine concrete pillars are laid out in a square so narrowly spaced that you can only walk through the pillars alone. What you don’t know and can’t see is that the ground below is not level. The slanting ground creates a constant state of unsteadiness as you stumble from one pillar to the next.

As a Jew, born in Berlin in 1932, uneven ground shaped my husband’s world view. Throughout life, he fluctuated between the terror and displacement he felt as a child while walking through broken glass and burning buildings during Kristallnacht to a giddy sense of adventure he experienced as a child while escaping Berlin with his family hidden beneath a pile of coal on the back of a truck. Once in Belgium the family hid in the attic of a pension where guests set their shoes out at night to be cleaned. Already a rascal, he snuck down from the attic and switched all the shoes and laughed uproariously at the chaos in the morning. His aunts and uncles were unable to leave Belgium and were killed in the Holocaust. If you can’t trust the earth, being off balance becomes your norm.

Author and her husband in the Garden of Exile at the Jewish Museum Berlin.

I was raised in midwestern suburbs in a loving environment. At five I became a dutiful student of ballet, struggling with the daily task to defy gravity. I learned to balance bone over bone, creating an illusion of stillness and calm. A product of the 15^th century royal courts, ballet held a high value for verticality because it connected royalty to the gods, creating an ethereal quality of heavenliness.

I was born in 1951 and came of age in the ‘60s fully immersed in the feminist movement, so connecting to royalty and gods was counter to my spirit. Revolution was in the air and I plunged in head first. I encountered modern dance at the University of Utah in 1969 having entered the dance program as a ballet student. One day, I snuck over to a modern dance class and saw dancers flying across the space to wild raucous music, gloriously pitching themselves into the unknown. I found my aesthetic soul that day.

Throwing myself intentionally off balance became the center of my choreographic research. In this I was rooted in modern dance history. In the early 20^th century Doris Humphrey shaped her dances on the principle of “fall and recovery,” a tension between the stability and risk. She famously described a fall as “…an arc between two deaths.” I always thought she meant between beginnings and endings as well. Mining that arc seemed grandiose.

I was playfully experimenting with the pull of gravity when I met my husband, so I attribute gravity for our spiritual collision. We fell head over heels in love from the very first moment. I offered stability with a yearning for risk, he personified risk and was searching for stability. Falling in love captures the intense eros kind of love we felt during the initial swooning. However, that crazy love could not stop life’s struggles. Build a house on a sand dune with no money? Sure. Start a new career with no prior knowledge or experience? Why not? Adopt a puppy near the end of life? Of course.

Gratefully, my husband never allowed us to fall out of love. He was an incurable romantic from a by-gone era of opening doors and pulling out chairs for ladies. My feminist, bra burning instincts softened as I twirled on the dance floor to Etta James and fell dramatically into his arms. He would dip me so low my head would come dangerously close to the ground and we would laugh at the glorious thrill of it all.

In rehearsals, my dancers and I were able to take risks because we knew how to counter-balance not only our own weight, but each other’s as well, by offering a leg or a back to slide down as we flew in and out of each other’s bodies. Dancing in tandem with gravity gives one a sensation that stasis and thus verticality is a figment of the imagination; each moment requires a unique response to the ever present now. Being on the edge rooted me in the tenuousness of life. Tenuousness seemed important when married to a man 19 years older than me.

Between the ages of 70 and 90, my husband turned a hobby of woodworking into a passionate reality by designing and building not one but two gorgeous homes for us and he filled them with stunning hand-made furniture. At age 85, he would be obstinately perched on ladders, hammering away, singing love songs, completely unaware that his body was beginning to change.

However, we were aging and it was changing both of us. Falling became something less romantic. I can’t remember when I first became more tentative. Perhaps it was simply grabbing for the railing while going downstairs. Careful was once a value we both detested – a sure sign of looming death. We weren’t ready for it.

When he hit his tenth decade, his normally lithe and athletic body began to falter. Multiple issues caused his nervous system to relinquish its job to keep him upright. I collected wheelchairs and walkers, which he vehemently resisted. He would say, somewhat disgusted, “I will look old and frail if I use those things.” Frustrated with his lack of interest in his own safety, I replied angrily, “You are old and frail.” I have regretted that comment ever since because I realized I was mad at him for everything that I loved about him. He was never going to change his wild and free spirit just to stay alive.

He continued to fall, so whenever possible, I slid his 185 pounds gracefully down my leg and onto the floor. Remarkably, he embodied my falling techniques, counter-balancing his weight gracefully to the floor. His frail body lacked the rebound, but remarkably he didn’t break bones. Even with our combined skills, multiple falls meant he became less active and therefore weaker.

He humored me by mimicking a fall, but I could see the dangerous trajectory coming and didn’t find it funny. One day, he moved forward into a fall, reached for me, and stammered, “help me,” but this time I was not close enough to catch him. I watched in horrific slow motion as he stumbled, careening toward a marble table. Panicked. Shortened breath. I saw and felt it all and realized the love of my life and I were relentlessly in a dance with the ending trajectory of Humphrey’s arc.

He finally succumbed to gravity and left this human world.

I step carefully down stairs now, painfully in awe of the earth’s power to spin our bodies and souls, not only into the air and down to the earth, but into other dimensions. For me, the ephemeral nature of life is now not only a practice but a living reality I must accept.

For my love, I imagine a playground in the sky where you can take passionate risks and free-fall to your heart’s desire.

Jan Erkert was a professor and the head of the Department of Dance at the University of Illinois, 2006- 2022. She is the author of “Harnessing the Wind,” and is currently writing “Every Body has a Body full of Wisdom, Stories of Leadership and Life.” She is a Fulbright Scholar, a Public Voices Fellow with the National OpEd Project and Director of the University of Illinois’ Alumni OpEd Project.

Home

About

For the Love of Falling by Jan Erkert - VISIBLE Magazine