We have thriving mixed sides, and women-only sides, and mixed sides that consist only of women because men don't want to join in and risk girl cooties. We have a great many different traditional types (I used to play percussion for a Northwest Clog side). Just look at this list for the Essex sides alone.

And you're completely right about fandom.

Spent the last 4 days staying with a friend who documented one of the earliest women's sides, who has seen original documents dating women dancing the morris as far back as any individual men dancing. When I'm not traveling, and have more time, I'll try to drag out some more info. There's been a lot of steampunk morris already, actually -- I think it predates the term "steampunk". Emma (Bull) may remember the folks who danced for her outside the Other Change of Hobbit back when she did a signing there for one of her early books, Falcon IIRC.

Lots of folk do morris now, and mixed sides are a lot commoner than single-sex sides, I think.

Nine-ball Morris, which allows to include the occasional odd gentleman.

(Seriously, though. My ex-wife was Miami, and we used to go to powwows all the time. The costumes, the circle, the agreed-upon fantasy that it's ancient tradition when it's really modern speculation and vaguely informed reconstruction -- Morris dancing and powwow are very similar. Still, I would like to see a face off between a lead fancy dancer and a neo-pagan Morris dancer sometime.)

I am in no way hardcore enough to sew bells to my skin, though.

A Morris Dance audioRealAudioDownload

Across the Common, on a lovely May
day in New England, I see and hear
the Middle Ages drawing near,
bells tinkling, pennants bright and gay—
a parade of Morris dancers.

One plucks a lute. One twirls a cape.
Up close, a lifted pinafore
exposes cellulite, and more.
O why aren't they in better shape,
the middle-aged Morris dancers?

Already it's not hard to guess
their treasure—her; their president—him;
the Wednesday night meetings at the gym.
They ought to practice more, or less,
the middle-aged Morris dancers.

Short-winded troubadours and pages,
milkmaids with osteoporosis—
what really makes me so morose is
how they can't admit their ages,
the middle-aged Morris dancers.

Watching them gamboling and tripping
on Maypole ribbons like leashed dogs,
then landing, thunderously, on clogs,
I have to say I feel like skipping
the middle-aged Morris dancers.

Yet bunions and receding gums
have humbled me; I know my station
as a member of their generation.
Maybe they'd let me play the drums,
the middle-aged Morris dancers.

Re Sam's comment: Dancing at Whitsun.

Somewhat stranger than goth morris, the White Rats [Experimental] Morris, which describes itself (on this somewhat out of date web page) as "the world's first queer/pervert/leather Morris team" (as far as they know). The sew-on bells are more than scary, even if (or maybe because) the Rats are smiling.

But perhaps this is why morris dancing is endangered?

Sorry, that's all I have to add at this time.

Thanks, but no. I don't even want to watch. It's one of my squicks.

Culture changes, it evolves, it is shared and travels to new groups. That's what humans do. Especially pleasurable culture: music, dance, cooking, self-adornment.

So a local Chicago morris side made mostly of fen decided to enact such a thing outside one of our local SF independent bookstores (when we had such a thing) in his honor.

I got to see (well, many years ago) two Morris teams from upstate NY do a May Day dance, climaxing with the launching of an effigy of winter at the junction of the Susquehanna & Chenango rivers. Apparently both those teams - the Binghamton Morris Men and the Heartwood Morris Dancers - are still active. So much for the death of Morris.

-- Brian out --

Being from the American Midwest, I don't know from Morris dancing other than from travelogues. But I was struck by the similarity to powwow dancing, especially the neo-pagan Morris dancing. If you compare the two, the first thing you think is how different they are, then you notice how similar they are, and finally you think, "Wow, people." And you're right -- they eat good, too. Let's have a Cornish pasty vs. Navajo taco showdown.

*what is frequently sold to consumers is a heap of blarney. Richard Rutt's A History of Hand Knitting, among others, helps dispels the myths, and DoChara.com makes a good point: "So, how Irish is Aran Knitting? Completely Irish, and it there is no dispute about its origin in the Aran Islands. Some people have expressed dismay that something they believed was an ancient traditional craft was in fact of recent origin and always commercial in nature. They shouldn’t. It is immensely to the credit of the women living on the remote Islands of Aran in the mid-20th century that they developed and created an original style of knitting with such wide appeal...It does no justice to these remarkable women to belittle their achievement or their creativity or to devalue their sweaters just because they, and not their forebears, came up with the style of knitting."

But my favourite Morris reference is Stan (and Garnet) Rogers on Home in Halifax, introducing a song. it's a bit unkind, but I do love the tone of it.:

Stan: "At any rate, they get together at folk festivals, and they gather around in their little clot, or mob, and they do their little dances. And there's nothing really alarming about this, except for the fact that, every once in a while, they will arm themselves with cudgels or bludgeons or some kind of blunt instrument like that, and to the accompaniment of accordion and violin, they will rhythmically and ritually hit each other again - and Again - and AGAIN. And this is considered to be entertainment or some kind of British fertility ritual or something."

Garnet: "It works, too. We've played this song and impregnated whole audiences."

Besides, Mark Morris is fond of Morris Dancing.

Nevermind.

Love, C.

There are, indeed, a lot of Morris teams in Massachusetts. Obviously nobody from the BBC thought to look into the New England Folk Festival.

Also, our two Morris stickers.

There are plenty of Pratchett Morris references to choose from, scattered throughout his works.

The one that came to my mind is from one of his rarer science fiction works, Strata, in which there's a mention of the Morris, during a period of future history when the human population had crashed and there weren't enough meat people to preserve the old crafts and skills, being kept alive by a Morris side consisting entirely of robots.

(I wonder what The Morris Ring would make of that...)

*The "Male, unless you put them in a skirt" faction was particularly vertigo-inducing. Especially when they demonstrated.

And yes, as Tracie said above, the Morris Ring organization is notorious for its unwillingness to accept female (or to a lesser extent, non-British) morris dancers.

I've met three of the White Rats (the team mentioned above that sews their bells right onto their skin) at the Midwest Morris Ale (ale = morris term for a large gathering) a few years ago. They were lovely people and taught us a very cool five-person dance figure involving tossing sticks back and forth. (Easy for four, very complicated for five, but lots of fun when it works.)

I don't know how it works in other areas, but here the white outfits are used for Cotswold-area dances, which are danced all summer, and black outfits are used for the Border dances, which are danced all winter. How is it elsewhere?

Tell that to the kids on Banbury Cross and they'll laugh. And their parents will laugh. And so will all the other teams in their area, because while we keep losing dancers to knee injuries and pregnancies and other forms of adult life and can barely get a side (4-6 dancers) together, these kids keep fielding 18 to 20 dancers at a time, and they can all dance.

To be honest I've been a little worried about Morris, myself, actually.

It depends, of course, on whether they are boy robots or girl robots.

Reminds me of another Pratchett scene where one of the characters is extremely concerned about whether the golem who cleans out the ladies room is a boy or a girl golem. She is at last mollified when the protagonist agrees to make it wear a dress and call it "Gladys."

The sad part of the story -- before the letter could get mailed, he died in an airplane crash. Eventually, we mailed the letter to his widow at the request of someone who knew them. We enclosed one of 10 buttons (badges) we made up for the Death or Glory Morris Dancers, with a picture of the Falklands and the date of our dancing on them; eight buttons went to those who danced, and one to someone who wheedled it out of me.

I still have mine, on my morris hat.

being kept alive by a Morris side consisting entirely of robots.

Oh, Morris Garage dancing!

pbrim @ 33

"Terpsichorate!"

San Francisco Folsom Street Fair 2007

Does anyone happen to recognize her as one of the White Rats? And does the fellow holding a white rat tie into this somehow?

A favourite here. That's the US title, by the way: the British edition is called Off with his Head. Oops, was that a spoiler?

Of course, I'm female, so automatically excluded, but in reading the BBC article, I found the statements condescending and chiding. I'd much rather go play with some other group that seems to have fun with the art and makes it live than with those whose only commentary is to whinge and try to guilt-trip me. Thanks, I have a mother for that. Don't need it in my hobbies.

One of the quotes on ML's front page seems perfectly applicable -- the groups outside the Morris Ring seem to be preserving the flame of tradition, while the Ring types seem to be worshipping ashes.

And "d too"?

Obviously it would be a shame if men-only sides were to die out; the best male sides are splendid to watch. And it's certainly true that sides which were mostly populated in the late 60s folk revival are finding that they're suffering from injuries a lot these days.

In some ways, Chingford's approach is quite a good one; our Cotswold side is all men (though there are women in the band), but the Northwest side is mixed. Obviously it would be nice to have more dancers; I think that's true of any hobby activity.

"Is it a living tradition when everyone only knows four dances"?

It's Even More a living tradition when everyone only knows four dances. Back when people danced in villages, they danced the odd dance or two. This business of knowing loads of dances was always something for a few peculiar enthusiasts.

Not least because the term 'morris side' was entirely absent in the TV piece. Which did at least incline me to take the entire story with a substantial helping of salt. If they can't get that detail right...

We have an exuberant women's morris side hereabouts (Cotswolds, UK) who are all breast-cancer survivors, dress and dance entirely in pink and do a lot of good raising funds and awareness.

And I never see Morris dancers without thinking either of that Ngaio Marsh book or Kenneth Williams' folk singer character, Rambling Syd Rumpole, from Round the Horne, or both. Is Morris related to the 'Floral Dance' of the song?

The latter was invented by members of the 51st Highland Division in PW camps during the Second World War. George MacDonald Fraser had a great story about ceilidh - The General Danced At Dawn - which includes the memorable line "There are two forms of Highland dancing. There is Highland dancing as it is performed when ladies are present. And there is Highland dancing."

Out in the real world, however, is is a case of Morris On, or Morris Off, if talking to anyone from the BBC. It isn't as though any team is going to get an Arts Council grant (although I'd be thrilled to be proved wrong)

I like to think of the whole gamut of Morris dancing as one of those baroque things free people do. I don't want to do it, I don't even want to see it very much, but how nice that other people are out there enjoying themselves with their bells and sticks, and their stapled in bells, and their black leather, and their little ribbons.

One of my daughters does capoeira, incidentally, and I would be astounded if no one has yet thought of combining it with morris dancing. Particularly around Carnival.

What about Hole in the Wall, Posties and Mairi's Wedding?

I was confused for a while as the first all female side I saw called themselves Molly Dancers, so I leapt to the incorrect conclusion that this was the name for a female Morris Dancer.

In Broadstairs during Folk Week they have torchlit procession of the Morris sides which is so long that the groups at the back have been known to get bored and go to the pub; seeing a massed batallion of hobby horses emerge from the dark clearing a dancing area lit by flickering torches is a scary thing.

As for being a fertility dance I remember one dance being introduced with the words "If you think you see anything rude, it's just a fallacy".**

* Which is mostly outside pubs. Coincidence? I don't think so!
** This is a pune or play on words. You can see that dance here.

The thing that irritates me about them most is their ubiquitous misuse of what appear to be (but usually aren't really) scare quotes. Whoever wrote their style guide needs to be spanked for that.

As for the typo in the ML post, I guess I probably should have just emailed abi about it, but I don't know a good way to get her attention quickly for things like that.

Maybe next time I should just say something outrageous that would shock a moderator into punishment mode, with a postscript of apology that mentions the typo. heh.

Thanks for the heads up. Gefixt.

Sometimes there is no quick way to get me. I have these things called a "bed", a "family, and a "job" (collective term: "life") that occasionally get in the way of reading Making Light.

A true moderator craves not these things...

Juliet@51: the all-breast-cancer-survivor side is AWESOME. Mad props to 'em.

Back when I was editing an anthology of Southwestern fantasy/sf/horror in the early 90's, one of the stories submitted used a pow-wow as one of the settings.

Unfortunately, from the story, it was clear that the writer thought a pow-wow was something like a neighborhood bar, where Geronimo, Cochise, and Sitting Bull could hang out together.

The writer was from Australia, but still... I sent it back with as gentle a note as I could, explaining that if he was going to write a story about Native-Americans, particularly real-life Native-Americans, he needed to do some research first.

(This was also the story that not only had ghost buffalo, but ghost buffalo with tentacles!)

Things that were supposed to have gone the way of the Dodo by now: books, vinyl records, magazines, portrait painting, chemical photography, "traditional" marriage and now, apparently, morris dancing.

And yet, my wife does wonderful gum prints and we have a nice little collection of vinyl records and lots of books (but never enough).

Why so many people feel the need to want so much of our culture to dry up and blow away that they are writing obituaries in advance? Is it just something to fill column inches or is there a larger social trend at work here?

Re the White Rats' (Experimental) Morris and the sewing on of bells: Yes, they dance the Folsom Street Fair, and while I forget her name, the woman in the photo is a splendid (young!) dancer with them. The fellow in the photo with the ferret is not someone I've ever met or seen in conjunction with the team, tho. They use a sub-cut surgical suture of something that looks like fishing twine, and squicked me out a whole lot less once I'd seen it. (No. And I don't believe I shall, but thanks.)

The Dead Ringers, an invitation reunion house-party and dance tour team that Jocelyn Reynolds puts together on Hallowe'en weekend actually appears to predate Pratchett's Lords and Ladies description of the Other Morris by a year, and still gets together annually.

It's true, rams, but the reason no one dances the Stick and Bucket dance is that the tune Mrs. Widgery's Lodger has been completely suppressed. Even though it MUST be a bouncy jig!

The whole rubbish about "Morris was traditionally male only" that the Ring holds on to so tightly was, pardon me, crap when Sharp and others were promoting the dance in the early 1900s; In a lesser-known Shakespearean (co-written?) play, there's a morris side of men and women (with a rude-tailed Bavian for a hobby-fool); in the 1890s when the usual family member who led the Abbotts Bromley Horn Dance was sick, it's on record that a woman of the Kimber family (I don't have the article in front of me, or electronically - Ann may have been her name) led out the dance.
So - definitely, all the Ring is clinging to and mourning the death of is cold ash (and nonsense at that).

Morris is alive and well, and the youngun's are indeed dancing it! Some of the elders dancing out here in the Bay Area put the middle-aged morris dancers to shame, or at least on our toes - there are dancers out here in their 70s who can, and do, jump higher than I can, partly why I stay tucked behind my fiddle.

I also love her comment on concern for the demise of the morris: "Piffle."

A member of my re-enactment group* is an enthusiastic rapper, what with being from Northumberland and all that.

*I'm chair, and a founding member. I don't actually own it, although we could do with some more minions.

It occurs to me that folk traditions are much like societies in general; either they change and grow, or they die out, become irrelevant, or are overrun. The Morris Ring's One-True-Wayism is the equivalent of embracing a corpse.

If they were in something like a bar, they certainly should have had ghost buffalo wings.

Or to put it another way, the all-male, beardless and all-in-white is as valid a version and a tradition as the others, and perhaps that one is in decline. But even if that strand did go extinct, one day a fairy-winged electro-bubblegum-punk Morris dancer will be researching and say "You know what? We could try some of this old stuff. It'll be utterly plasmic!**" and it will live again.

* Or one of the older versions anyway
** Or whatever the kids say

I once attended a wedding that featured Morris where one of the sticks broke during a particularly vigourous clash and the large flying piece nearly took the bride's head off.

When: Wed, January 14, 2009 7:30pm
Where: First Unitarian Society of Newton, 1326 Washington Street, West Newton, MA (map)
Description: English Traditional Dance and Song with refreshments & visiting after the show Admission: Free! (Dessert contributions are welcome). Performances by Banbury Cross Morris & Sword Candyrapper Faux Finnish Green River Tap & Die Orion Longsword and (your hosts) The Commonwealth Morris Men [lack of commas sic]

I may attend, just to see the lively corpse for myself.

Why would you need a caller? It's all perfectly simple:
The beginning.
The middle, eight times, once for each dancer (ladies first).
The end, which is the same as the beginning, except that most people try to do the last sixteen bars in eight bars in order to leave time for spin turns (there are those who Do Not Approve of this).

Shadowing in the reels is optional, and should not be done if the set contains novices, or people who Do Not Approve.

JHomes.

P.S. The Dark Morris shows up again in Wintersmith, the third Tiffany Aching book.

I know you didn't write the thing, just quoted it, and the last verse takes a bit of the edge off, but it's still mostly shaming fat people for having the nerve to move for the fun of it in public.

I recall the Ithaca side, a mixed side, as "Hearts of Oak". The Binghamton Morris Men, an all male side (with the appropriate head-set), had a _significant anniversary_ when I lived there and I got to follow them around. Wonderful....

Whatever their (for $fsv of whatever) their views and visions, it really enriched my life at the time/

I used to keep company with a Morris dancer, one of the MTM (Minnesota Traditional Morris) -- actually, a bunch of you know him from music parties: Gary Schulte, the guy with the violin. The MTM men wore crossed baldrics with a badge on them depicting a moose-like animal with a wreath of laurel around it, so of course we all referred to them as men of moose laurels.

One of the fun parts of a Morris Ale (which I was only on the edges of, but we hosted once and lent out our space for some indoor gathering when it was storming out, I believe), was seeing all the mummers plays the various sides knew. (Speaking of such, thank you again, Mr. Whitmore, for giving me a copy of Emperor Norton and the Pterodactyl! That led inexorably to the Star Trek mummers play that Mike and I wrote, so you get to share a tiny bit of the blame/credit.) Anyhow, the Madison Morris team did something in their mummers play involving a banana, and... oh, you had to be there. I'm going to just sit here and grin incoherently for a while.

Morris dying? I agree with whoever said "Piffle!" Indeed.

I've been enjoying the assorted Morrises & such muchly, & learning too. Thanks to all for pointing the videos out.

The Dead Ringers (Hi, Ruth) were started for an Ale in San Luis Obispo (Ale Hallow's Eve), because Jocelyn had people all over the country that had learned an uncommon style (called a "tradition", but not yet old enough to be what I'd call traditional). It's an odd group in that it consists regularly of people from the East and West coasts who practice together a couple of times before going out to dance in public, though all have learned the style in much longer practice sessions. It is, AFAIK, the only regularly dancing bicoastal Morris group, with the occasional person from the Heartlands showing up.

The first time I went to an Ale was one of the Midwest Morris Ales; I literally had never met anyone there before the Ale started, and had a wonderful time.

try everything once, except incest and morris dancing.

Recently Traditional Fictional Morris Dance, based on something written in a Terry Pratchett book.

Linked from their web site, an account of a 17c morris riot.

The idea of bicoastal morris dancing is making my head spin. ;)

And I'd never heard of it till this post was put up!

RuTemple (#77) ooh, thanks for that link to Elaine ("Piffle") Bradtke's piece in the Guardian. It has examples, with videos, of obscure and fascinating styles, like the original 'rapper' dance.

kid bitzer (aka young mongrel?) (#101) I heard the advice for life "One should try everything once except incest and folk dancing" first attributed to Thomas Beecham, but there's a school saying Arnold Bax and some Malcolm Sargent (all British conductors). This is the first time it's been narrowed to morris, though that may've been in his mind.

Tlönista (#107) fortunately there's a longstanding <ahem> tradition of [May]pole dancing. One hopes that isn't becoming extinct.

1. Preferably as footnotes (PTerry)

"Dr. Mortimore looked strangely at us for an instant and his voice sank almost to a whisper as he answered, 'Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound.'"

BTW, I knew (and miss) a cat who looked very like Morris (and a little like a whale), of whom I've not previously heard. Must check my friends for photos of him.

I've been pleasantly surprised by these books; I resisted reading them for years, but tried one and liked it enough (obviously) to continue. There are now eight and I'm looking forward to the rest of them.

Must see if there's a Morris side here in Western Australia.

Tracie @ 105: The photo is a few years old, but does reflect current Ann Arbor Morris kit. (Note to self: implore AACTMAD webmaster to update the winter practice location.) More recent pictures are here.

I had the privilege of fiddling for a subset of the White Rats at the Midwest Morris Ale a couple of years ago. Lovely people and excellent dancers. They didn't sew bells to their skin in the Midwest, but several Ann Arbor dancers now have bell tattoos. Coincidence?

Last year's Midwest ale page is still up. I think the 2009 ale -- Memorial Day weekend, as always -- will be in Minnesota.

Elise @ 94 and Liza @ 95: thanks for reminding me to dig up my recording of Gary Schulte. His playing is my favorite part of the Midwest Ale. (Even better than the Sunday morning single-malt tasting workshop -- the one that frequently gets a temperance serenade from the shape-note singers...)

Abi -- When I first learned Strip The Willow, I,and my primary dancing partner of the time, were both wearing satin. Strip The Willow when both dancers are wearing essentially frictionless fabrics is both an exhilarating and sobering (as in "you will sober up Right Now or you will Do Yourself An Injury") experience.

I do not know about Morris Dancing in KC, MO area, but I do know that Irish and Scottish traditional dance are very active and span across all ages.

My partner, Rohanna, has been teaching Irish Ceiledah (sp. variant) to adults for well over 20 years with her dance teaching partner. They teach through a UMKC program called Communiversity and they have problems keeping their beginners classes from getting out of hand due to the numbers that want to sign up.

And her teaching partner has a son who is a competition bagpiper. One of their students (and his girlfriend) is a rated competition adult Scottish dancer in the region.

Next time I see them performing hereabouts, I shall make a point of getting more info.

Q: What does a Morris dancer have for breakfast?

A: A light cereal beverage.

w/r/t living tradition, from the sublime to the ridiculous: My team has written (both dance and music) a dance in the Border style to honor a teammate's recently deceased father. We were asked to dance at his memorial service, and the dance is now part of our repertoire, complete with introductory explanation.

The ridiculous? Well, en route to Canada (from the US), my team wrote a dance called Border Crossing -- to the tune of "I Fought the Law and the Law Won."

Just about every folk genre community has its TraditionIsTheOneTrueWay faction and its It'sALivingTraditionDammit faction. It would be nice if they both stopped trying to prove themselves Right. They're both Right, and the world is enriched thereby.

(hi, Susie!)

They must have very long staves.

Also -a friend of mine, years ago, saw dancing in some mill town in Yorkshire that used machined spindles for the wooden sticks, so I'm thinking Steam Morris indeed predates steampunk.

126 -- Hi, ers, didn't realize you were here! Got any links to video of Border Crossing?

I think Canada needs to develop Road Hockey Morris. Sew bells to your shinpads, get out your sticks and find someone who can play the old Hockey Night in Canada theme in 4/4 time on an accordion. Car!

Susie, I know we have stuff out on youtube. Google on Red Herring Morris and Border Crossing, and bob's yer uncle. (I mostly lurk here... it's Never Boring)

BTW, insofar as we have a hobbycritter, it's a fish. So there. Right now it's a stuffed sockeye salmon named Waldo.

A friend Morrises in what calls itself Border (I'm no expert on terms), wearing elaborately and brightly-colored "tattered" coats. His comment on the Beeb was that it was all photography's fault; Morris was always in fancy/unusual clothing (plus bells), but the Victorians' pictures (the first visual record) got treated as Sacred Tradition.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOtNR2AblVQ&eurl=http://www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/archives/2007/10/05/more_finishing.html

(The medium-tough play hockey, but only the truly tough can listen to the whole 54 seconds.)

Among the house lares and penates is a vinyl album signed by Stan Rogers, and the inscription reads "those who morris dance in public may have other habits of which we know nothing"

#132, I'm not sure but something like unto Feardubh. (Which is Gaelic for "black man".) He claimed that he's black Irish. He's in the Fourth Book of the Chronicles of Eoforwic. (I seem to appear in the second book.) "There are occasional legends of a man who actually did not like Feardubh; they are discounted by all as preposterous."

http://xkcd.com/305/

...or in a sordid episode of Daktari.