KOLKATA, INDIA - JANUARY 2012

"Peace Buzz"- Zuleikha with Kolkata high-school girls performing "Dance Peace"

So much to tell about. It's been too hard to write every day. For one week of work, it seems like I’ve been here for weeks. I am part of the “Teach Peace to Reach Peace” project in the American Center, a collaboration of Fulbright alumni.

Part of this was “Dance Peace,” a collaborative performance by me, flutist Steve Gorn, and girls from six city high schools in Kolkata. We presented “Dance Peace” on Friday January 20th at the American Center.

(Zuleikha and Steve Gorn in back row center right)

I have been going to schools for 6 days, and working with high school and middle school students, from 50-125 at a time. Each school is very different. What impressed me was the openness that the girls brought to the sessions. After jumping and skipping we discussed how they felt in body and mind. Many reported feeling "refreshed, calm, with more energy."

The subject is “peace.” This is so interesting, as I have been working from the inquiry “what is the feeling of peace in the body?” Mind and feeling. In schools where there is time, I have done a whole program of some Take A Minute (TAM) exercises, then skipping, running and jumping, then sitting in partners and learning to listen while someone speaks, and then switching roles. The questions they were asked to speak about were something like: “What surprised you about today's session? What is something you noticed? What is something you enjoyed that we did together?”

They have been coming up with very articulate answers about the depth of awareness they felt from the exercises. One 15-year old girl looked at me, eyes wide, and commented that her mind felt so free, so open, and she really liked it!

These sessions are a good springboard for talking about self-care, world peace and how we can relate to each other as human beings. This has led to great laughter, discussions and dialogue on the virtues and difficulties of East and West. We have talked about posture in working on computers and wondered if and when we ever really relax. I asked them how they relax. Most said talk on the phone, listen to music, or sleep; some said to talk with mother. Most agreed that life is not very relaxing.

I showed them an exercise where we imagined dumping our problems into the earth and using them as compost, after which most girls reported feeling lighter. I have worked with many groups of teachers, showing the same things.

The fact is, everyone needs the Take A Minute practice, and many have expressed how this is not something they have learned how to do in schools of the East or West. Someone could send me on a world tour and I could spend an hour or two at each place with groups of teachers, and it would good. I am serious about this. Teachers, nurses, doctors, and many others who are using TAM regularly are getting great results. 

My days are long, the jumping is ferocious, and the laughter in every place is so welcoming. The girls in the high schools turn into little children. They are hilarious and they are so loud in laughter. One feels that they haven't gotten a chance to let down. I believe this is true. Most of the time we use sports for this, but to move about freely takes some learning and containment, and as you can see from the pix, it is really welcomed by the students.

Teach Peace to Reach Peace Program in the schools

Every day since I have been in Kolkata, I spend half a day with high school girls in the Peace program, and the afternoon/evening time with the daughters of the sex workers, as they are called here. In order to create this program, TSP formed a new partnership with New Light Center. I first came here last year, when I met Urmi Basur, the Executive Director and Founder of New Light through Sohini Das from the American Center, and ended up doing several programs at the Center. This is when the idea for a pilot training program for the college-age girls was born.

This year I have been doing the training with the college girls in the evenings at the Hogar Meridional-Soma Memorial Girls Home. This many-storied building houses 32 young girls at risk of being trafficked and abused. They have been removed from the red light district of Kalighat to the safety of this residential home in South Kolkata with the consent and cooperation of their mothers. Each day I have to get there, which takes a long time from just about anywhere. A cab or car has to bring me to the cinema as a landmark, and then to the Park Regent Police Station. Then the dispatcher calls the home, and the girls or someone comes to meet me, and we walk together to the home.

I meet the college girls here, as it is a safe place for us to conduct the training of Core Wellness and Movement Arts. There are seven girls in this training. They live in a house together, (the Sonar Tori Shelter) with a guardian, and they all participate in keeping the house, cooking, washing, etc.

Working with them has been an inspiring experience. Our space is small, and the joy is big. In fact, the younger girls who live at Soma, pre-teens, have been gathering to watch, so I started another class after the trainings, each evening, so that they can move, too. We are in the first phase of the training, which involves doing the free movement and the Take A Minute exercises. I think they can do this with the younger girls, and it will take some time. Everyone is so busy going to school, and yet there is that feeling of joy that erupts when we all do this movement together. I have brought music from different places in the world, which sounds fun and free, and so everyone is enjoying the bouncing around together. 

Moving freely at Soma - trainees in the new TSP/New Light Center Pilot Program

More to say about this situation, as the depths are more sad, some days.

Everyone in the world dances, and has ways of moving that are natural to the culture. What we are focusing on here in this training comes from the Core Wellness exercises I have developed in Take A Minute for your Life, combined with our simple Movement Arts work in creative expression. When we started, there was a lot of laughter and nervousness, and small movement. Now the girls move about with more freedom and they can explore inside the container of music for quite some time. It is a pleasure and there seems to be a cultivation of well-being. Smiles abound.

Last night we did an exercise of plucking a fruit or light from the Happiness Tree in the stars, and spreading it all around. Then we spontaneously decided to create invisible costumes with this feeling. A kind of pleasure of grace and self-respect began to emerge in the movement.

It is such a thrill to share something like this. I have the feeling that we are all getting our cells washed in the joy of movement. It is not just “dancing around,” yet there is child-like quality to the practice. What comes of it, as we finish each evening, is a lightness of being. It is a hard thing to describe. Amidst the trials of life, a kind of spontaneous clarity of freedom emerges, and we all know that we are touching something of true nature.

The Young Women Trainees of Sonar Tori Shelter with Zuleikha

High-school girls' shoes with their names in them outside of the classroom

Copyright 2012 Zuleikha & Swan Lake Publishing

www.storydancer.com, www.thestorydancerproject.org