The Great Fall - Poetry, Dance, and Music at Archway Gallery

Grateful to have premiered our collaborative piece, "The Great Fall," this past Sunday at Archway Gallery in Houston. Composer George Heathco invited me to write a poem and choreograph a dance inspired by Zen Buddhist master Suzuki's waterfall metaphor — a meditation on life, death, separation, and return. George then arranged the poem into song lyrics and composed an original work for cello and three opera vocalists from ConTempo Studios.

In Suzuki's book "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind," he writes about how when a human life comes into being, a unique form comes together, like a drop of water when it is separated from the wholeness of the river as it hits a rock or falls down a waterfall. And when that separation occurs, the drop feels a deep sense of disorientation and longing to return to its natural, undifferentiated state. When we can understand our life and death in terms of the separation of the particles of water in a waterfall, he said, we can find a new point of view from which to live, and although the flight down the waterfall might continue to present us with difficulty, we are better able to connect with the truth of the river that waits to receive us at the bottom.

“Whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water. Our life and death are the same thing.”

The metaphor stayed with me deeply: each human life emerging like a drop of water separating from the river at the edge of a waterfall — feeling adrift, fragmented, longing for reunion — before ultimately returning to the wholeness from which it came.

My choreography emerged largely through improvisation and drew from Chinese martial arts, tai chi, and the hand gestures of Chinese Dunhuang dance. I was interested in embodying both the disorientation of separation and the flow of return while being grounded in the deeper "knowing" that we are all "one," which brings inner peace through life's changes. I’m deeply thankful to George for leading this project and to Sarah Dyers, director of ConTempo Studios and vocalist, vocalists Julie Hoeltzel and Natalia Leslie, and cellist Daniel Saenz for bringing this piece into being.

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"The Great Fall" by Emilie Anne

A river – flowing deeply so

Arrives at the edge of the abyss

Drops of water separate from the whole

Falling, flying, feeling adrift

Unraveling into a great descent

A curtain, composed of a million pearls

Cascade of disoriented severance

Time slips slow and eternity unfurls

The truth of the river awaits as

Drops of water join the whole

Returning home to the river –

A place it has always known

Returning home to the river –

Flowing deeply so