English Dance and Song Autumn 2022
This article appears in English Dance and Song, the magazine of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. The world’s oldest magazine for folk music and dance, EDS was first published in 1936 and is essential reading for anyone with a passion for folk arts.
The English Folk Dance and Song Society is changing the focus of EDS magazine. Marketing and Communications Director Peter Craik gives an outline.
EDS is changing. We intend to include more information about your activities and the activities you attend. And we can only do this with your help. Put very simply, we are asking you to tell us what you do.
What’s so exceptionally special about the folk arts – dancing, singing, playing and storytelling – is all of those countless sparks of human interaction, which combine into a vital shared experience. We want EDS to foster similar collaborative approaches at a national level, by encouraging the cross-fertilisation of ideas, by presenting examples of best practice, by identifying innovative approaches and encouraging our collective readership to develop them further.
We already publish articles about the English Folk Dance and Song Society’s own activities. Some of these are designed to enthuse and inspire our readers by providing a showcase for the very best folk artists in England today – the National Youth Folk Ensemble is the perfect example of this. Other articles give more practical information – perhaps about new materials in our free Resource Bank, providing step-by-step (often literally!) guidance and tools to get people actively involved. We shall be producing more content along these lines.
We also know that many EDS readers are doing great things to help keep folk thriving. Has your social dancing club developed innovative ways to reach new members? Have you devised a new format for your sessions, which has been enthusiastically received? Has a website or newspaper published your article about why you care so deeply for the folk arts? Have you discovered something in archives that we should all know about? We are sure that many readers will be able to provide some great content to feature on the pages of EDS.
Please send us suggestions about the folk activities and folk people you think we should feature in the magazine. You do not need to provide carefully calibrated texts with beautiful photos – send us whatever you have and we can talk about how to turn it into a finished article.
One outcome of this new focus is the revised EDS will be managed in-house by our full-time staff and will no longer have a dedicated editor. Natalya Catton Wilson will be stepping down from the role she has filled for the past seven years with great professionalism and imagination. Her last edition as editor will be December 2022.
For now, please continue to send your news to us at [email protected] (and from after the publication of the December edition to [email protected]) – we look forward to hearing from you.
