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Making Traditions: Girls’ Carnival Morris Dancing and Material Practice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2018

Lucy Wright
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Extract

Girls’ carnival morris dancing holds a curious status in the canon of English folk performance. On the one hand, this highly competitive team-formation dance operates at a fundamental remove from the conventional spaces and narratives of the two English folk revivals with which most morris dancing is associated (Wright 2017). More closely linked to the popular “town carnival movement” of the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries than to the contemporary folk scene, girls’ morris dancing is practised in sports halls and community centres, predominantly in the northwest of England and parts of North Wales, and is rarely seen in public. The dancers—almost exclusively girls and young women from working-class communities—compete as members of morris dancing troupes within regional and cross-regional carnival organizations. They do not straightforwardly identify as “folk” dancers.

Type
Articles
Information
Yearbook for Traditional Music , Volume 49 , 2017 , pp. 26 - 47
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 By The International Council for Traditional Music

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