This time it’s social!

English Dance and Song Summer 2019

EDS, the magazine of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, is the world’s oldest magazine for folk music and dance. First published in 1936, EDS is essential reading for anyone with a passion for folk arts. The following sample article is copyright. You are welcome to share it in the format supplied and accompanied by this title page, but you may not reproduce it, in full or in part, by any other means

Chloe Middleton-Metcalfe discusses the new social dancing study guide she has produced for the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library (VWML).

At the Knees Up! ceilidh held at Cecil Sharp House in March, I was pleased to launch my new study guide: An Introductory Bibliography of Traditional Social Folk Dance, prepared especially for the VWML’s growing collection of online resources.

This bibliography is publicly accessible and free for anybody to use through the library’s website. It is divided into sections on dance manuals, dance history, the folk dance revival and case studies of particular dances and dance collections for the more academically inclined. Music has not been forgotten and a discography of social dance music by traditional musicians is included.

The bibliography’s unique selling point is a list of dances collected in England with some 340 entries. This list allows users to browse by name and by county, making it easier than ever before to trace traditional dances and find ones that were collected near you. The dance list has already been the focus of a workshop series, Forgotten Dances, held at Chippenham Folk Festival this year, with rumours of a repeat at Sidmouth Folk Week in 2020.

In addition to the dance list, visitors to the bibliography can read An Exploration of Social Folk Dance in England, a short, accessible essay on the subject which explores the historical and contemporary problems of genre definition.

A number of dancers have expressed their dismay at the term ‘social’ folk dance. What folk dance is not social, they ask? Social dance is a broad descriptor in the wider dance world, applied to all forms of dancing done primarily for the pleasure of involvement. Cecil Sharp imposed distinction between country dancing and morris dancing which is still widely used as a short cut to emphasise differences in purpose and outlook between dance styles and events. There has been a general shift away from the terms ‘ceremonial’ or ‘ritual’ by folk dance scholars towards the word ‘performative’. The term ‘social’, although disliked by some dancers, is still used by dance researchers and acts as a counterpoint to the performative dance styles. ‘Participatory’ as an alternative term for ‘social’ is also a close contender, but it is less frequently used in the folk dance world.

The compilation of the bibliography and index threw up some interesting quandaries. Should I include dances that were historically excluded from the ceremonial canon because they were performed by women or children? What to do with the East Coker Morris Dance collected by Cecil Sharp from school children in Somerset in 1908? Its name implies that it is morris and not a social dance. However, in Grove’s Music Dictionary Volume III (1907), Frank Kidson noted that in the north of England there was ‘A country dance which goes by the name of the Morris Dance...It is danced by an indefinite number of couples, standing opposite to one another, as in Sir Roger de Coverley’. Perhaps this type of morris was a form of social dance? Sadly, we don’t know in what context the dance was performed. Did everyone pile in with a ribbon or was it a calculated and practiced display, or both?

To clarify the criteria for inclusion, I proceeded with the following clause: ‘This bibliography focuses on set, repeated movements which were primarily seen at dance events. These dances use a minimum of two individuals and they are not exhibition dances, that is, they were not seen as an explicit show of skill or stamina’. Even so, I had to make some difficult decisions about the inclusion of material based, where possible, on knowledge of the dancing contexts. So, in the end, East Coker Morris stayed in but the Helston Furry Dance was left out.

The concept of the ‘living tradition’, which usually focuses on the benefit of new material creation, permeates many discussions about social folk dance today. However, just as folk song scholars find it useful to draw distinctions, though not firm boundaries, between broadside ballads, collected songs and 20th-century material, then so should folk dance researchers. As social dance lacks a distinctive categorisation, I felt that there was a greater imperative to emphasise a particular time span. This avoided the risk of presenting a bibliography on the whole history of social dance. To make the historical time period under investigation clear, the bibliography has a sub-heading: Focussing Primarily on Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Dance Practices in England.

In dance scholarship, social folk dance lags behind the research carried out into the more performative styles. Is it not time that it got a bit more scholarly attention? This bibliography is an initial attempt to do that. Within the English revival, collected material has often had a bit of a raw deal, as Cecil Sharp preferred studying the older manuscript dances whilst successive EFDSS leaders were enamoured with North American materials. There are already fantastic resources for exploring a wider range of social dances, such as the VWML’s Dances and Tunes Index which includes, amongst other things, many 18th-century publications.

I anticipate that this bibliography will be used as an additional resource through which information on collected dances and early 20th-century dance practices can be used to help connect historical dance manuscripts with the present day.

To explore Chloe’s bibliography, visit vwml.org/socialdancebibliography