Now, Allegra, then went on different. She was exposed, really, to all kinds of dancing schools, modern, and she, also, was very interested in my SYNERGETICS and she loved the numerology and we had great companionship over it, and I thought she was going to be an engineer she wants to be an engineer, she seems to be so good at mathematics and so forth, so I got her entered for MIT which was quite difficult in those days for a girl to get into MIT. At any rate, they accepted her, and that summer, before going to MIT, she did what she had been doing every summer she went to she danced all summer down at the Balanchine School, and I said, "I'm forcing you to be an engineer, you really do want to be a dancer." And I was just thinking about that episode you told me, "I think you better be free, so forget about MIT." So she did, she was in the Balanchine Civic Repertoire for two years, and then, all the years of her childhood I was also making great charts of the history of science. I would like to get big charts, and using a quarter of an inch to the year, and going back to the earliest known scientific discoveries, I plotted them, and had these very long charts, and gradually you could really feel the acceleration. More things came in.

And on the scientific charts, then, I also superimposed the technical history the technology began to come in, and I was able to, by giving colors to the items that are really very purest in scientific intellectuality, I would give that purple, and then I worked down into the blues and finally down to red mechanics were red. By giving color to the different items, it became quite clear all of a sudden, I could see the where it was the mind over matter. I could see the intellectual that occurred long before, if it hadn't been for the atmosphere of that kind of thinking, this one wouldn't have happened, so I was really able to make a very beautiful demonstration of the mind before matter importance.

And, at any rate, my charts were very, very long. Finally I was asked to give a lecture at the Bureau of Standards when I was with Phelps Dodge in 1936 and my charts went all around the auditorium wall, they were so long. But it was fun, I could walk up and down these charts and do things. During that time, Allegra continually studied dance of people around the world. She kept tearing things out, anything she would read, anything she could find, pictures of people dancing in Africa, anything she could find, it was always in there. And she began to work out a history of the dance. Anything she could find about Biblically, the way they were dancing there, she had these on there. So she had when she was in the Balanchine Civic Repertoire Company, she said that, Lincoln Kirstein and Eddie Walberg who founded the Harvard Society of Contemporary Art, who asked me after that Marshall Field Show, asked me to come to Harvard to put on an exhibit and give talks at Harvard on my Dymaxion House, it really saw the beginning of its moving around quite rapidly, and Eddie Walberg and Lincoln Kerstein were the with John Walker who later became now he is the Head of the National Gallery, these three undergraduates, had started the Harvard Society of Contemporary Art and it was really a very good place, but these are two very wealthy boys Kerstein and Walberg. Kerstein and Walberg but particularly Kerstein financed the Balenchine School and this was all his doing.

And, so, Eddie Walberg and Lincoln Kerstein had collected enormous archives about dance around the world, and they gave their archives to the Museum of Modern Art, and at the Museum of Modern Art, they were just a collection they hadn't been in any way sorted out. So Allegra was asked to come and she put together, organized the Archives of dance at the museum. She did this during the dancing season she said, all the dancers were so tired, they worked them so hard physically, they really had nothing left over for intellectual interests, and, but she was not happy with it, so then she began doing both the dance and organizing these archives whenever she had any time. She became fascinated that no dancer ever came to look at those archives. They really got into a special teacher and a special class, and really tended to be specializing. So she said, she really decided she would like to have some more intellectual development. She suddenly hungered for more of that, she plunged hard at that dance, so she decided to go to Bennington where she could graduate, and there were not many schools at that time where you could graduate in the dance, but she did.

And while she was there, they had not only these out work periods and so forth, but she had to do, really, in effect a masters' thesis, and her thesis was of great fascination. She, in her out periods, would work with motion picture companies in New York, and she, her thesis was on the future of the dance in moving pictures and in television which was to come. Everybody knew that they already had it in England, but it was not operating in America, but she felt these were the two very important mediums and the future of the dance in the television and TV. and documentaries in general, from the viewpoint of the dancer, and not from the viewpoint of the entrepreneur or the exploiters of the dance, or from the moving pictures viewpoint. But from the viewpoint of the dancer, what the dancer wanted to do. What how did the dancer really communicate in these kind of mediums and so forth.

So, in doing that thesis, she said, and those of you who are anthropologists then begin to be very interested in what she began to turn up, because all the anthropologists became really fascinated with what Allegra turned here. She said that all life, all biological life, when in perplexity, in fear, would congeal, and all these animals, creatures, just they are beautifully camouflaged in nature, and they just don't see them there. And she said, so, there was so much perplexity and so much fundamental fear, that they were in this state a great deal of the time. But she said, the only thing, then, that would make them move, is an overriding force to that of fear. And she said there would only be two. One would be hunger, and the other the procreative urge.

So she then was developing this concept of the procreative urge or the hunger then gets into the concept of early man before he has evolved his much, any languages or anything. He's got a little tribe and they're very hungry, and they are looking for some food. Now she said, they'll come then to, here's a if you have spent anytime in the wilderness, it is a very extraordinary matter that you know when you see the trees waving all around, if there is an animal, the motion is different from a tree, and you realize, really quite intuitively, you suddenly realize that something else is going on here other than tree. There is the presence of some living creature. And if it is a human being you are terribly aware of that. Their motions are very different from the other creatures. So that, every once in a while, human beings in the wilderness realize there is another human being there, and it couldn't be their family their family is back over here, and so they this is a very bewildering thing because they find human beings tend to be very dangerous. Because they are scared to and so forth, so both these, the other one becomes aware, and they are way two hilltops apart, so they freeze, and they are just lying there for a long time. But then one of the hunger of his tribe, and his own hunger is very, very great. Finally his hunger is so great that it could be that this other man is a hunter and he might really know where there is some food, not a hunter but whatever it is, he might know where there is some food, so he decides to move, and tries to say "Do you know where there is some food?", "I want food."

Now, she said, this brings you to two kinds of human beings two lives of humans on our planet. She said, there are the people who live, they are the agrarian people, they're up to the south and the hunters are pretty much to the north, where the meat spoiled in the hot country but in the colder country it would keep better, so that the hunting prevails in the north, and the agrarian to the south. So she said that if you were of the cold and the hunting world, and you wanted then, to talk about something to eat, you would talk about, you would really do because the hunter mimicked the animals, and they really learned how to do what the animals so they mimicked the animal that they would like to have that they could eat, and so the other person signals back, "Yeah" and so forth, and makes the same signal, and this way, and off they go. So the tribe is saved.

Now, if it were in a country where, not hunters, if they were agrarian, then the signaling the tree stands there, and you would like to then, the wheat and the rice wave like this and so forth, so that you would dance with your top. She said all the dancers in the world dance either with their bottoms or their tops there are absolutely prevalent the bottom-type dancers of what you find very much to the northern part of our planet, as to the pre-traveling days, and people who dance primarily with their tops and it gets into tongue dancing even (Bucky demonstrates this for us). With the clicks and so forth. So, that seems very interesting. So then we find the tribe gets saved by virtue of the effective communication, and food is found, and everybody feels pretty good about this. This goes on time and again because you just don't know where the food is. There is no store to go to. It is a continual search. And this happens time and again that you communicate about the food at a distance, so finally the tribe is very used to the idea that, this is what you do when you are in trouble about food. If you see some strangers, how do you act. So they begin, then, to teach everybody in the tribe how you act because the tribe is often hungry like this. So everybody is learning how to do these kind of acts.

Meantime, there is a man sitting there, one of the tribesmen has broken a leg, or whatever it is, and he starts spontaneously making scratching pictures of what they are doing. He tends to like to scratch on a stone, or he may scratch on a piece of bark, and he begins, then, to represent how the animal runs and so forth, doing this. So then it turns out that the chieftain finds that this is very good representation, and this can be sent much greater distance with a messenger, so one way or another, communication about needs like this reaches greater distance and lasts longer, because the point is the dance is so ephemeral you have to do it all over again, but you've got it now memorialized and you don't have to keep doing that all the time, you've got the picture of it. So she has, then, gradual obsolescence of this way of communicating, yielding to the graphic medium which reaches much greater distances, and is not ephemeral. It lasts. So this is the quality of greater distance and greater lasting. However, the tribe doesn't know that, that the chieftain is being successful with this thing, they don't know really it is a very gradual thing that it begins to replace it is very, very slow obsolescence, so they keep on learning to do this, and gradually the chieftain is operating a different way about the problems of getting the food and where it is coming from, but the tribe has been learning to do this, and they have been doing it from generation to generation, so they keep on doing it, and then they say "Why are we doing it?" Well it was something to do with the tribe being saved, so it gets to be really a mystical matter, so that this is what you do, gets to be very symbolic we are talking about. These are the things you do, there is a ritual that goes along and this will bring succor from some great understanding God. So the mystical connotation begins to develop into what so as we have then people who were hunters yesterday, because man had to hunt, or otherwise he would be starving, but then they don't have to hunt anymore but they keep on hunting, and they may wear red coats and do it on horses, whatever it is.

She sees then, things that human beings do becoming really obsolete as a necessity but carried on for other reasons, where it is considered sort of fun, or it is a habit, and maybe it is a symbol of prestige or somehow or another is a struggle of life they carry it on for other reasons. So, she then said, we would like to see, we can see this thing, then going on. She has the dance then carrying on in two different kinds of ways. One was, then, I said, for procreative urge, and the other was for food. I have taken care of the food part.

The procreative one, we get very much the Chieftain and the female really doing things selectively, and the excitation you get with the birds, there are many Allegra made enormous studies of the different creatures and the mating dances that go on, and what goes on very spontaneously as human beings under various conditions like this, so she has the one that gets to be almost a theater where the male, the mating kind of dance, or excitation that relates to the chieftain who everybody decides he is a God and he needs to reproduce, and they have all kinds of ways to try to entice him to reproduce. And, that one you can understand.