It is a dance of character in the truest sense, being based on the movements associated with the sailor’s duties. Accompanying himself with a tuneful patter of foot-work, the performer pantomimes hauling at ropes, rowing, standing watch, and sundry other duties of the sea-dog who dealt with sails and not with coal. The hands are placed on the hips palm out, to avoid touching the clothing with the tar that—as everybody knows—always covered the palms of the deep-sea sailor. While not in any sense a great dance, it is uncommonly ingenious and amusing in its combination of patter of steps and earnest pantomime. It is literally a sailor’s chantey sung in the terms of movement instead of words of mouth; even to its division into short stanzas (one for each of the duties represented) the parallel is exact. Its place in the dancing art might be defined as the same as the position of the sailor’s chantey in music.
In England there has been a recent and earnest revival of the Morris Dances, accompanied by a good deal of writing on the subject. In England they have the importance of being English. They are “quaint,” it is true. They reflect the romping, care-free spirit of Merry England; they bring to the cheek of buxom lass the blush of health; they are several centuries old; they follow the antique usage of performance to accompaniment sung by the dancers. But their composition—and its absence—commends them to the attention of the antiquarian and the sociologist, rather than that of a seeker after evolved dancing.
The word “Morris,” according to the suggestion offered by certain scholars, is a corruption of “Moorish”; which theory of its derivation is not confirmed by step, movement or sentiment to be found in the dance. What does seem reasonably possible is that it is of Gipsy derivation. Gipsies are sometimes known—in Scotland at least—as “Egyptians”; so why not, by a similar abeyance of accuracy in England, as Moors?—a process of near-reasoning the value of whose conclusion is nothing at all. At any rate, the Morris dancers have a tradition of hanging little bells around their arms and legs, and decorating themselves with haphazard streamers of ribbon, which is Gipsy-esque. Stories are recorded to the effect that there have been performers who tuned their bells, and by the movements of the dance played tunes on them. The stories offer no definite information as to the quality of dance or music.
The Morris seems to have been a dance for men only, in which respect it was unique among the old English forms unearthed in the recent revival of interest. Many of these dances certainly are interesting, if not in actual choreographic merit, in association. Their very names are rich in flavour, such as All in a Garden Green, The Old Maid in Tears, Hempstead Heath, Greensleeves (mentioned in The Merry Wives of Windsor), Wasp’s Maggott, Dull Sir John, and others equally suggestive of rustic naturalness and fun. Their revivals by Miss Coles and Miss Chaplin include full directions for performance, which is simple. Several of them preserve the ancient usage of saluting the partner with a kiss—which is not mentioned as a warning, but as an observation merely.
England has been among the nations to preserve the institution of dancing around a pole—among the English-speaking so commonly known as the “Maypole” that its use in the celebration of anything but the coming of spring seems incongruous. Other peoples, nevertheless, incorporate it into religious celebrations and what-not. The device of suspending ribbons from the top of the pole, and weaving them around it by means of an interlacing figure described by the dancers, seems to be universal. The steps employed are the simplest possible—those of the Waltz, Polka, or Schottische, varied perhaps with an occasional turn. It is another instance of a semiformalised romp called by the title of dance. In passing it may be noted that the Maypole has become a part of the Mayday celebration of the New York public school children—and those of other cities, for anything we know to the contrary. Some hundreds of poles distributed over a green, each with its brightly coloured group twinkling around it, tickles the eye with a feast of sparkle, at least. The same outing is the occasion of an exhibition of the character dancing that the children have learned as part of their school work during the preceding year. The exhibited skill is higher than one would expect, and remarkable, considering the difficulties in the way of imparting it. In one direction the celebration probably attains to the superlative: its participants numbering as they do well up in the thousands, and occupying about a quarter-section of ground, there is nothing in history to indicate that it does not constitute, in point of sheer size and numbers, the biggest ballet the world has ever seen.
Ireland has a group of dances exclusively her own, unique in structure, and developed to the utmost limit of their line of excellence. Their distinguishing property is complicated rhythmic music of the feet. The Jig, the Reel and the Hornpipe of Ireland are at once the most difficult and the most highly elaborated dances of the clog and shuffle type that can be found. In them are passages in which the feet tap the floor seventy-five times in a quarter of a minute.
They have, too, the art that interprets the character of their people. But it is not the Irishman of the comic supplement that they reveal. Rather, by means of their own vocabulary of suggestion, the eloquence of which begins where words fail, they present the acute Hibernian wit that animates the brain of Irishmen like Shaw. Intricate combinations of keen, exact steps, the Irish dances are a series of subtle epigrams directed to the eye. And like the epigrams that proceed from true wit, they are expressed so modestly that their significance may be quite lost on an intelligence not in sympathy with the manner of thought that lies back of them. To the end
