The ‘higher fundamental rhythms’ of Margaret Morris (1891–1980) by Clare Button Margaret Morris was a changeling child. At least that was the opinion of the superstitious midwife who delivered her on 10 March 1891. When the woman picked the newborn baby up to wash her, Morris apparently refused to have her head supported but lifted it up out of the midwife’s hand and turned it from side to side. Morris later remarked, ‘My first independent movement seems to have been a good indication of character’. She was right: Morris’s determination led to a long career as a dancer, choreographer, artist, costume designer, theatre manager, teacher and physiotherapist. She began her career aged three, reciting poems at Victorian smoking parties, and ended it training dancers in the 1960s rock musical Hair at the age of 81. The movement and dance technique she created as a 12-year-old, Margaret Morris Movement (MMM), is still taught worldwide today. She ran a London school, theatre and club, set up a number of businesses and appeared on numerous television and radio programmes. Later in life, she relocated to Scotland, where she established the country’s first national ballet company. Yet, for all this, Morris remains little known, often overshadowed by the reputation of her life partner, the Scottish painter J.D. Fergusson. I had certainly never heard of Morris when I first got the job of cataloguing her extensive archive in 2017. The Margaret Morris Archive, held at the Fergusson Gallery, Perth, Scotland, was catalogued and conserved between 2017 and 2021 as part of the Wellcome Trust-funded project ‘Body Language: Movement, Dance and Physical Education in Scotland, 1890–1990’ at the Centre for Research Collections, University of Edinburgh, and Culture Perth and Kinross. My thanks are due to both Culture Perth and Kinross and the International Association of Margaret Morris Movement. In the beautiful Fergusson Gallery in Perth, Scotland, I entered a room full of boxes overflowing with photographs, letters, press cuttings, diaries, costume designs, choreography notebooks, sheet music, sketches and paintings. But as I set to work sifting the paraphernalia of a life lived largely on stage, I uncovered fragments which told a more private story. Morris’s unpublished autobiography (which is much more revealing than her published memoir, My Life in Movement), scribbled letters and notes and a sequence of ‘morning books’ (tiny diaries that Morris used as journals) reveal her interest in nature worship, divination, meditation, automatic writing, theosophy and spiritualism. Although Morris never wrote or spoke about these interests publicly, their influence can be seen in aspects of her life and work. In this article, I want to explore Morris’s spirituality as it is revealed in these archival sources and argue for her as an important figure amidst the tangled networks of alternative artists and thinkers at the birth of modernism. Cultural connections Margaret Morris was never going to be conventional. Born into an artistic household – her father was the painter William Bright Morris (not the William Morris, as some sources claim!) – and raised bilingually in England and France, she had a nomadic childhood due to her acting commitments and received little or no formal education. Visiting Paris in 1913, she met the artist John Duncan Fergusson (whom she always called ‘Fergus’) and their relationship of mutual inspiration and personal freedom lasted until Fergusson’s death in 1961. When they met, Morris was already running a dance school and theatre in Chelsea, where her pupils included the later well-known actors Elsa Lanchester and Angela Baddeley (and where a young John Gielgud gave one of his first performances). When Fergusson relocated to London during World War I, he and Morris set up a club which featured readings, performances and dancing into the early hours. The roll-call of attendees reads like a who’s who of early-twentieth-century modernists: Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Augustus John, George Bernard Shaw, Jacob Epstein, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Katherine Mansfield, to name but a few. The Margaret Morris Club was at the heart of Chelsea’s burgeoning scene of experimental small theatres and bohemian nightclubs (Morris was briefly employed to dance at another of these: the Cave of the Golden Calf club near Regent Street, where she shared the bill with the writer Arthur Machen, among others). Meanwhile, her ‘summer schools’ on the French Riviera were frequented by even brighter luminaries: Picasso, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Marlene Dietrich, Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce, whose daughter was briefly a pupil of Morris’s. Among this scintillating social circle were a number of individuals with an interest in spiritual, even occult, matters. Morris’s pupil and friend (and Fergusson’s model) Kathleen Dillon had a relationship with John Rodker, who was married to the writer and student of Aleister Crowley Mary Butts, while Kathleen Goddard, the secretary of Morris’s school, married the poet and publisher Victor Neuberg, another associate of Crowley’s. Other close friends included the composer Eugene Goossens, whose affair with the occultist Rosaleen Norton would later cause a scandal, and A.R. Orage, the modernist thinker and pupil of Gurdjieff. Like many of her free-thinking contemporaries, Morris dabbled with Theosophy. She was a member of both the Theosophical Society and the Order of the Star in the East, an international organisation co-founded by the socialist, women’s rights activist and educationist Annie Besant. Besant had been a pupil of the polymathic biologist, educator and town planner Patrick Geddes, who knew Morris well through their shared summer schools in the south of France during the 1920s. A flier among Morris’s personal papers for Sunday ‘sermons’ given by Besant at St Mary’s Church, Caledonian Road, North London in June 1927 suggests that Morris attended these and may have known Besant personally (it’s possible they may have also overlapped through their suffragist activities: Morris was a member of several franchise leagues and designed the front cover of the sheet music for Ethel Smyth’s 1911 anthem ‘The March of the Women’). As the Order had been founded to prepare the world for the arrival of a messianic entity identified as the Indian teenager Jiddu Krishnamurti, there must have been considerable excitement when, in the winter of 1919, Krishnamurti himself joined the Margaret Morris Club. Even as early as 1908, however, Morris had arranged dances for the Fantasy of Peer Gynt – the first production of Ibsen’s play to be performed in Britain – adapted by the writer and astrologer Isabelle M. Pagan of the Edinburgh Lodge of the Theosophical Society. Moving in such circles, it is inconceivable that Morris’s work would remain untouched by the influence of alternative beliefs and practices. While Theosophy’s popularising of Eastern philosophy and culture may have partly inspired some of her Orientalist dances (Figure 1), her interest was more than purely artistic. Morris developed a knowledge of yoga and meditation at a time when these still had a relatively niche cachet in Britain, and their influence can be seen in MMM’s emphasis on natural movement, breathing, balance, posture and flexibility. Yet while Morris’s introduction to Theosophy came about through her eclectic social and professional networks, her break with mainstream religion had occurred much earlier in life. The eternal rhythm In her unpublished autobiography, ‘The First Fifty Years’, Morris describes rebelling against her High Church upbringing and the horror she felt at the ‘lifesize tortured figure of Christ on the Cross’ that hung in the middle of the church her family attended in Kensington, west London. Physically fleeing the church, she took comfort in the ‘sanctuary of living green and earth’ which ‘awaked consciousness of inner peace and inexplainable happiness, that I never felt in churches or when saying my prayers’. Her experience of communing with nature brought about a deeply mystical experience: I had my first experience of feeling a part of something far greater than myself, and in that feeling was a wonderful happiness that evaporated when I came in contact with other human beings, so that I crept back to my sanctuary as soon as I could, sitting under a bush gazing up at the pattern of leaves against the sky, or lying with my face pressed in the grass, feeling and smelling the damp earth. Here I sensed a goodness, an immensity I knew I could never grasp, but of which I felt myself a part; here in solitude I might find some realisation of what people called God – not shut in churches surrounded by people, and not a God made in the likeness of man, but something so immense that it would forever be beyond my understanding, but to which I dedicated myself. This affinity with nature would find expression in Morris’s choreography. Many of her dances were intended to be performed outside, and some, such as The Dryad, openly referenced the mystical side of nature. Morris’s ‘summer schools’ were intended as a chance for her students to leave the smog of London to dance and paint in the outdoors, close to the cliffs and sea. The remarkable photographs taken by her friend Fred Daniels (who went on to work with filmmakers Powell and Pressburger) seem to show Morris and her dancers as tree spirits themselves, barefoot among the trees, their symmetrical poses almost indistinguishable from the natural landscape. Morris’s description of her childhood mystical awakening is revealing, but we need to look elsewhere in her archive for an insight into her adult spirituality. Morris’s ‘morning books’ are a series of small notebooks which she used as personal diaries during the 1950s and 1960s (at least, these are the volumes that have survived). As well as ideas, reflections, insecurities and motivational statements, the books contain sketches of her morning tea leaves (suggesting that Morris also took divination seriously), references to experiencing ‘bad vissions [sic]’ and seeking ‘spiritual grace’ and evidence of Morris’s experiments with automatic writing. In an entry dated 11 March 1958, Morris instructs herself: ‘Write down everything as it comes, even trivial things to be done. Do not tax your conscious memory with details… Free yourself to receive what is important. Prepare – then go slow the impulse that comes if you get it right – it must succeed.’ Morris was not alone in these experiments: among her correspondence is a letter from her friend and colleague Betty Simpson, dated just three months later, which reads like a manual on automatic writing: All that matters is to judge what you get and see if it is helpful, and above all be calm as a cucumber when it is coming through. I know how true this is! Another point is never, never do that sort of automatic writing if you are worried, tired, impatient or anxious. Wait till you are still on every level, and then if you tune in to the ‘white Light’, or whatever you like to call it, you will not get Astral interferences, which do sometimes get in the way. All my writing comes NOT automatically. But only when I’m very still + ‘tuned up’. It doesn’t matter what method, or how you do it (as long as you do tune up), scenery will do it for me, mountains especially, and meditation, and then one is safer from interference. Another thing: the more sensitive you are (and you of all people are), the more you should protect yourself – it’s like shutting the door and only admitting the influences, vibrations, people, call them what you will, that belong to the Light, and not the dark and the shadows. This letter provides a tantalising glimpse of Simpson – an intriguing, if elusive, figure in her own right – in the role of spiritual guide and confidante. Simpson began dance training with Morris in 1922 while still a teenager and went on to become her second-in-command, working with students and patients across Britain and around the world. She was also a talented artist: Fergusson counted her among his best pupils, while Morris described her as ‘the best friend I ever had, and the best friend of MMM’. When Simpson died prematurely in 1961, her spirituality was clearly significant enough to warrant a mention in her Times obituary (written by the soldier, civil servant and fantasy/science-fiction writer Sir Ronald Fraser, no less): ‘She herself had to bear a long illness that crippled her powers and condemned a vivid, eager spirit to inaction. In this as through all her life she was fortified and inspired by her sight of other and wider fields of activity, into which she is now released.’ Simpson’s letter concludes, ‘No I don’t mind you telling dear Fergus [about the automatic writing], if you did tell him it must be meant. He knows all these things.’ This comment hints at Fergusson’s sympathetic interest in ‘these things’, which, like Morris, stemmed from early childhood. In her ‘biased biography’, The Art of J.D. Fergusson, Morris describes the artist’s childhood friendship with a Perthshire woman known as ‘Betsy the witch’, who lived in a cottage in the woods and told him about folklore and history. Whether or not it was Betsy who first introduced him to folklore, Fergusson certainly drew inspiration from Celtic mythology in his art and later got to know the Celtic Revival artist and theosophist John Duncan (who had worked closely with Morris’s sometime colleague Patrick Geddes). The female nudes for which Fergusson is best known, for example, were for him celebratory archetypes of ‘pagan goddesses from a mythical Celtic past’, while his and Morris’s joint library – now at the Fergusson Gallery – contains books on topics such as second sight and dowsing. The influence of nature mysticism in their creatively symbiotic partnership can be traced in Fergusson’s wooden sculpture Dryad, which bears the same name as one of Morris’s dances. An annotation by Morris on Simpson’s letter, ‘Good letter re: contacting right rhythms’, reveals another shared affinity. As a dancer and choreographer, ‘rhythm’ was naturally a key concept for Morris (while Fergusson was briefly art editor of the influential magazine Rhythm, the front cover of which was his 1910 painting of the same name). But her morning books make recurrent references to the spiritual connotations of ‘the right rhythms’, which she clearly looked to for guidance in both her personal and professional life: ‘Success – for you – is when you are so attuned (or “tuned in”) to your part of the eternal rhythm – that things begin to “happen”’, she wrote on 19 February 1955. A few months later, on 2 August, she was still grappling with ‘tuning in’ and sometimes feeling overwhelmed by the results: ‘It comes to me strongly that my main trouble is that I “contact” too easily – & too much!! So many conflicting inspirations and urges come to me [which] confuses or even blocks [sic] my contact with the higher fundamental rhythms of which I am a part – & by which I should be inspired and guided.’ Most personal – and poignant – is the entry dated a week after Fergusson’s death in February 1961: ‘Came to me that if I can control my thoughts – F[ergus] could come through?!’ Morris’s published writings also emphasise the importance of rhythm, albeit for its artistic and therapeutic, rather than spiritual, qualities: ‘The value of rhythm to induce movement in difficult cases is now admitted by many, but rhythm, in its fullest sense, must include the aesthetic, and its full possibilities, both for getting muscular response and awakening interest, have certainly not been made the most of.’ While Morris was often at pains to emphasise the medical soundness and respectability of her technique through commonsense language, the following description from her 1972 book Creation in Dance and Life has the flavour of a morning-book description of ‘tuning in’: ‘If you try to be effective and forceful, you will fail miserably… While working with others, whether in small or large groups, always remember you are part of the whole, get into harmony with your group, and while being yourself, feel the oneness of purpose in all you do.’ This holistic approach, emphasising the interrelatedness of physical and mental health and the importance of creativity and harmony to wellbeing, were undoubtedly informed by Morris’s own experiments with meditation and automatic writing. There is surely no clearer example of the link between Morris’s spiritual and professional practices than the double-page spread in one morning book (Figure 2), with one page dedicated to spinal mobility and the other to quotes from Krishnamurti about the mind’s ability to ‘discover what is beyond itself’. Conclusion Histories of dance have tended to sideline Morris in favour of contemporaries such as Isadora Duncan, Madge Atkins and Ruby Ginner (whom Morris taught). Barbara Jean West, a practitioner of MMM who wrote a dissertation on the relationship between Morris’s technique and her ‘core beliefs’ in 2007, concluded that, unlike these better-known dancers, Morris ‘did not cultivate a spiritual side in her dance work’. I hope this article has gone some way towards correcting this view and that the increased accessibility of her archive will lead to more research on Morris’s life and work. While Morris’s relative public silence on spiritual matters can partly be explained by her lifelong bid to have her method officially accepted by the medical and educational authorities (which it never fully was), her championing of holism, mindfulness, creativity and inclusivity are far more mainstream today than they were in her lifetime. Perhaps now, then, is the time for Morris’s ‘fundamental rhythms’ to come through. As she herself noted in a ‘morning book’ entry (dated 28 November 1961): ‘There is no end – only change…As […] Fergus constantly quoted “What’s your hurry? You’ve all eternity”!’ Bibliography Grace Brockington and Claudia Tobin, ‘London’s Little Theatres’, British Art Studies (2019), 11. Available at: https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-11/theatres/p1. Richard Emerson, Rhythm and Colour: Hélène Vanel, Loïs Hutton and Margaret Morris (Edinburgh: Golden Hare, 2018). John Duncan Fergusson, Modern Scottish Painting (Glasgow, William MacLellan: 1943). Ronald Fraser, obituary for Betty Simpson, The Times, 29 November 1961. Margaret Morris Movement, https://www.margaretmorrismovement.com/about/margaret-morris. Margaret Morris, ‘The Educational and Remedial Value of Dancing’, Journal of Living and Learning (January 1934). Margaret Morris, My Life in Movement (London: Peter Owen, 1969). Margaret Morris, Creation in Dance and Life (London: Peter Owen, 1972). Margaret Morris, The Art of J.D. Fergusson: A Biased Biography (Glasgow and London: Blackie, 1974). Barbara Jean West, ‘The Development of MMM in Continuing Practice: An Examination of Margaret Morris’s System of Training in Relation to Her Core Beliefs’, unpublished Masters dissertation, Roehampton University, 2007.