I’ve been incommunicado the past few days as I spent the weekend at the Whittlesey Straw Bear festival.

Last year we went to this as spectators and it was mind and body numbingly cold but just so bizarre and amazing and fun that we determined to learn to morris ourselves.  All year long I was thinking “in 2010 I’ll be dancing in the Straw Bear festival!”  But as it turned out, my shoulders have been getting worse and I can’t flick a hanky above waist height any more.  I certainly can’t do stars or swings, and even the stepping jars everything and makes things hurt more.

So, no dancing after all.  However, all was not lost.  Ely and Littleport’s regular bodhran player, John, was dancing at Straw Bear, in a side called Mepal Molly.  I loaned him my 18th Century working woman’s clothes for the occasion, and he looked better than I do in them!

Click here to view the embedded video.

This left Elriot with no drummer.  As I had got my bodhran for Christmas, I saw a chance to get involved in the festival in a different way, and volunteered to stand in for John.  This was just as well, as almost all our other musicians were also dancing with Mepal Molly.  It left me and Dave, one of the Riot’s fantastic fiddle players, walking behind the Ely and Littleport Riot, trying to play in the pouring rain.  That’s me in the hat with the liripipe.

It was a bad start.  In the wet the goat-hide of the bodhran’s skin stretches and goes all floppy, which gives it the acoustic properties of a damp paper bag, and you couldn’t hear me at all.  To make matters worse I dropped the beater in the street twice during the procession because I was having to hit the drum so hard to get any noise out of it, so I felt that I was literally letting the side down.

However, after the procession was over, the festival moved into “wet weather protocol” mode, and we were able to go inside at one of the many Whittlesey pubs and drinking establishments.  There the bodhran began to dry out and recover some of its bounce, and I managed to play OK and only drop the stick once.  So far nobody had said to me “please, just stop.  You’re making a terrible noise and we’d rather just have Dave on his own.”  So I felt that I was doing about as well as I could expect – ie, adequately.

Besides, I had the example of Mepal Molly to bolster me.  They dance only on Plough Monday and at Straw Bear every year and they practice once a year.  They are so bad that you can’t believe they haven’t actually practiced for years and years in order to become incredibly skilled at giving the impression of badness.  They are a hoot, and a kind of self-reverential morris parody tribute side.  And they make everybody laugh, including themselves.

Anyway, we moved on to another dance spot and played some more, sharing the spot with Red Leicester, who wear multicoloured ragged jackets and red facepaint.  They were fantastic – really energetic and also obviously having fun.  They had a tendency to go up to any woman who looked like she wouldn’t slap them for it and kiss her on the cheek, leaving her marked with red paint.  Surprisingly few people rubbed the paint off afterwards.  Most wore it like a badge of pride for the rest of the day.

I don’t seem to have a picture of Red Leicester, so here is one of Gog Magog Molly, looking a little bewildered:

Bewildered is not a normal look on them.  They usually come across as very confident and cheery and their dance style is crisply precise and imaginative.

For our final spot of the festival we went indoors again at another pub, and – after the dancing – there was a certain amount of standing around, while the audience who had come to watch the dancers visibly wondered what was going to happen next.  So Dave just started playing.  It was a reel, which I’m comfortable with, and a speed I was OK with, so I joined in, and then Mark, the Riot’s other amazing fiddle player came over from Mepal Molly and he joined in too.  Before I knew it, there I was, like the bloke in my icon – the drummer between two fiddle players – playing live music in front of a pub full of people.  It was absolutely amazing!  I pretty much forgot everything except just letting the rhythm flow through me, and it was like magic.  I loved it.  I am so keeping up this daily practice thing.  I want to be able to do that again!

Today we went back to watch yet more dancing culminating in the bear being burned.  And I have to say that, after spending yesterday in the bear’s company, it was moving and distasteful and not at all funny to see it go up in flames.  Almost like a real sacrifice.  They didn’t burn the baby bear, fortunately.  That would have been too grizzly

Click here to view the embedded video.

Did you know that women have always morrissed?  Right from the earliest records, where we find a gloriously entertaining condemnation of the dance by one Christopher Fetherston in 1582:

I myself have seene in a may gaime a troupe, the greater part wherof have been men, and yet have they been attyred so like unto women, that theyr faces being hidde (as they were indeede) a man coulde not discerne them from women.  What an horrible abuse was this?  What abhominable sinnes might have hereupon ensued?

The second abuse, which of all other is the greatest, is this, that it hath been toulde that your morice dauncers have daunced naked in nettes: what greater entisement unto naughtines could have been devised?

Sorry, I included that second paragraph not because it had anything to do with women dancing morris but just because it made my mind boggle.  There are some traditions I find I’m happy to allow to gently lapse

It’s relatively well known that in 1600, William Kemp, (a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s men along with one William Shakespeare) morris danced from London to Norwich as a sort of early publicity stunt.  It’s less well known that he was joined by a different female dancer at two separate points along the way.

And in 1769 Thomas Blount published an account of some village customs which included the following:

At Kidlington in Oxfordshire, the custom is that on Monday after Whitson Week, there is a fat live Lamb provided, and the Maids of the Town, having their Thumbs tied behind them, run after it, and she that with her Mouth takes and holds the Lamb is declared ‘Lady of the Lamb’, which being dressed with the Skin hanging on, is carried on a long Pole before the Lady and her Companions to the Green, attended with Music, and a Morisco Dance of Men, and another of Women,

John Cutting, from whose book ‘History and the Morris Dance’ I have lifted these quotes, thinks that the village in question was actually Kirtlington – which had a Lamb Ale up until 1858 – rather than Kidlington, which didn’t.

But that aside, given that our earliest piece of evidence for the existence of Morris dancing in the UK at all is in 1448, and our evidence for women dancing comes only a century later, I think it’s pretty conclusive that this Victorian insistence that women shouldn’t morris is in truth something made up by the Victorians, in the same way they made up the idea of horns on Viking helmets and many other modern myths.

There is also zero evidence that Morris is a survival of ancient pagan ritual dance, other than the fact that the first collector of the dances, Cecil Sharp, was a bit of a fan of The Golden Bough, and inclined to see survivals of ancient pagan traditions all over the place.  From what I have seen so far, morris is inconveniently silly, and serious minded people have a tendency to try and turn it into something more important and more folklory than it is.  Witness this:

The Abbot’s Bromley Horn dance is a dance that can claim to be older than morris, and to have been danced in Abbot’s Bromley for over 1000 years.  Surely if any dance is a pagan survival, this is it.  Now this is a modern reinvention of the Abbot’s Bromley Horn Dance:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXe0QL2t6Bk

and it is eerie and unsettling and easy to believe that it’s a survival of something mystical.  But in fact, this is a version specially slowed down and folked-up for the popular imagination.  This is the real thing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJVC7ZocNjI

I read an article just yesterday in The Times Online, AA Gill meets the morris dancers that seemed to reflect this.  After exercising his wit in order to prove just how much he is above all of this, for one brief moment he finds himself enjoying himself.  Oh noes!  How could a man so sophisticated as himself possibly enjoy such a stupid pastime exercised by such lumpen, ugly, beer-drinking proles?  It can’t possibly be because ordinary people dancing and having a drink or two is an entertaining thing to do.  It must be because he was feeling from afar the influence of the deeply hidden ancient spiritual meaning of the thing!  Well, thank goodness for that!

To prove where I stand on the whole thing, here I am dancing Padnall with the Ely and Littleport Riot women’s Border morris side.  Not naked in a net, you’ll be glad to hear.

Another miscellaneous post, as lots of things are happening at once. 

Probably the biggest thing is that finally, after at least six months if not a year of dentistry, the tooth has landed!  On Tuesday I went to the dentist for the final time.  He took out the phillips-head screw which had been screwed into my gum to give the gum something to grow around, and screwed on a vicious looking spike instead.  I almost had a heart attack when he said to his assistant “pass me the torque-wrench”, but fortunately it turned out to be a really cute little torque-wrench, about the size of a finger.  So they tightened up the spike until it couldn’t get any tighter.  Then they covered it in cement (dental cement!) and cemented the porcelain and metal tooth onto the spike.

Yesterday, the top of my gum did not come down far enough to cover the dark metal at the top of the tooth, and the shape of the tooth made me lisp.  But today the gum has lowered, and I’m speaking normally again, so I am desperately looking around for things to bite, while sometimes I forget that I can’t take my tooth out any more, and tug on it.  It’s extremely odd to have a tooth there again, but rather wonderful.  Is it all worth it?  Ask me when the post-dentistry headache goes away

Unpleasant photo alert – scroll past fast

Blurry before

Blurry after

I’m sure I have a lack of perspective on things, but I squeed far more about making some bell-pads for my black shoes so that I could use them for morris dancing:

I just got some soft black leather, folded it over and sewed down one edge, and then sewed the bells onto the resulting tube.  This way I can slip them onto the straps of my shoes for morris dancing, and take them off again for normal life.

Andrew has to make the full shin-pad of bells for his side, but that’s because he’s a man

Another week of very little progress on ‘Boys of Summer’, this time because Rose was been off school ill over Monday and Tuesday, and Ailith was off school on Wednesday because she had several teeth extracted, and then she was off again today having caught Rose’s cold.

Beer, Bells and Bears

from Alex Beecroft’s Blogger blog by Alex Beecroft

Nobody who has suggested that the British are a phlegmatic, rational, buttoned up and repressed sort of people can have possibly ever been to any of the folk events that go on around the country on various obscure saints days and festivals.

I’ve just come home and thawed out from attending the Whittlesey Straw Bear festival, which was, I have to say, absolutely fabulous in a ‘this makes no sense but go with it anyway’ style.

It was bitterly cold.  So cold that in T-shirt, woolly jumper, fleece and calf long fake-fur coat, *with* the hood up over my knitted hat, looking a bit like a straw bear myself, I was still chilled to the bone.  However, it was the weekend before Plough Monday – the day when the ploughs are blessed and work begins on the fields in preparation for planting the corn.  The little town of Whittlesey had held a straw bear festival from time immemorial to mark the day.

(This year they had three bears, a daddy, mummy and baby, but sadly we arrived too late to see baby bear.)

Traditionally one of the ploughmen would be chosen as the bear, and would be wrapped up so tightly in straw that he couldn’t see.  Then he would be led about the village by attendants, and presented with gifts of food and beer (which presumably the attendants drank!)

This tradition was similar to many of the Jack-in-the-Green traditions about the country, and seems to me to have been clearly some sort of agricultural ritual designed to get the corn-growing year off to a good start.

In Whittlesey the tradition was stopped some time in the 1800s because it was regarded as a form of begging.  But 80 years after it stopped, and 30 years ago now, they started it up again, and it’s grown to become a big festival of morris dancing and beer.

Fleeing from the arctic cold into the first pub we came across, which happened to be The Boat Inn, we discovered these lads, who for my money were the best dance side I think I’ve ever seen.  They are the Stone Monkeys, a Northumbrian rapper sword dance side.  The bendy metal strips they’re holding there are the rappers – a kind of bendy metal strip with a handle at each end.  To quote their own article:

The rapper dance was traditionally performed in the mining villages of the Northumberland and Durham coalfield of England and involves five people connected by short, two-handled, flexible swords (called rappers) forming an unbroken chain.

Without breaking this chain the dancers weave in and out of one another twisting the swords to form locks and breastplates, sometimes even jumping or somersaulting over the swords. The dance commences by the five dancers forming a circle each holding one sword in his right hand, often clashing their swords together before grasping in their left hands the free end of the sword held by the dancer in front. The only time this chain is broken is to present a star of five interlocked swords. The dancers step or ‘jig’ in a characteristic way throughout the dance.

Intricate figures are danced with the dancers passing between and around each other, under and over the swords, seemingly into an irretrievable tangle which resolves at intervals into open circles with the swords linking the dancers or into a closed circle with the swords interlocked into the star which is presented aloft to the audience.

It was amazing to watch, and their musicians – a lady violinist in a red hat and a male accordionist – were also extremely good, as was their ‘Tommy’, who narrated what was going on and made jokes.

I’m not sure there’s a lot better than thawing out inside a warm pub with a pint of ‘Straw Bear’ bitter, listening to the kind of music that makes you tap your toes and watching this really clever and ever so slightly dangerous dance.

But one of the great things about morris is that every side has its own character.  The Old Glory Morris side have these very sinister musicians who are almost more entertaining than the dancers.  The dancers (all male) dance like men who are dancing like men – if you see what I mean.  Lots of wide legged stances and clenched fists, which made it extra amusing when they danced ‘Lord Nelson’s Revenge’, which is an 18th Century dance originally danced in Regency ballrooms by ladies in floaty white dresses.  But that whole OMG gender WTFery thing was very much a feature of the day.  While the majority of Old Glory’s menfolk were in trousers and waistcoats, this bearded gentleman had a fetching green gown and bonnet on:

Old Glory are very traditional indeed   A rather younger side were Boggart’s Breakfast from up Manchester way.  They made quite a contrast!

They call themselves ‘cyber-punk morris’, and had a mixture of male and female dancers, dancing with lots of energy and obviously having great fun at it.

(The ragged clothes are traditional though – field workers in the fens used to sew rags inside their jackets to make them warmer.  On festival days they would wear the jackets inside out, with the multi-coloured motley rags showing.)

In the market square, the Kings Morris side (from King’s Lyn) were dancing with handkerchiefs.  They were one of the few sides which actually looked as you would expect morris dancers to look.  And I must say that they did prove that men can wave hankies in a manly sort of way

I keep harping on about gender here, because it’s an important issue in morris.  Traditionally only men could dance the morris dances.  Women might be among the musicians, but they were not allowed to dance.  If there was a ‘woman’ among the dancers, it was usually the biggest and most beardy man who was wearing a dress.

Men wearing dresses also formed the core of the Molly dancers.  This is the Pig-Dyke Molly side:

who are in fact a mixture of men and women, all in dresses.  In this case the women are pretending to be men pretending to be women   The Pig-dyke Mollies (not an offensive name, as they are named after the pig-dyke drainage ditch) were wonderful.  Their musicians included a man on a tuba, which always sounds amusing to me no matter what it’s playing.  They danced both traditional dances with brooms and one they’d made up themselves, which was a dance called ‘Wardrobe Malfunction’

These are the Gog-Magog Molly dancers:

another mixture of men and women, but where everyone is wearing a dress.

Do not ask me what this is all about, as I don’t know!  I suspect it has something to do with the ‘Lords of Misrule’ tradition, where on certain days the strict social order of society was eased or even reversed.  Men at least could have a day of doing what they liked (there was no corresponding tradition of women dressing as men and dancing the Morris) and the molly dancers prove that some of them quite fancied being women for the day.

These days, however, just to even out the spectrum, there are ladies morris sides, who are women who dance the morris and do not allow men to join (except as musicians).  The Ely and Littleport Riot side are one of these, but I wasn’t able to get a picture of them as they’d finished before we arrived.

But no folk festival is complete without a hobby horse.  I never got to find out what this one was called.  There was another, attached to the Pig-dyke Mollies, which was called Nodger, and as we drove in to Whittlesey in the car we passed Nodger the hobby horse who was riding a bicycle up the high street.  It set the tone for the whole day.

Morris has deep connections to the agricultural life of Britain.  But these days few of the rest of us share those connections, and as a result it looks immensely silly, out of date, and slightly embarrassing.  But I love it for its silliness and flagrant not giving a damn about what people think of it.  So I’m off to join the Ely and Littleport Riot side, if they’ll have me.  They meet only twenty minutes drive away from me.  Maybe next year I can be dancing through the streets behind the straw bear myself

They’ve also done a great slideshow of the festival HERE