Caroline Flowerdew, one of our new dancers, reflects on her first year of dancing with Glory of the West:
If someone had told me this time last year that within a year I would have danced in public in several
dozen pubs and public spaces and even festivals around Devon, festooned with bells and ribbons
and enormous white handkerchiefs and big sticks, I would have laughed. I had enjoyed other country
dance at university, but I knew absolutely nothing about morris dance and it had never occurred to
me that it might be for me. But a friend invited me along to Glory and so, extremely nervously, I
went to my first training session with Glory back in October. I had no idea what I was letting myself
in for, I didn’t know what style of morris dance Glory did or that there were different styles at all, but
I was at a stage in my life where I wanted to try something new, and this counted as something new.
The first surprise for me was the music. The folk dance I’d done before had usually been to recorded
music, so I was stunned when I found there were half a dozen musicians playing, just for a training
session. It was a pleasure just listening to the sounds of it, which were all new to me, and getting to
hear talented musicians playing the dance music for us. I worked my way through learning my first
dances—and there is nothing like the thrill of the first time you successfully dance even the most
basic of dances, getting all the figures and steps more or less right and ending up in the right place
most of the time—and by the end of April I had a rough working knowledge of less than half of
Glory’s repertoire of dances, enough that I could dance them without getting lost or treading on my
own feet. I had my kit put together, including some frantic last-minute internet searches: how to
sew a rosette out of ribbons, and I was all ready to go. But I didn’t really understand what it was all
about until I first danced in public. Or, as morris dancers call it, my first dance-out.
This was at the Green Man Festival in Bovey Tracey, which was an excellent place to begin, because
the entire town was filled with morris dancers of all different styles, all in their different colourful
outfits, and the sound of bells in all directions. Suddenly lots of the bits of the practice sessions that I
hadn’t really understood before, like how we’d practised lining up at the side of the school hall and
then walking on in the right order so that we’d end up in the right place, facing the right direction
and ready to dance, made perfect sense, because it seems easy when you’re in a sports hall on your
own but it’s a different matter when you’re on an unfamiliar street with crowds of people watching
you. And when performing the dances in public, they all made sense too in a way they hadn’t before.
I felt like someone who’d been rehearsing lines all winter but had never actually watched a play.
So that was my second surprise: how many different people are involved, how many different styles
and colours and steps and dances and songs there are. I had discovered by this point that there were
different styles of morris dance, but I’d never really seen any of the others danced. Seeing them all,
even in the glimpses you get when you’re anxiously trying to remember the difference between
Ascott and Wheatley steps with lots of people watching you, was a fascinating experience and I
started to get a sense for the kind of dances Glory does and how they fit into the wider world of
morris dance.
After that we spent all summer dancing in different pub gardens and other public spaces around the
Exeter area, and I got to know how a dance-out worked and stopped feeling nervously excited about
going and started feeling happily excited instead. Towards the end of the summer I even took a turn
as squire for the evening, choosing all the dances myself–a nerve-wracking experience but like so
many nerve-wracking things, tremendous fun when you get stuck into it.
And now as the evenings start to close in and the weather is chillier and damper, I feel very ready to
go back into the practice sessions and learn all the dances I don’t know yet and improve my stepping
and my confidence with the dances. I’ve made new friends and been to new places and tried new
things and had a wonderful time. The third and most lovely surprise for me has been just how
generous everyone I’ve met has been, in Glory and from other sides and groups, generous with their
time and talent and enthusiasm. Once you start going to one kind of folk dance, people will invite
you along to others and encourage you to try new things and share their knowledge and joy in dance
with you. When I ask people how long they’ve been dancing for, I usually get an answer measured in
decades. I’ve only been dancing for a year, but after this year I hope that one day I’ll be able to say
I’ve been dancing for decades too.
