Gerda Geddes: Obituary by Frank Woods

Gerda ‘Pytt’ Geddes: t’ai chi pioneer, dancer, psychoanalyst

Gerda Geddes died on 4th March 2006 in Shrewsbury where she was visiting her younger daughter. She was in her 89th year and was well prepared for death which she faced with trademark clarity. Clarity, along with flow and balance, are key principles in her book ‘Looking for the Golden Needle’ in which she finds within the symbolism of T’ai Chi an allegory for the human journey from birth to death.
She was born Gerda Meyer Bruun in Bergen, Norway on 17th July 1917, daughter of a distinguished businessman and politician. From an early age Gerda had a strong sense of her own identity and of a force that she felt as inner personal energy. It was an energy that she was aware of in her early explorations of dance and of psychoanalysis, both of which were major influences in her young adult life in Oslo and later in Sweden after her involvement in the Norwegian Resistance had led to a perilous escape from Norway
In 1948, she married David Geddes and travelled to China in connection with his business career. During a dawn walk she came upon an old man performing T’ai Chi. As she watched, she experienced sensations of light and energy and a growing conviction that this was what she was searching for. It was extremely difficult for a Western man to find a T’ai Chi master and virtually unheard of for a woman: except a woman of Gerda’s determination. She persuaded Choy Hawk Pang, himself a pupil of Yang Chengfu, to teach her. Instruction was by imitation, Gerda’s houseboy translated as required, and there was strictly no physical contact, hence Push Hands was off the curriculum. Such was her progress under Choy Hawk Pang and, later, his son Choy Kam Man, that Kam Man, writing to her in 1956, describes her as his ‘one and only true successor’.
Britain in 1959 was less prepared to be enthusiastic about Gerda’s T’ai Chi. Her initial attempts to interest dance studios, drama schools, and similar agencies fell on stony ground. Then, in the early Sixties, she started teaching T’ai Chi in London, Cambridge and Tunbridge Wells. Later she joined the staff of the newly opened London Contemporary Dance School, ‘The Place’ where she taught T’ai Chi for thirty years and influenced generations of modern dancers, musicians, artists, doctors, therapists and members of the public who attended her classes.
Two years after her husband’s death in 1995, Gerda moved to northeast Scotland to be near her elder daughter. She continued to teach T’ai Chi classes until 2002 when, at the age of 85, she decided to stop instructing. By this time, ‘Searching for the Golden Needle’ had been republished with an epilogue which considers preparation for the mystery of death. It ends: ‘We just grow wider and deeper all the time and all we have to do is climb to the top of the mountain and jump.’
A memorial service will be held at Coull Church on Saturday 25th March at 2pm. Coull Church is in Aberdeenshire, next to Kirklands of Coull, off the road between Aboyne and Tarland.

Frank Woods

NB. for those wishing to make contact with each other about Gerda or publications, please send me your email addresses via the blog or to info [at] greatrivertaichi [dot] co [dot] uk and I will do my best to connest you.