The following account of an old dancer will give the atmosphere of the folk-dance and an idea of the way in which the Espérance Guild teachers have themselves learned the dances. I was speaking in a village at a “sing song” one evening when a man asked me if I had ever heard of certain dances and offered to give me the names of the then surviving dancers. I said “No,” and he gave me the names.
I wrote to one of two brothers who still had the traditional dances and received the following reply:—
“I am the party what has got those dances, I shall be proud to show them to you, yours to command.”
Eventually I went to see him, spent an afternoon in the bar parlour of a jolly little inn, and invited him and his brother up to London.
When they began to teach we found they had only one adjective between them and it was “perpendicular,” and this word had to do duty many times during the evening. We were told we must “dance perpendicular to one another,” “perpendicular to the music,” and finally that we had got the dance “quite perpendicular”!
But I think we got hold of the dance, and that our boys and girls dance it much better than if they had been taught it by a professional dancer with technical terms and a settled technique; anyway, they love the dance, and it is always encored when we give it in public.
What, then, is the natural way for these ever-changing, ever-evolving dances to be passed on? I unhesitatingly say that they should be learnt in the first instance from the traditional dancer and passed on in the same way. The written instructions are only useful as a reminder of steps and evolutions, and should never be made an unalterable and fixed standard. For if folk-dancing has been evolving through all these countless generations, who shall fix the exact moment when evolution ceased and the steps and evolutions became fixed and unalterable? So far as I have seen traditional dancers, I have noticed that not only does every side in every village dance a little differently, but each man has his own way with the steps, and still further, the same man may dance differently every time he does the dance. I am behind no one in the desire that these dances shall be as accurately transcribed and as carefully taught as possible, and that the general character and atmosphere shall be preserved, but it is just because of this desire that I would have the dances as far as possible left to the interpretation of those who are unhampered by technical knowledge and unconfined by technical terms and academic restrictions.