The Outside Capering Crew Morris in the 21st Century

Simon Pipe of The Outside Capering Crew was invited to write about the Morris in a new millennium for the second edition of Direct Roots, a 368-page directory of the UK folk scene. The editor's instruction was: be provocative.

Some people would like the Morris to be seen as the English "national dance", but England doesn't really have such a thing.

What it does have is a fabulous wealth of regional and even very local dance forms, some of which happen to be performed all around the country.  Lumping most of them together under the banner of Morris merely obscures their great diversity.  The Morris Federation should really be the English Dance Federation, or something.

At the start of the 21st Century, the Morris is probably healthier than it has ever been, if you judge by the number of teams.  Strangely, as the number of participants has gone up, the size of the audiences seems to have shrunk.

Don't tell the tabloids, but these days there may well be more women dancing than men.

The variety of styles increases by the year.  Stave dancing has caught on in a small but dignified way; The Outside Capering Crew has taken an obscure novelty called the bacca pipes jig and turned it into an exhilarating dance form in its own right; the Flag and Bone Gang has reconstructed a Yorkshire Morris from fragments of evidence, and performs it while wearing beekeepers' gauzes and playing the bones.  It looks terrific, but apparently isn't terribly comfortable.

The core material collected by Cecil Sharp a hundred years ago retains all its appeal in the hands of a strong team.  Hammersmith Morris Men perform it with a raw, testosterone-charged power that puts younger dancers in the shade.  Sadly, many of the teams performing Sharp's "black book" dances are now a lacklustre argument for the Morris remaining an exclusively-male tradition.

Many sides are inventing new patterns and seeking tunes from outside the standard sources, but some have not understood that the innovations work best if they respect the idiom.  The teams that break the rules only succeed - none better than Berkshire Bedlam - if the dancing itself is good.

Rapper sword dancing, a manic group-contortionist act, is enjoying a renaissance (floppy swords with handles at both ends - useless against Vikings, but employed to dazzling effect by the best rapper teams). Quite why any serious rapper dancer would want to be seen as performing "Morris" defies explanation.

Border Morris continues to be popular (black faces, whooping, sticks - the main reason the Welsh never conquered Shropshire) and East Anglian Molly Dancing is being reworked in highly creative ways (black faces, but no sticks or whooping - the Welsh weren't much of a threat in East Anglia). Both were dismissed at one time as degenerative forms of the Cotswold hanky-waving style, but then the wilder elements decided degenerative dancing was more fun. No doubt we can soon expect a new style combining Molly and Border - to be called Bawdy Morris, perhaps.

But it's not enough that more people are donning the bells, or cummerbunds, or whatever.  There remains a credibility problem that stands in the way of Morris being accepted as an object of national pride.  The apparent derision towards Morris is perpetuated by smug metropolitan types in the national media, who spend so much time with their own kind that they're out of touch with the values that prevail beyond the M25.  In reality, a great many people have a favourable view of the Morris.  Their understanding of it is vague and they probably wouldn't want to try it themselves, but they quite like the idea of people wearing ribbons and leaping about in the street.

There are bad teams, but the fact is that a lot of the worst teams know they 're weak, but they enjoy what they do so they don't really care.  It's a free country: you can't ban them.

An alternative approach is to highlight the best, and hope it will inspire. There is a lot of good Morris about, and a small amount that can wow an audience.  At the highest level, standards continue to rise.  But other dancers and musicians apparently decide that they couldn't possibly rise to such levels, and don't try; or maybe their team leaders resist change.

There has been talk of encouraging more people to take up the dance, and of fostering excellence.  The two aspirations aren't necessarily compatible: more recruits means more beginners, but the number of experienced teachers and guiding figures will not rise in a hurry.  There's more to it than learning the stepping and sticking.

For most adherents, it's not about excelling anyway.  It is a pastime or a maybe passion, but rarely the sort of obsession that is needed to achieve true excellence.  And Morris dancing is strangely attractive to people who can't dance for toffee.

"I've got two left feet," says the would-be recruit.

"No problem," comes the reply.  "Just remember to start on the other one."

This is not unhealthy: one of the inspiring things about the Morris is that embraces a wide range of abilities, and empowers people to go out on the street and do extraordinary things.  Individual talent matters little. Besides, some forms of the Morris barely involve "dancing" at all.

In truth, the national organisations have not been effective in raising standards.  A team that wants to join the Morris Ring must "dance in", and show that it is good enough; but once admitted, its dancing can become absolutely dire, and not a word is said.  The Morris Federation runs workshops, but they are poorly attended and seldom about improving technique.

But festival organisers, who can bestow rewards in the form of high-profile bookings, have a certain influence in these matters.  They should use it.

Why do organisers never say what they want from teams - beyond appearing at this or that spot?  Why is nothing said when a 10-minute ceilidh spot turns into nearer 25 minutes of repetitive dances and self-indulgent announcements?  Why do they never point out that the musicians have their backs to the audience?  Why do they never check that a team's proposed programme is going to please an audience that has paid a lot of money to watch the show?  Why do they seldom give advice about using the PA system?

Of course, a festival organiser who actually tried to do any of this might well be told to caper off.

Then there's the curse of turn-and-turn-about: shared stands at which teams perform only one or two dances before making way for another side.  The sides don't usually work together to create a cohesive show.  The result is full of variety, but it becomes a mere demonstration.  Whenever the term Dance Display appears on a festival programme, it means someone is missing the point: it shouldn't be a display, it should be a performance.

There's more to good Morris than the stepping and the lines and the tunes; in fact, it's possible to put on a great show with only moderately good dancing (the music's another matter).  There is a magic in the Morris, and often it's invoked not by the dances, but by the banter, the antics of a fool and the general spirit of the thing.

Fools were once an integral part of the Cotswold tradition.  Tommy and Betty (both male) remain strong in the rapper, but among Cotswold sides the comic figures are endangered.  With their decline, the spirit of the tradition is dimmed.

In the summer of 2002, a think tank called the Future Foundation produced a list of 50 icons and institutions regarded by young adults as significant features of British heritage.  Morris dancing only just made it on to the list (one place below the Rolling Stones).

The survey defined heritage as "about things that have a root in the past, but which will also endure into the future".  A separate list was made of aspects of culture that would still be regarded as part of national heritage in 50 years' time: the Morris was not mentioned.

Roy Dommett, something of a guru for dancers over recent decades, declared in the Summer 2000 issue of Morris Matters magazine that the tradition would not last far into the new millennium, at least in its present forms. "I give it fifty years at most in England," he wrote.

There is no sign that the teams that survive from the 19th Century are fading in the 21st - just the opposite.  The coconut men dance doggedly on in Bacup and the hankies are waved as crisply as ever in Bampton and Chipping Campden; and it would be unthinkable for the horn dancers' antlers not to be lifted down from the church wall in Abbots Bromley each year, on the first Monday after the first Sunday after September the fourth.

Teams come and go, and if more go than come it will simply increase the value of those that remain.

The encouraging number of teenagers and twenty-somethings becoming involved may prove the pundits wrong, but if the Morris continues to evolve at its present rate it will certainly be a very different creature by the century's end.  There is more creativity at work in the Morris now than there has been since Cecil Sharp "corrected" the old dancers' memories almost a century ago.

This is all as it should be.  The great strength of the Morris is that it has always adapted with social change.