ORION COSTUMES Men's Morris Dancer Fancy Dress Costume

Product Information

Listen to four Morris tunes from Joan Sharpe The apparent simplicity of the three hole pipe and tabor belies a very complex musical instrument .... A similar Plough Monday tradition exists in the East Midlands; some of these dances involve swords, usually danced over in a similar manner to baccapipes [45] jigs from Oxfordshire. A jig is a dance performed by one (or sometimes two) dancers, rather than by a set. Its music does not usually have the rhythm implied by the word " jig" in other contexts.

The dance may have given name to the board games three men's morris, six men's morris and nine men's morris. In 1924, members of the Cambridge Morris Men (as the Travelling Morrice) toured some of the villages where Sharp had collected morris dances. They danced in these villages and met many old dancers, who taught them more dances, tunes and steps. In subsequent years more tours were made through the area, resulting in additional morris dance material being collected.

Available as Adobe PDF documents

Other forms include Molly dance from Cambridgeshire. Molly dance, which is associated with Plough Monday, is a parodic form danced in work boots and with at least one Molly man dressed as a woman. The largest Molly Dance event is the Whittlesea Straw Bear Festival, established in 1980, held at Whittlesey in Cambridgeshire in January. The occasion was unique; the first time that the three Morris Organisations in the the UK had got together to dance; a celebration, yes, but connected with the recent (2003) PEL, Public Entertainment Licence legislation. Longsword There are actually quite a few different types of Morris dancing styles and different dances or traditions within each style, typically named after their region of origin. Cotswold The trousers are well made in a style already old-fashioned by the second half of the nineteenth century (the double front flies had largely been replaced by a centre fly by the middle of the century). Many morris teams wore breeches but these were supplanted by trousers as the nineteenth century progressed. Music was traditionally provided by either a pipe and tabor or a fiddle. These are still used today, but the most common instrument is the melodeon. Accordions and concertinas are also common, and other instruments are sometimes used. Often drums are employed.

While the earliest records of "Morys" invariably mention it in a court setting, and it appears a little later in the Lord Mayors' Processions in London, by the mid 17th century it had assumed the nature of a folk dance performed in the parishes. [ citation needed] It is unclear how the dance came to be referred to as Moorish, "unless in reference to fantastic dancing or costumes", i.e. the deliberately "exotic" flavour of the performance. [15] The English dance thus apparently arose as part of a wider 15th-century European fashion for supposedly "Moorish" spectacle, which also left traces in Spanish and Italian folk dance. The means and chronology of the transmission of this fashion is now difficult to trace; the London Chronicle recorded "spangled Spanish dancers" performed an energetic dance before King Henry VII at Christmas in 1494, but Heron's accounts also mention "pleying of the mourice dance" four days earlier, and the attestation of the English term from the mid-15th century establishes that there was a "Moorish dance" performed in England decades prior to 1494. [16] [17] Moreton, Cole (11 May 2008). "Hey nonny no, no, no: Goths and pagans are reinventing Morris dancing". The Independent. London . Retrieved 14 March 2010. a b c d Blake, Lois. Ffair Caerffili and other Dances from Nantgarw. Cymdeithas Ddawns Werin Cymru. Morris music" redirects here. For the former jazz record store in New Orleans, see Karnofsky Tailor Shop–House.the first description of such dances was John Playford's The English Dancing Master, published in 1651. It would be remiss of this historian to write about Morris dance but not talk about the live music that often accompanies the dancers. Morris bands utilize traditional instruments ( concertina, fiddle, melodian, accordion, pipes, tabor) and are percussion driven. Bands can range in size from a single musician to tens of people, depending on the style of dance and the preference of the side. Musicians often dress to match the dancers and are an integral part of the performance. Often the costume will include a Rag Coat, (a coat which has tatters, small pieces of cloth, sewn on it), or sometimes a formal tail coat. Like Molly dancers, they will disguise their faces; some modern sides will go further and wear masks.

Rapper sword from Northumberland and County Durham, danced with short flexible sprung steel swords, usually for five dancers.Many sides have one or more fools. A fool is usually extravagantly dressed, and communicates directly with the audience in speech or mime. The fool often dances around and even through a dance without appearing really to be a part of it, but it takes a talented dancer to pull off such fooling while actually adding to and not distracting from the main dance set. The proceeds from a week's dancing could be considerable and the screwed-down lid helped to ensure that none of the members of the team (or anyone else) could easily open the box and help themselves to the taking. [1895.46.1.8] White handkerchief Clare Sponsler, 'Morris Dance and Theatre History', Thomas Postlewait, Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography (Iowa, 2010), p. 96: John Gough Nichols, Diary of Henry Machyn (London: Camden Society, 1848), p. 13 Wright, Lucy (2017). 'Girls’ Carnival Morris Dancing and Contemporary Folk Dance Scholarship', Folklore, vol. 128, no. 1, pp. 157 – 174. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0015587X.2016.1231486 Molly dance from Cambridgeshire. Traditionally danced on Plough Monday, they were Feast dances that were danced to collect money during harsh winters. One of the dancers would be dressed as a woman, hence the name. Joseph Needham identified two separate families of Molly dances, one from three villages in the Cambridge area and one from two in the Ely area.

The first reference to Morris style dance comes from the wedding of Raymond Berengar, Duke of Barcelona, and Petronilla of Aragonin 1149. There are further references to continental Morris dances being adopted into church ceremonies and being performed at court events throughout the Middle Ages. It is very likely that these dances were being performed in England at the same time as well, as Morris dance was considered ancient by the Elizabethans. During its long history, Morris dance has transitioned from being an important pagan ritual, to being a way of making money, into a lighthearted celebration of English culture. Morris has evolved over the years, and undoubtedly will continue to do so, proving that culture and tradition are mutable.In England, an ale is a private party where a number of Morris sides get together and perform dances for their own enjoyment rather than for an audience. Food is usually supplied, and sometimes this is a formal meal known as a feast or ale-feast. Occasionally, an evening ale is combined with a day or weekend of dance, where all the invited sides tour the area and perform in public. In North America the term is widely used to describe a full weekend of dancing involving public performances and sometimes workshops. In the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, the term "ale" referred to a church- or dale-sponsored event where ale or beer was sold to raise funds. Morris dancers were often employed at such events. Three prominent groups organise and support Morris in England: Morris Ring, [2] Morris Federation [3] and Open Morris; [4] all three organisations have members from other countries as well. Morris dance may have been lost to time had it not been carefully documented by the ethnochoreologist and ethnomusicologist Cecil Sharp. Sharp traveled England collecting folk dances and published several works on the subject. Sharp's books revived interest in Morris dance, and Morris began to be taught (and tested) in some English schools. The earliest (15th-century) references place the Morris dance in a courtly setting. The dance became part of performances for the lower classes by the later 16th century. Henry VIII owned a gold salt cellar which depicted a Morris dance with five dancers and a "tabrett". A "tabret" is a small tabor drum. [21] On 4 January 1552, George Ferrers, the Lord of Misrule of Edward VI, put on a show in London which included "mores danse, dansyng with a tabret". [22] In 1600, the Shakespearean actor William Kempe Morris danced from London to Norwich, an event chronicled in his Nine Daies Wonder (1600).