Elements of English Country Dance
Hugh Stewart
Copyright 1998 The Round
Smashwords Edition
First published by The Round in 1992 as ISBN 0 9519193 1 8
Firstly a caveat. Students are used to the concept of exams where they have to supply a ‘right’ answer to a given question. Folk dances usually have several ‘right’ answers depending on such things as what sort of music the band play, what sort of people are dancing the dance, your fancy at the time and what the phase of the moon is. My intention here is to provide assorted ‘right’ answers, but if anyone dares to quote these notes at you and claim that you are doing it wrongly because you are doing something different, then politely agree with him (so he goes away happy), but otherwise ignore him.
Background
There
have always been two lots of people dancing country dances, for the
sake of argument the country folk and the town folk. The country
folk want entertainment for their harvest festivals or whatever —
they want simple dances so they can remember them from year to year,
so that children and newcomers can pick them up quickly; they want
energetic dances so they can let off steam and then collapse at the
bar for some gossip; they want dances with a little bit of scope for
showing off (can you stamp harder, kick higher, do it faster than
him?). The town folk want a different sort of dance: they want
complicated dances so they can show off their education (read it up
in advance, go to lessons or simply go to dances more often); they
want less energetic dances because they are going to a dance to
dance, and want to keep it up all evening; they tend not to want
individual show offs because they are treating the dance as a group
effort and want to say ‘we did it’ of some complicated dance
rather than ‘I did it’ of some complicated step.
By the very definition of the distinction I have drawn we have no record of the ‘country folk’ dances of previous centuries — if you could record it you were ‘town folk’. However sometime around 1600 the English upper classes discovered country dances, and for the next 200 years or so their balls and so on had a mixture of what were recognised as formal dances such as minuets and what were regarded as light relief in the shape of country dances. Given what I said above the genuine country dances were not really appropriate for court use, so gradually dancing masters would make up new ‘country dances’ in a style more suited to their market. These dances were published, and we can see from those books how the style evolved over the years. Eventually Quadrilles, and then the Polka and Waltz killed off country dances from the ballrooms, though of course the country folk carried on much as before.
Early
in the 20th century Cecil Sharp was doing his best to collect
evidence of country folk activity before modern communication and
education smothered it. He started off collecting folk music, like
various other enthusiasts, but he then branched out into morris
dance and country dances. He published a book (The Country Dance
Book, Vol 1) of dances he had collected from various country folk,
but then discovered that a music publisher, John Playford, had
published The English Dancing Master in 1650, and decided that this
described dances closer to the original English Country Dance. He
published a set of four Country Dance Books, with precise
interpretations of dances from John Playford’s books; and he also
published another Country Dance Book describing Kentucky Mountain
Square Dancing (which he encountered during a visit to the USA in
1917 and regarded as an even purer form of the original English
Dance).
Inspired by Cecil Sharp many people took up teaching and dancing the dances he had described, and some set about raking up other old books of dance instructions, while others made up new dances in the old style. By 1940 the English Folk Dance and Song Society was busy organising dance activity (song stuff too of course, but that’s another story) based on Cecil Sharp’s work. The EFDSS activity was very much what I classed as ‘town folk’ above; you would go along to a weekly dance club, and when deemed competent (and awarded a certificate to prove it) would go to a real dance and do the dances you had learnt. After the war (with the invention of PA?) the EFDSS started taking a stronger interest in ‘country folk’ activity; they collected dances still being performed by country folk, and published a set of ‘Community Dance Manuals’ which gave instructions for dances suitable for people who did not go to some regular dance club. The position now is that we still have a strong distinction between folk dance clubs who organise dances to suit themselves, and Scout troops, PTAs or whatever who organise Barn Dances or Ceilidhs to suit their members. The folk dance world is not quite as polarised as that sounds — there is a large area of overlap — but there can be a severe culture shock if someone from one end of the spectrum wanders into a dance organised for the other end.
Where do the dances come from?
English Dances
Apart from the editions of The English Dancing Master published by John Playford (and later his son, Henry) various other publishers published similar collections of dances. Between 1650 and 1800 when the popularity of country dance waned some ten thousand dances (mostly not very interesting) must have been published.
Initially the EFDS (nowadays EFDSS) danced the dances described by Cecil Sharp in his Country Dance books. In the 1920s and 30s a Cambridge group (which included Marjorie Heffer of the bookshop and printing firm) published two collections of dances. The first is known as the Apted Collection because it is based on some books a Mrs Apted was given by her father who found them among a cupboard full of old books he had bought for a shilling; in fact these were dances published by Thompson around 1770. The second is called Maggot Pie, and is of dances they made up to fit old tunes that had originally been published to go with poor dances. The Maggot Pie book has a nice EFDS preface that says that they could not really count as proper traditionally approved dances, but it was only fair to give them a try to see if they might qualify.
More recently Bert Simons, who lived in Kent, decided to do something about the lack of dance tradition there. He hunted through all the old books looking for dances with Kentish names; fortunately he looked at the dances too and made sensible choices. He published sets of these dances as Kentish Hops.
Bernard Bentley lived in a Cheshire village called Fallibroome, and ran a series of dance summer schools. He dug through the old books for interesting dances to teach, and published a set of Fallibroome dances.
Many other people have rummaged through the old books (and continue to do so), or have made up dances recently. Probably the best known is Pat Shaw (Patrick Shuldham-Shaw to be precise), who died in 1977, having written a large number of dances, many very complicated.