yours truly at 21
It’s been a quiet week for the most part although it ended with a rattle last night when we ran a Rapper Workshop to see if we could find any new dancers for Mons Meg.
It was a successful evening in that we had 25 folks show up and I think that a goodly number of them will take their interest further. We also had a good fiddler whom we met last week on our pub tour come along and play. After the workshop most of us dropped round to Bennets Bar where, suitably rehydrated, we did a decent dance. Certainly a better dance than last time we were there when we snapped a sword! It had the desired effect which was to show the new recruits where Rapper has its true home.
And we put the hat round and made a few quid as well.
I wonder what my 21 year old self – pictured above right, would have made of it? I like to think that I would have appreciated it and been interested enough to have joined in, but there’s a decent chance that I wouldn’t have. It’s hard to remember really. My interest was eventually caught by sword dancing around 1985 which was still four years away from this picture being taken – although I didn’t actually do anything about it for another 20 years. Maybe if I was interested at 25 I would also have been interested at 21 and could have been involved with the legendary but now no more Beltane Rapper of Edinburgh.
light and shade
Just before Christmas I posted here about Arthur Berry and particularly his magnificent Lament for the Lost Pubs of Burslem. For the benefit of anyone who is googling and finds this post then I am pleased to say that I received a copy of a cd with it on this morning from BBC Radio Stoke.
The cd is called “Lullaby of Queen Street” and cost £6.50 plus £1 P+P. The cd contains eight of his broadcast monologues and they’re all good.
Surprisingly, given that it has come from the BBC and is on their own label, the sound quality is erratic as though the broadcasts were put on without any mastering or balancing; so they are at different levels and there is the occasional distortion, almost as though they were recorded off air.
Be that as it may the Lament is as wonderful as I remember it and it is lovely to be reunited with it after many years.
Mind you, the book I ordered in December hasn’t appeared yet.
Kirkburton Rapier Dancers, Holmfirth, 2006
The title of this post is taken from Trevor Stone’s booklet from 1980 about Yorkshire Longsword dancing. I said above that I first got interested in sword dancing in 1985 which was when, I think, Channel 4 in the UK showed the Bill Bryden production of The Mysteries (Sadly unavailable on DVD).
In the course of the play, the story of Abraham and Isaac, which concludes with the foundation of Israel, is marked by a simplified longsword dance (making the obvious use of the six-sword lock) and it made a big impression on me. I didn’t encounter the dance again, somehow, until The Jake Thackray Experience made our first visit to Holmfirth Festival of Folk in 2006 when I first saw the Kirkburton Rapier Dancers and I was floored. It was after that experience that I looked to see if anyone was dancing Longsword in Scotland and thus got involved in the first workshop from which Mons Meg emerged.
I subsequently danced some Longsword for a while in Biggar but that is dormant for a while and I’m itching to try and get a proper Longsword side started in Edinburgh. Time will tell.
Recent Comments