Very little grows on jagged rock. Be ground.Be crumbled, so wildflowers will come up where you are.
—RUMI, “A Necessary Autumn inside Each”
“AND THE OSCAR GOES TO . . . Jennifer Lawrence!”
The stunned twenty-two-year-old, wearing a strapless confection of pink silk, looked authentically shocked, which made us really like her.
Then she tripped and fell on her way to the stage, face-planting in her magnificent gown, which made us really love her.
The audience at the 2013 Academy Awards gave her a standing ovation.
“You guys are just standing up ’cause you feel bad that I fell, and that’s really embarrassing. But thank you,” Lawrence gasped into the microphone once she’d reached it, after what must have felt like the longest journey of her life. But with impeccable poise and the ability to laugh at herself, she transformed her fall into a screwy-sophisticated Cary Grant kind of moment.
Grace is an act of transformation, making an ordinary moment into something extraordinary. And nowhere is that more visible than when we fall and the veils of composure drop away. But must they? Whether we’re talking about a physical stumble or some event that brings us to our knees emotionally, grace can help us meet life as it comes with ease, equanimity, and courage.
I find Jennifer Lawrence’s fall fascinating and inspiring. It’s terrific theater, starting with her open-mouthed, socked-in-the-gut reaction to hearing her name announced, and the little upward tug she gives the neckline of her bodice, to make sure that, you know, she’s not going to experience some kind of wardrobe malfunction on live television.
And then she does. I love the moment of stasis when, after she trips, she lies utterly flattened on the steps, and time stops. She sinks into the carpet, seems to give up under an oppressive weight. Her shoulder blades wiggle and collapse. She draws a hand to her face, and just looking at the back of her head you can feel her gasp.
But then she gathers herself—you see it in her back, where there’s a little muscular rebound as resolve settles into her spine and goes to work. She’s the drowning Ophelia in reverse: that many-tiered dress may have pulled her underwater, but then it seems to bear her back to the surface. Lawrence rises and moves onward to the stage—talk about grace under pressure—and the dress is no longer an anchor but a sail.
Here is the yoga of grace, the practice, not the perfect.
Falls elicit an emotional reaction, which is why choreographers like to use them. They see in them both the vulnerability and the courage of the fallen. Mark Morris, one of the world’s leading modern dance choreographers, created a work called “Falling Down Stairs” for an Emmy Award–winning film, with Yo-Yo Ma playing Johann Sebastian Bach’s Unaccompanied Cello Suite no. 3. It has one of the most dramatic and graceful openings you’ll ever see in a dance: the whole cast tumbles down a flight of stairs and spills onto the stage, like water rushing over rocks. Their velvet gowns fly up behind them.
I have seen those gowns backstage; designed by Isaac Mizrahi, they resemble loose choir robes of the softest, richest puppy’s-ear velvet I’ve ever felt. They’re cut to reveal the body in motion, especially the hindquarters. It seems to me that Morris envisioned his dancers as earthy angels, falling and soaring, flaunting their big round bottoms, their seats of power, the essence of their humanity—which is to say, the divine.
In any fall—in any humbling moment—there’s an arc between death and rebirth. “Pride goeth before a fall,” as the proverb tells us. Pride slips away, all right, and in its place is something new. In the most graceful recoveries, there is clarity, resolve, and a deep dip into the well of self-discipline.
I once saw a ballet that unspooled so carefully, with such deliberate perfection, it nearly put me to sleep. In her central solo, the leading ballerina wasn’t dancing so much as demonstrating her steps, blandly preoccupied with her technique. Then for some reason—maybe she’d finally warmed up to being onstage, maybe her opening-night jitters had vanished—she seemed to wake up. She flew into a turn with enthusiasm, missed her mark, and crashed to the stage like felled timber. After scrambling back to her feet before the rest of us could exhale, she went on to give the performance of her life.
Even the best dancers slip and fall periodically, but with this one I feared bloodshed. I haven’t seen such a spectacular spill since I witnessed a middle-aged man fall unconscious while standing and plummet with dead weight onto a subway platform. Adrenaline must have returned the ballerina to her feet, but also, I suspect, a blazing sense of duty. She was humbled by her fall, and humbled by the enormous challenge of making up for it. And, like Jennifer Lawrence, she sucked it up and got back to work.
If anyone should think ballerinas are delicate and fussy, think again: this one reacted like it was fourth and goal with six seconds on the clock and not a blooming thing was going to stand in her way.
She fell because she put a little too much juice into that turn. She took a risk and soared through the consequences with grace. That’s a moment you remember.
Tripping and falling, admitting failure and weaknesses: these things endear us to people. Psychologists call it the pratfall effect. John F. Kennedy experienced it after he fell off his pedestal by botching the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.1 What started as a plan to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro ended in disaster, with missed air strikes, sunken ships, downed planes, and more than one hundred dead. The failure left a stain on his administration, but Kennedy had the grace to admit his mistakes and take responsibility for them. The result: his popularity increased. People liked him more when he showed the world that he was fallible, and that he could shoulder the blame. He ceased to be a figure of overwhelming awe (and maybe even resentment, as we can tend to hold a person’s über-competence against him) and became a person to whom folks could relate.
• • •
MARTHA REEVES FELL during a performance recently, and it was Maxine Powell’s lessons in grace from nearly fifty years ago that got the singer up on her feet again.
“She taught us how to relax your body, and not tense up, because you’ll break something that way,” the seventy-three-year-old Reeves told me. “I was able to fall and not damage myself, because of Mrs. Powell’s training.”
She was appearing in a benefit performance in New York, singing “Dancing in the Street,” the song that had made Martha and the Vandellas famous and became an anthem of the free-loving 1960s. Reeves, in a sparkling evening gown, was shimmying to the instrumental break, banging a silver tambourine on one hip, when she took a few steps along the thrust stage and tripped on an electrical cord. She stumbled, rolled, and landed flat on her back.
“You’re gonna fall, there’s no doubt about it,” the veteran performer said. “But being taught how to fall, it all came to my mind and it kept me from feeling embarrassed.”
Someone recorded the episode and posted it on YouTube. Despite the tumble, Reeves held on to her microphone. “I’ll keep right on moving—nothing’s gonna stop me now,” Reeves said into the microphone, with remarkable composure, as she was helped to her feet by her backup dancers.
“When you fall down—” she continued, and paused for a perfect four-count measure, “you gotta get back up.” And she did get back up, brandishing her tambourine like a laughing full moon. She found her walk, and found her way back into her song. She seemed even lighter on her feet then. As she continued to strut down the stage, beaming, she jiggled her hips like a kid.