I Keep On Falling
On my favorite Radiolab episode, and why dancing is love.
A photo by John Seyfried, of my Varsity Contact class dancing together in 2019.
Research with Ann and Gabe isn’t like other research. We are one professor and two students, six feet apart from one another in socked feet on the springy wooden floor of a former gymnasium. Our laptops are closed. Warner Main Space’s ceiling arcs above our heads, and its many-windowed walls curl around us in an embrace. We’ve spread the contents of some old manila folders across the floor, and now we’re standing over the glossy photographs to survey our options. Trying to create a promotional website has become an embodied act.
Since Gabe and I don’t know many of the people in these pictures, Ann wants us to choose our favorites: we don’t have memories attached to them like she does. We hover over them, smiling at a few dancing shots of Ann pregnant or with dark hair (not today’s distinctive silver). We choose our favorite images of dancing bodies based on light, color, and contrast.
Perusing the photos, I realize I’m drawn to moments where movement is obvious, even in the camera’s inscribed stillness: the sweep of a leg through air, a dancer aloft and reaching back while their partner presses forward, a fall’s spiraling line.
Being here, where two years ago we danced together in class three mornings of every week, makes me sad. The feeling, like the research, like the light in this room, is tactile: a yearning to dive back in, to dance again. I brush my foot along the floor, swinging it forward and back. I remember. In one photo, magnolia blooms splash against the sky behind a pair of soaring legs. I want to extend like that.
This feeling has a name: kinesthetic empathy. When we watch the embodied experiences of others, we don’t just perceive. We feel. We experience a kind of movement ourselves, like the shifting and sensing of phantom limbs.
Putting a name to the feeling of kinesthetic empathy taught me about myself. When I was a child, I used to leave the older kids’ recital performances at my dance school wanting so badly to move that I could have screamed. It was inspiration as a physical urge: love as the desire to participate myself.
Ann told me once that when Contact Improvisation — the dance form that Gabe and I learned from her — was first coming to prominence, audience members could be known to rush the stage after watching CI dancers perform. This response makes sense: watching Contact Improvisation feels unusual, because the form is ultimately more concerned with the performers’ experience than with the audience’s. Contact relies on weight sharing, following a point of connection between two bodies into moments of rolling, lifting, and lofting. A good, juicy Contact dance goes where it must, and looks like magic. The desire to experience that magic myself is what first led me to Warner Main, and to Ann’s class.
Contact “jams,” communal spaces for all dancers to move together however they wish, feel like the perfect conduit for kinesthetic empathy: you witness other dancers fly, fall, and collide, and then collide, fall, and fly yourself. And repeat. If this sounds wistful, it’s because I am: it’s been a long time since I danced Contact in Warner Main. I went abroad to Amsterdam during my junior year of college, and returned to campus as a senior in the throes of a still-ongoing pandemic that prevents physical touch.
In October, back in Ohio and not dancing Contact, I fell in love with an episode of the podcast Radiolab called “Falling.” The episode is split into chapters, each contending with a different aspect of its subject. Before listening, I expected at least one chapter to be about CI, recalling days spent warming up for a Contact performance with my earbuds in, listening to Alicia Keys’ “Fallin’.”
For me, learning Contact was also learning to fall and love falling. With two feet planted firmly on the ground, a partnered dance rarely becomes particularly dynamic. But leaning, leaping, swooning, and giving over to moments of shift transform a dance into a fruitful conversation and a joyful exploration. By dancing Contact, I began to experience falling as trusting the ground rather than fearing it, as moving through instability instead of freezing up. I never fell anymore into stunned stillness on the floor. I fell into a roll, or a handstand, or someone else’s arms.
The “Falling” episode doesn’t talk about improvisational dance at all. But predictably, the second chapter is a story of falling in love.
“Sarita” and “Simon” (friends of Lulu Miller, who produced the segment) met in college, made a few semesters’ worth of intense eye contact around campus, chatted sporadically, and finally started dating. When they got together, Sarita learned that Simon has prosopagnosia: face blindness.
“If I pass you in the street I can’t swear that I’ve ever seen you before,” he explained in an interview with Miller. The eye contact that first attracted them was actually his way of checking if she was a friend, ascertaining whether they knew one another from her response.
Simon would break up with Sarita eventually. He worried that he could fall further.
“There was no falling,” Sarita told Miller about their separation, her voice strained at a familiar pitch. “I was at the bottom of a well, sitting and stewing. I loved him so much.”
After their relationship’s end, they’d see each other at friends’ houses occasionally. But her apartment, it turns out, was also close to the restaurant where he worked. On warm nights, she could walk by its outdoor patio and see him without being recognized in return. He simply wouldn’t know her. She described the anonymity, the sense of looking in, as a comfort.
For a while, I misremembered the sadness that washed over me at the segment’s end. I thought that achy feeling came from the pain in her voice: of walking by still feeling everything, unseen by someone who didn’t feel the same. But I was wrong.
When Lulu tells Simon in the segments’ last moments that Sarita walks by like she does, his voice drops lower in response. He says he didn’t know.
“It’s hard, somehow,” he says. “That I wouldn’t see her. It’s like she faded back into the crowd, quickly.”
In their conversation, suddenly he is awash in another piece of the emotional information. He understands something he didn’t. He has a sense of what she feels — and it destabilizes him.
Because I’m selfish, and because I like metaphors, I love listening to this episode and wondering over its possible symbolic meanings. Sarita liked metaphors too: was intrigued that he couldn’t remember her face, mulled over what it meant about impermanence and the dissolution of the self. And after, his reality afforded her a strange kind of protection.
“It’s actually haunting to me to hear that,” Simon says of her walking by, and I wonder if it’s better to be haunted by an unseen person and their unseen feelings, or by a face you remember, worry over, and long for from afar. From the bottom of a well.
I don’t relate to this sadness right now, either way. But I’m enamored of the shape and ache of the fall, and of its aftermath.
For me, talking about falling in love means talking about the love I share with a funny, thoughtful, and kind partner. This love has surprised and delighted me for the past three years: in it, I have been less falling than dancing.
And when I think of love as dancing, I think about a morning Contact class in Warner Main a couple of years ago. Ann felt our energy flagging, so she turned to the speakers. Dancing Contact to music is somewhat rare — often, breath is the only soundtrack — so lyrics and the swell of a melody inject a new sense of playfulness into the movement. On this most memorable of mornings, she selected The Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows.”
“God Only Knows” is a funny song. While the lyrics ooze melodrama, the melody meanders along simply and joyfully:
I may not always love you, but long as there are stars above you
You never need to doubt it
I'll make you so sure about it
God only knows what I'd be without you
If you should ever leave me
Though life would still go on, believe me
The world could show nothing to me
So what good would living do me?
These emotional realities converge beautifully in dance: and especially dance with another person, and especially dance with a person you don’t love but who is there smiling and bobbing and weaving with you.
I danced to “God Only Knows” with several partners that day. With buoyant limbs, we shifted together through silly, imaginative steps. We laughed. We swooned. Dancing with someone else like this gives a vicarious feeling of both yearning and fullness. You play at love in a few short minutes. You dance what you’d love to feel.
Today, Warner Main feels haunted by these memories — benevolently so. I’m touching the edges of these old photos, and feeling my weight shift over my toes and heels and the balls of my feet, and remembering all the time spent falling in this room. When I look at the diagonals and spirals, the imagined places this movement went and the connections it came from, my chest tugs toward other days spent here.
Kinesthetic empathy, I think, is not so different from falling. It is not so different from love. Sometimes wanting to feel a breaking heart can be its own kind of heartache. Wanting to dance almost feels like dancing.