“The Trick Is That the Dancing and Singing Are Unrepeatable”

Empowering Improvisations in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees

Abstract

In Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees, intergenerational memory is depicted through a number of mediums: photos, music, film, and performances. Materia becomes a pianist for a vaudeville group during WW1, and her daughter, Frances, becomes a performer at a speak-easy after Materia’s suicide. Both women use music in their performances in a way that is highly experimental but also dialectical, in which the subject performing the improvisations later becomes defined by such improvisations, allowing Frances to develop a persona that connects her to her mother after Materia's death. In this article, I show how these different elements of media are able to contribute to ongoing discussions of intergenerational memories of trauma through an analysis of Frances Piper.