HOW TO FALL WITHOUT GETTING HURT

In most physical practices a fall is the thing that went wrong. In Contact Improvisation it is a technique, practised deliberately, and the dancers who look most at ease in a jam are usually the ones who have fallen the most. The reason is simple: once you trust that you can get to the floor without harm, you stop bracing against it, and everything above the floor gets lighter.

Lower your centre before anything else

The distance you fall is the distance from your centre of gravity to the ground. Standing tall, that is a long way. Bent at the knees with your hips low, it is not. Most of what looks like fearless falling in experienced dancers is simply that they were never very far from the floor to begin with. If you feel a fall coming, go down first, on purpose, and the fall becomes a small one.

Roll, do not stop

A fall hurts when it ends abruptly: a knee hitting, a hand out stiff, a hip landing square. It does not hurt when the energy keeps travelling. The skill is to convert the downward motion into rotation, so that you arrive on the floor already rolling away from the point of impact. Rolling spreads the force across a curve of your body instead of a corner of it. In a class you will spend a lot of time rolling from kneeling and from sitting, precisely so that when a real fall comes, rolling is what your body reaches for.

Exhale

People hold their breath when they fall. A held breath stiffens the torso, and a stiff torso lands like a plank. Breathing out on the way down softens the whole structure. It sounds too simple to matter. It matters more than almost anything else on this list.

Keep your feet available

In a lift or a lean, the safest position is one where you could put a foot down if you needed to. Dancers talk about keeping your feet available, or keeping a landing gear. Giving your weight fully does not mean surrendering the ability to catch yourself. The two coexist, and a good partner will never put you somewhere you cannot get out of on your own.

Why spotting exists

At many jams one or two people stand near a dancing pair, hands free, not dancing. They are spotting: ready to slow a fall that goes wrong. You will not always see it because it is meant to be unobtrusive, and you can do it yourself from your first evening. It is a way of participating that asks nothing of your body and teaches you a great deal about where falls come from.

The rest of the ground rules, including what you can always refuse, are on safety and consent. If you want to learn falling in a taught setting before trying it in a jam, the classes page is where to look.