Socially engaged project | Research | Archive
This is folklore too. Folklore clad in sequins and spandex is still folklore. Folklore does not owe you rusticity.
Girls’ carnival morris dancing from the northwest of England is the performance that started it all, for me.
Growing up as the daughter of a morris dancer, I was always told that women didn’t morris dance. Or if they did, it was an abomination, an effrontery from the ‘Women’s Lib’ movement of the 1970s.
So it was something of a surprise to me, as a fledgling researcher poring through the archives, to find old, black-and-white photographs of teams of women and girls doing something called ‘morris dancing’ as early as the 1880s. Unique to Manchester, Merseyside, Cheshire, Lancashire and the North of Wales, girls’ morris dancing was written out of the history books, excluded from the narratives that came to characterise the English folk movement. But it thrived nonetheless.
Today there are hundreds of troupes, thousands of dancers, mostly teenaged girls, who dance in competitions held across the region. They perform to pop music, re-design their dresses as often as funds allow, and continually innovate with the tradition that has been passed down through generations of women. The performance is as old as any other kind of morris in the area, probably in the country, in spite of popular but unfounded claims to ancient pagan origins for the men’s morris of the folk revival.
Seeking to artificially preserve something only speeds its obsolescence and demise.
If something is no longer relevant to the people who created it and they choose to replace it with something else, then this beautiful and a perfect part of the process.
An ongoing project
Beginning in 2013, this ongoing self-directed project of making, recording and collaborating offers a glimpse of an alternative history of ‘folk’ in England—one which recognises the crucial and continued role of women and working-class communities.
Test performances at Southport, 2023
The archive |
The archive |
Documenting over ten years of research and socially engaged practice in the town carnival community. Including kazoo bands from the northeast and south Wales, ‘entertainer’ troupes from Staffordshire and majorettes from Yorkshire, and further afield, parts of my archive, including links to publications are stored on the ‘Folk is a Feminist Issue’ page.