Modern dancing and dancers

by J. E. Crawford Flitch

By permission of Messrs. J. Curwen & Sons, Ltd.

by grace. There is lurking in them a certain note of savagery and battles long ago. The old fighting England as well as Merrie England still lives in the Morris. It is not surprising that King Charles’s men should have danced it on the eve of Naseby fight. It is essentially a dance for men, and a dance for the open air. It does not sway or glide; its movement is spirited and abrupt. The foot is lifted as in walking and then vigorously straightened to a kick; the heels come solidly to earth. The object of the dancer is to make the bells ring fortissimo, and to do this he must kick, and kick hard. The Morris does not exhibit the graceful postures and fawn-like agility of the Spanish country dances, nor the fiery energy of the Hungarian and the Russian. In its solid merriment, its even rhythm, its vigorous but restrained movements, it is essentially British.

It would be impossible to describe the spirit of the Morris Dance better than in the admirable words of Mr Cecil Sharp, who is not only learned in the history of the dance, but has sought it out wherever the tradition lingers on the greensward and under the ancient oaks of an England that is passing away. “It is, in spirit,” he says, “the organised, traditional expression of virility, sound health and animal spirits. It smacks of cudgel-play, of quarter-staff, of wrestling, of honest fisticuffs. There is nothing sinuous in it, nothing dreamy; nothing whatever is left to the imagination. It is a formula based upon and arising out of the life of man, as it is lived by men who hold much speculation upon the mystery of our whence and whither to be unprofitable; by men of meagre fancy, but of great kindness to the weak; by men who fight their quarrels on the spot with naked hands, drink together when the fight is done, and forget it, or, if they remember, then the memory is a friendly one. It is the dance of folk who are slow to anger, but of great obstinacy—forthright of act and speech: to watch it in its thumping sturdiness is to hold such things as poniards and stilettos, the swordsman with the domino, the man who stabs in the back—as unimaginable things. The Morris Dance, in short, is a perfect expression in rhythm and movement of the English character.”

The modern revival of morris-dancing in England is of very recent origin, but of astonishingly rapid growth. The story of its rise reads like a romance. This movement, which is already national in its scope, which promises to renew the heart of England, which is swelling out into wider circles that will probably be felt throughout the Empire and America, was born in a girls’ club in a poor quarter of the north-west of London. The object of the Espérance Girls’ Club in Cumberland Market was to bring something of the joyous and serene atmosphere of a younger and fresher world into the grim and hurried life of the city dwellers. For some time one of the features of the club had been the encouragement of music, dancing and play-acting. During some winters Scotch reels and strathspeys, Irish jigs and folk-songs, had been practised one night a week. A meeting between Mr H. C. MacIlwaine, the musical director of the club, and Mr Cecil Sharp, the leading authority on folk-music, led to the introduction of the English folk-song. From the folk-song to the folk-dance was only a step. Mr Sharp seven years before had collected a set of morris-tunes from some dancers in Oxfordshire, in whose family the Morris had been handed down from father to son for five generations. The idea suggested itself that as the girls had learnt to sing the old songs they might also learn to dance the old dances.

In October 1905 Miss Mary Neal, the secretary of the club, who has throughout been the directing spirit of the movement, went down to Oxfordshire and brought two of the morris-men up to London, and set them to teach the members of the club. The success of the experiment was immediate and astonishing. The girls were as unfamiliar with the steps and the music as with the speech and dances of ancient Greece; but perhaps a kind of ancestral memory awoke within them. The rhythms of the Morris had sprung from the rhythms of the old English life, and the Londoners, who are said to be never more than three generations from the soil, responded to a summons of the blood. Within half-an-hour of the coming of the Oxfordshire dancers the Morris, with its stamping of feet and clashing of staves, its maze of intricate movements, was in full swing upon a London floor. Thus was begun the revival of morris-dancing which to-day is a part of the national life.

The next step was the giving of a public concert to make known to the larger world the rediscovery of the ancient dances. This took place at the Small Queen’s Hall in the following April. The public interest was immediately aroused. As one of the newspapers remarked with prophetic insight, it was “a little entertainment which may indeed light such a candle in England as will not immediately be put out.”

From that time the movement progressed by leaps and bounds. Inquiries began to pour in as to how the traditional dancing could be brought back into the lives of the English people, to those in the towns who had lost it altogether as well as to those in the country for whom it was only a vague memory. Miss Neal’s answer to this demand was to send out the best dancers among the members of her club to act as teachers. They have danced the Morris throughout the length and breadth of England. There is not a county to-day where the merry jangle of the bells and the clatter of the staves is not heard. In course of time the Board of Education took cognisance of the movement and introduced the Morris and other country dances into the curriculum of the elementary schools. In the spring of 1911 Miss Neal visited America, and by lectures and demonstration showed to the people of the new continent the old dances which their Puritan forefathers had omitted to bring with them. In response to numberless appeals for instruction she left behind one of the teachers of the Espérance Club, and the movement in the States is spreading with the same astonishing enthusiasm and rapidity as in England.

The most significant and hopeful feature of this movement is that it is in every sense a popular one. The inveterate cavillers may argue that it is artificially imposed upon the younger generation by a few cultured and enthusiastic pedants, and they will certainly repeat the well-worn shibboleth concerning the impossibility of putting back the clock. But the artificiality has been in the enforced imposition of a Puritan code that abolished dancing from the village green. To all healthy children it is as natural to dance as to laugh and sing. The tradition has been abruptly broken; now it is being restored to them and they respond to it with every fibre of their being. They are far from regarding it as yet another troublesome item in a bewildering system of education; they do not have to be driven to it as to a new species of drill. They revel in it as in a delightful game, for it satisfies all the child’s inborn love of music and pantomime and emphatic rhythm. When once the initial impetus has been given from above, the movement goes on with its own momentum. Its motive force is not authority but the old indomitable impulse of the blood.

All that the revival of the old dances will do for the rising generation it is impossible to foretell. It is giving them back the power of self-expression, which the common people seem once to have possessed in the old days when music and song came naturally to birth in the life of the folk. As Miss Mary Neal has well said: “Music is the one art in which the otherwise inarticulate can express themselves, and so we have in this music the truest meeting ground for all classes. The revival and practice of our English folk-music is part of a great national revival, a going back from town to country, a reaction against all that is demoralising in city life. It is a reawakening of that part of our national consciousness which makes for wholeness, saneness, and healthy merriment.”