2017 | 12 minute loop | No audio

481 falls is a video collaboration by choreographer and director Jane Gotch and filmmaker Elizabeth Stehling. With a desire to observe emotional patterns within the human form, the artists document sixteen people in the act of falling. The piece is a 12-minute loop of continuous, arrhythmic, slow motion falling structured to create an environment on and around a gallery wall. 

While in the physical act of being off balance, in falling, our primal nature comes to life. For gravity does not discriminate, everything with mass, all bodies are subject to its whims. We grab, kick, look down, look up, we reach for some aspect of control, but once in the throws of a fall there is a singular fate, the ground. We have one measure of defense. A choice in our daily flirtation with gravity, we can tighten and cringe or surrender and release. Between these two extremes, lie infinite possibilities. We depict 481 variations.