Morris Dancing - equality issues! Weddings and other celebrations.

It’s funny the things you don’t think of as being affected by the lockdown, usually odd, peripheral stuff, not mainstream everyday stuff. Neither do you think of them especially as regards equality matters. One of these is Morris Dancing. Apparently Morris Dance groups have been very glad to be able to get back together and perform in public again. They have had to observe social distancing rules, using longer sticks than usual for clacking against each other and not getting too close or hooking up into pairs. 

But they have been out and about once again. May Day is, of course, one of their big days to be performing in village centres all over the place and it’s only reading about it that I stop and think of all the occasions when they have NOT been in our village over the last year. “Members of the Hook Eagle Morris Men performed near the village of Hook, Hampshire, to mark the May Day dawn on Saturday, in their first show since January 2020.” They were quite surprised to have a few spectators. It was 5.00 in the morning!

It seems that they are a group who usually perform in blackface but, influenced by Black Lives Matter, they have changed from blackface to blueface. Not all Morris Dancers use blackface. I’ve rarely seen it around here but I hear it’s common in some parts of the country. Some people explain the tradition by looking back to the 1400s when peasants would smear soot over their faces to hide their identity if they went out begging as the activity was illegal. That doesn’t really explain how it got into the dancing. Another theory is that originally Morris Dancing was “morisco” or Moorish dancing, possibly coming into English via the Flemish “mooriske”. This makes sense if you think of Shakespeare’s Moors and Blackamoors. 

Also, in Elizabethan times, there was significant cultural contact between Italy and England, and it has been suggested that much of what is now considered traditional English folk dance, and especially English country dance! is descended from Italian dances imported in the 16th century. Oddly enough, looking at Italian festivals for my Italian conversation class, I have found examples of dances and costumes very similar to our Morris Dancing. 

So that’s the racist bit of Morris Dancing. How about the gender equality thing? It seems very much a male preserve, but for males who don’t mind donning silly costumes with bells on their clogs and flowers in their hats. The stuff with swords, however, suggest that maybe some dances could have originated as celebratory victory dances, another traditionally male preserve! But that’s another matter. 

It would seem that the activity had a big revival in the early decades of the 20th century, with a sort of competitive element around 1934 with the creation of the Morris Ring, founded by six rival men’s groups. By the 1960s women wanted to get in on the act, although I can’t really see why, and there was much discussion of the propriety and even legitimacy of women dancing the Morris. Maybe they were expected to stick to maypole dancing. On reflection, that very discussion was probably why they wanted to join in. A gender equality matter!

Incidentally, Oliver Cromwell’s puritan government banned celebrating such occasions as Whitsuntide with dancing and drinking Whitsun ales. When the crown was restored, however, Charles II was happy to have springtime festivals such as Whitsunday back again, apparently because the date was close to his birthday. There you go!

Here’s another bit of gender equality stuff: marriage certificates in England and Wales will from now on include the name of the bride’s and the groom’s mother, not just their fathers’ names. Presumably this concentration on the father was a throwback to marriages often being arranged as a kind of alliance between families, with the offspring, especially the daughters, as a kind of possession of the head of the family. So now we have got rid of that bit of nonsense! 

This provokes a question: Are we about to see a rash of weddings as we stagger out of lockdown? At the moment weddings can take place with 15 people present. If all goes well with the roadmap, in a couple of weeks up to 30 guests will be allowed. And after the 21st of June there will be no limits. Happy couples can invite the whole world and their grandmother if they so choose. Wedding planners must be really happy!

It’s not just weddings, of course. Families and friends will be able to get together to remember and celebrate the lives of people they have lost in the last year, pared down funerals having taken the place of such get-togethers. Christenings or naming celebrations can take place again. Or at any rate, families can get together to coo over new arrivals. And largish groups of old friends will be able to meet just for the sake of it, reminiscing about our youth and catching up on how we have all fared over the last year.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!