I honestly never heard of "Morris Dancing" until I read this article
in the Independent.
<http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/hey-nonny-no-no-no-
goths-and-pagans-are-reinventing-morris-dancing-823498.html>
or
http://tinyurl.com/44kh8j
Hey nonny no, no, no: Goths and pagans are reinventing morris dancing
Why the newcomers are putting the fear of God into the traditionalists
By Cole Moreton
Sunday, 11 May 2008
Just before dawn, by an empty ****ngle beach, sinister figures move
through the gloom. Living shadows, they're dressed all in black, their
coats made from long rags, their faces obscured by paint. But their
eyes burn brightly as they gather in a circle. If some poor insomniac
comes walking the dog now =96 at 5am on a cold, damp morning =96 they'll
get a massive fright. "Hey-ya!" yell eight men and women as they come
together with a loud clash of sticks, and what appears to be a blend
of country dancing, martial arts and the mating ritual of raggedy
crows. The dance is about ***, there's no mistaking that: one partner
stands with legs straddling his stick, holding it upwards from the
groin, while the other uses his own stick to bash it about. "It's so
much a fertility dance that you'd have to really not know what you
were looking at to miss the point," says 47-year-old Laurence Ranger,
the squire (a kind of road manager) of Hunters Moon Morris.
Morris dancing is a joke, isn't it, with a hey nonny no? Beardy men
with beer bellies prancing about in white stockings, waving hankies?
Very twee. But try telling that to the men and women of Hunters Moon,
here by the Sus*** coast looking like the devilish spawn of Hell's
Angels and medieval mummers. They are part of a secret revolution in
morris dancing, transforming the most easily lampooned of English
eccentricities. Fresh rivalries are emerging, as younger men and women
reinvent "the morris" in startling ways =96 including, as we discover
during a mad dash around southern England on May Day, the world's
first Gothic morris troupe =96 or "side".
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