In 1924 I accompanied Tagore on a lecture tour to South America. He fell
ill, and during his convalescence in Argentina, he talked to me on several
occasions about the importance of expressing thoughts and feelings in
physical movement. He did this particularly in the knowledge that I was
planning to set up a new school in England, where such ideas could be tried
out, as eventually they were at Dartington Hall. The following transcript of
his discourse, which I took down at the time in the form of extensive notes.
Only three short sentences of a personal nature have been omitted,
otherwise it is a faithful record, set out in paragraphs for the sake of
readability. L.K.E.
POUPEE (adopted name of the Poet’s granddaughter) TRIES TO SPEAR
TO ME with the whole of her body. Meeting me on the boat she expressed
her delight in the form of a dance of her own design. As she danced, her
speech was through her whole body. Life is sweet, she wanted to say, the
world is beautiful, but having as yet no language of words, her small mind,
stirred to its depths, broke out into a complex movement of dance. Her
whole body moved as if to music.
It is a function of the body, not merely to carry out vital actions so that we
may live and move, but so that we may express, and not with the face alone,
but with the legs, the arms and the hands. All our limbs have their own
power to express. This truth came to me one day in London. One of your
people, a great thinker, asked me to lunch with him. I won't give you his
name, but there he was, another philosopher, sitting opposite me. Suddenly,
he left his chair and began to walk up and down. As soon as his thoughts had
started circulating in his mind, he felt he needed the accompaniment of a
circulation of movement, a coordination of his body. This was because his
mind felt a vital connection with his body, and his body with the
spontaneous and natural movement of his mind The act of leaving his chair
and of walking up and down expressed the demand of his body for free play
for his thoughts.
We often take a brisk walk when we are agitated became thought needs
bodily expression if it is to perform its work freely and fully. Children must
dance. They must be restless. When they think, the body becomes restless
and ripples with a variety of movement that helps to keep their muscles in
harmony with the mind.
In children the whole body is expressive It is in going to school that we
take our first false step. There we are bidden to think sitting. We mustn't
move our arm. To our teacher we present so many masks. All the time we
are forced to control those lines of movement that would parallel and
accompany our thoughts. Whenever, as children, we are stirred emotionally
or feel receptive to thought, we need an appropriate accompaniment of
physical movement.
Children can quite quickly acquire the habit of receiving thoughts sitting
still. Their minds have then to think unaided by the collaboration of the
body. The body, in its turn, feels neglected because it is not aiding its great
partner, the mind, in its internal work. Our minds suffer ever after as a result.
This does not mean that for certain kinds of thinking you need never sit still.
Sometimes, as in the world of mathematics, you have, if you are to apply all
your physical and mental energy to a problem, to eliminate all distracting
movement, especially when you wish to explore to the depths a complex
subject. For particular kinds of thinking, sitting still can be useful.
But for creative work the mind acts as a coordinator of ideas, and we
discover best by thinking and by expressing. When we try to express
ourselves merely in words, we feel incomplete, and for the fullest expression
there should certainly be arm and leg movement as well. The poet, or the
musician, gesticulates as he works. He must move his arms, his hands, and
wrinkle his face. Why, then, doesn't he start up from his chair and dance his
ideas out in the sunshine? Because he's been to school. It is at school that he
has learnt the habit of stifling so thoroughly the natural companionship of
body with mind. His widowed body feels neglected, because he has lost the
art of composing or of thinking whist he is dancing or moving. The result is
that the whole body, which is designed for expression through movement,
loses one of its most important missions in life, the urge to express. The
body becomes feeble, and only the face retains some power and freedom to
express through movement. As you think, you wrinkle your forehead. As
you smile, or as you weep, each emotion is expressed in some movement of
your face. But as a small child, you smiled with the whole of your body, you
wept with every muscle you had and in anger you beat with your feet upon
the ground. The whole body tried to express whatever deep emotion you
felt. This power and this freedom we have deliberately mutilated and of both
we have deprived an children.
When I was young, my body was very expressive and graceful. All my
limbs worked perfectly in harmony. Then I sat down and began to give too
much time just to thinking. I wrote sitting, a process in which the whole of
my body took no part at all. Only my face screwed itself up, and now and
then I would stretch my arms. While the rest of the body remained still, my
muscles became inarticulate. In this way the body may continue to perform
its other utilitarian functions, but it loses grace. I may have retained some
dement of beauty in my face and even in the movement of my arms, but the
general shape and form of my limbs has lost something that was invaluable
to me in my early youth. Only my face and arms today retain any ability to
express what my mind is thinking.
You remember our seeing together those great Japanese actors, and our
discussion of the training they underwent, so that with their whole bodies
they could express any idea the play demanded from them. They had
specialized in this power from childhood using every muscle in the body to
convey some specific emotion or a single idea. Every limb, and not just the
muscles of the face, should have a put of its own to play, and should know
how to give to our inner sentiments their own perfection of expression.
There is a wealth of language in movement that it should be simple for us to
exploit and to realize. To find expression for a single sentiment, all our limbs
must be free to move and act. Why not then admit that in the process of
thinking there are two stages: the act of thought itself and the process of
giving to that thought appropriate form or shape, even though not in words?
The grouping and shaping of these thoughts should be expressed in rhythm
of movement and the body should sway with the inner movement of the
thought.
The best actors will always be those who have been trained to use the
whole body as a tool for the expression of thought, of emotion or of
sentiment. Words, to convey the full perfection of their message, must be
accompanied by the appropriate bodily movement. If our schools were run
on the right lines, boys and girls would never lose their natural gifts of
bodily expression, making use for that purpose of all their limbs.
Unfortunately, today, in civilized communities, expression through
movement is repressed and is no longer looked upon as quite proper.
Turning your face into a blank mask helps you to live in a crowd and among
strangers without attracting notice, and thus you can achieve respectability.
It is much safer to learn how to repress any vivid form of expression. By
constant practice we can, and have, become adepts at concealing our real
sentiments and thoughts. Sometimes we want experience once again this
freedom this power to express thought or sentiments. Then we have to
employ men who have specialized in such an art from birth, and are not at
all like the ordinary run of human beings, who have altogether lost it. We
pay actors, therefore, to cultivate their natural gifts and to give us the chance
of experiencing the joys we crave, but can no longer achieve through the
repression of our bodes. We get a kind of vicarious enjoyment by watching
great actors perform a part. It is only to a few outstanding professional actors
that we permit the expression of ideas through theme of all the limbs and of
the body. We need, then, to drink deeply as to whether we cannot make
some new kind of compromise between our bodies and our minds.
It is true that we cannot any longer be spontaneous or natural in the
expression of our feelings before strangers. The cultivation of such an art
would have to be the outcome of special training. In the developing of your
own school, I advise you to make the practice of drama and of the histrionic
arts compulsory for all children. We must make dramatic performance a
regular subject of education. Children need the opportunity to give
expression of their sentiments through perfect and graceful movements of
the body. Never allow this capacity to use the whole body as a medium of
expression to die out. Man, as a fraction of a multitude, may feel he has to
repress his individuality. Let us defy this feeling. So - introduce the dramatic
arts into your school from the beginning. This is the only way.
But you an also have walking classes, once a week, perhaps on a Sunday.
Boys and girls should become accustomed to talking and learning whilst
walking, and the teachers too. They should not just sit like statues in a
museum all the week. If you can let these walks be oftener than once a week
so much the better. For waking can also be a most natural accompaniment to
thinking. It is when man turns himself into a vagabond or a tramp that talk
becomes natural and spontaneous. Lessons or ideas can then be assimilated
the more easily. Talk becomes organic.
By repressing all activity of the body, so many school lessons remain
absolutely dead and ineffective. To compel the mind to use only one portion
of the body in the learning process is not natural. In the process of taking in
and of digesting our food, a whole symphony of life is being performed in
which heart; eyes, tongue and ears are playing their part. The same process
should occur when you are taking in your lessons or trying to swallow useful
information. You can, with the help of the classroom dull all the faculties.
But Life should be entire, a coordination of all the different faculties and
functions. There should be nothing dead or inert about life in school. I would
allow all our boys and girls during class to jump up, even to climb into a
tree, to run off and chase after a cat or dog, or to pick some fruit off a
branch. This is really why my classes were preferred, not because I was any
special good as a teacher. I tried to keep in mind the need of the child to use
the whole of its body in acquiring a vocabulary and in mastering a sentence.
I remember, in teaching English, I was trying to get the children to master
the idea of 'tearing', verb 'to tear'. Now it would have been easy enough to
demonstrate by tearing a leaf from a book, but instead I asked each of them
to climb to the top of the nearest mango tree and to tear off a leaf and bring
it back to me. The whole process of tearing, when accompanied by such a
full body movement, became a living thing. Most of our teachers used to get
disgusted when they heard the children in my class laughing and shouting
and clapping their hands. A boy would say to me, 'May I go for a run' 'Yes,
of course', I would say, because I knew that by this means some tedium
would be broken and that when again he felt lively, it would be much easier
for him to receive and to digest. It is while children feel dull, from the
passivity of their minds and through being asked to be inert receptacles,
without any activity of body that they cease altogether to assimilate the nonliving
lesson.
We should understand that, in reality, the body is one with the mind. If,
with Gandhi, you believe that, though wedded, we should all live celibate
lives, then life is bound to be incomplete; anyhow one way or another. You
cannot separate them into different compartments. My only wish as a poet is
to be free to walk in the open air and to use a pen while the body is
responding to the mind, in rhythm. According to such a rhythm I would
punctuate. Suddenly, I should be moving slowly, andante, then allegro, and
the time would change with the changes of expression. While composing my
poem the body would be helping me with its own movements.
So with children in school. Let them recite while out walking; let them do
their thinking aloud. If possible, I would recommend children to carry their
notebooks and to go on writing while they are on trek. First these notes
would be about the things they see around them, facts and observations of
natural history, aspects of the countryside, experiences on the road, of
market day, of topics of conversation, of their special interests. All the
picturesque details of the life around them they should sketch or record.
I used to encourage them to watch the Santal women filling by with
materials for sale on their heads, with their pottery or water vessels, to listen
to the singing of the cart men and to all the signs and sounds peculiar to the
roadside on a market day. Sometimes they would record detached, isolated
facts only, but to walk along the road on a market day, when loaded bullock
carts or women were streaming by, was a exercise for body and mind, for
eyes and ears, an exercise in observation, with movement, in writing or
sketching at the same time, while walking. By demanding this kind of coordination
of body and mind, eye and ear together, the exercise could
become more and more complex and interesting.
I am perfectly certain that if the whole body were active in all its
functions, we should learn that much more rapidly. My school now has 300
boys and girls, but I started with not more than ten and encouraged them to
develop widely their freedom of body and mind. The old house had big
verandas long corridors, spacious terraces. Occasionally, I would bring them
all our on to the veranda and change the place of the class. When we are ill
the doctor often advises a change of air. Then why not a change while we
are well and in school. After the class was over, I made it a rule; the place
must be changed for the next class. We would move from the shade of one
tree to the shade of another. I insisted on a five-minute break so that they
could run and dissipate the obstructions of the mind.
Sastrimashai would never allow a child to leave until the whole class was
over. He would keep his classes overtime, so that the children had to race to
avoid a reprimand from their next teacher. Their time was too much taken up
by tyrants, and some reasonable gaps were badly needed between the
different regimes of tyranny. Five minutes is not at all too long when
children are under pressure between one period and another.
But the moment you leave a little space fallow, the utilitarians will pounce
upon it and say, 'Why leave this space unfilled? You should grow a crop
there.’ They possess such a superstitious faith in the efficiency of their own
teaching, that they don't realize that periods of non-teaching are just as
important as a means of tempering formal instruction. Utilitarian by nature,
they must fill every niche and leave no space or time for 'Not-teaching'. Poor
body. Nature made a perfect adjustment between the body and the mind. It is
civilized man who, by his formalism in the classroom has caused dissension
between the two of them who has severed the connection and made the gap
as wide as possible. But body and mind are indissolubly connected. The
most natural form of healing is that which takes place through the suggestion
of the mind. We are at last coming to accept this idea. Civilization has built
up the barrier between the two, and it is our task to break down this gap and
to open up once again the natural passageways between the two. The Greeks
were probably aware of the need for this interrelation, for they cultivated a
perfect harmony of body and mind. They linked teaching with music and
with games.
As a kind of after-thought he continued: 'If only I could be born again and
be sufficiently orphaned to be admitted into your Siksha-Sastra! Santose is
so receptive to ideas and he has great faith in you. In practical affairs he may
not be entirely competent, but faith he has and he tries his best.
