Falling

Dancers embrace gravity as a source of creative potential and change. Existential therapists and philosophers embrace death and dying as a source of creative potential and change. My book sets these practices of intentional falling against human resistance to falling, because of its association with danger, pain, death, fear, failure and shame. In my experience a paradox emerges out of this tension: falling, we can be powerless subjects and agents of change, a dynamic distinction that enlivens discussions throughout the book. I describe how an act of falling, as simple as breathing out, spreads outwards to uncover metaphorical and philosophical connections between falling and laughter, thrill, trauma, ageing and queering, disrupting the fixation of Western culture on individualism, uprightness and supremacy.