WHY FOLK-DANCE
By RODNEY GALLOP THE audiences who attend the public performances of the International Folk Dance Festival next week will see five hundred dancers from a score of European countries and as many more from our own islands. Of our foreign guests many, indeed most, will be true peasants who have come • to display the dances which have been handed down to them by oral tradition from their ancestors. Most people who have travelled abroad have had the good fortune to stumble, on one occasion or another, on some village festival at which they have seen a farandole, a fandango, a schuh- plattler or a czardas performed in its proper setting: This setting the Albert Hall can scarcely hope to repro- duce, but such dances always have an unmistakably authentic quality which makes them a spectacle com- parable to that which the ballet has to offer.
It must not be thought that we possess no such dances in the British Isles. Oxfordshire Morris Men, North Country Sword Dancers, Abbots Bromley Horn Dancers and Hobby Horses from Padstow and Mineliead all come out at their appointed seasons, and some of them will be seen at the Festival. The vast majority of the British contingent, however, will consist of ordinary men and women from town or country who for their own pleasure have joined in the movement to revive a heritage of dance which not long ago could be regarded as moribund if not actually extinct. I have described in another place* how Cecil Sharp first saw a traditional dance and was inspired to start a movement which is now nation-wide. All that need be emphasized here is that this movement is no older than the present century and yet has spread within so short a time into every corner of the country. The parent English Folk Dance and Song Society counts two thousand members and its local branches ten times as many. And they are in- creasing in number every day.
It could not, of course, be expected that the revival would not in some way alter the dances and particularly the outlook of those who perform them. Traditional dances are of two kinds : ceremonial and recreational. The first, invested in their beginnings with a serious ritual purpose, have been kept alive within historic times by the sheer momentum of acquired habit. The second, more naturally as it may seem to us, are per- formed as an exercise or diversion. In the revival the two types have become merged, and the attitude of the performer has inevitably become tinged with that self-consciousness which is so pronounced a charac- teristic of our age. The traditional dancer dances as a matter of course. It has never occurred to him to ask himself why. The revivalist, On the other hand, must necessarily have had some definite motive for joining his local branch of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. In folk-dancing he is seeking something more than an opportunity for exercise and recreation, an outlet for artistic self-expression. It may be argued that the modern ballroom dances satisfy the same requirements. But there is a difference. Personally I do not folk-dance (partly, perhaps, owing to an excess of that self-consciousness which I deprecate in those who do) and I am interested in the traditional dance primarily as spectacle, local colour and folklore rather than as a medium for self-expression. But it is difficult to deny the justice of the folk-daneer's contention that, in the first place, he adopts a healthier and more com- fortable garb than his ballroom cousin and that what * The Traditional Dance, by Violet Alford and Rodney Gallop, pp. 8.10. he does is part of our national heritage in a way that the fox- trot, the rumba and even the waltz can never hope to be.
The style and character of the folk-dance are neces- sarily affected by the revivalist's attitude towards it, and if one of the objects of the Festival has been to compare the regional dances of the various countries in their pure, traditional form, another and equally important of its aims is to consider the place which revived, synthetic folk-dance can occupy in the modern civilized world.
It must not be thought that ours is the only country where such a revival is taking place. All the Scan- din avian countries have Folk Dance Societies and have organized similar festivals, though on a much smaller scale, in past years. In Germany a great revival of folk-dances is a feature of the National Socialist cultural policy. The Soviet authorities have similarly given every encouragement to the notation and performance of regional dances. In Southern Europe the situation differs in kind rather than in degree. In Yugoslavia, for instance, the national chain dance is firmly established in the ballroom, and the Court Ball at Belgrade used to open with a performance of the Royal Kolo, the long serpentine chain of diplomats and court officials being led by the King and Queen. It is much the same in Roumania and Hungary. In these countries there is no revival because the national tradition needs no reviving. People are proud of their dances as they are of every other side of their national culture, and it may be added that this is an aspect of nationalism the expression of which is likely to do more good than harm to international relations. We hear much of the oppression of minorities in a distracted Europe, but I have yet to learn of a minority which has been forbidden the performance of its dances.
In organizing next week's festival the promoters have been actuated to a considerable degree by the feeling that it will, in a small way, constitute a positive contri- bution to international friendship, a plank in that platform of cultural co-operation which the League of Nations has recommended to its members. The Festival concludes on July 20th with a Folk Dance Ball at which the guests will endeavour to join in turn in the dances of all the participating nations. This is less absurd than it may sound. Did not the Prince of Wales set the example by learning the czardas on his recent visit to Budapest ? When we come to look into them there is a marked family resemblance between all European dances, and I know from personal experience that it is as enjoyable and almost as easy to join with faltering footsteps in a Yugoslav kolo, a Greek syrtos or a Portu- guese vira as in a Paul Jones or Sir Roger de Coverley (a real English Country dance, by the way) at a children's party.
It is to be hoped that ,other countries will follow our example in organizing Festivals in their respective capitals ; and the movement may well have some influence on a wider 'circle than is immediately concerned with folk-dancing. For there has always been inter- change between the ballroom and the greensward.
The English Country dances of today were the Court dances of Tudor and Stuart days when, according to Pepys, Charles II called for " Cuckolds All Awry, the old dance of England." Conversely, the ballroom dances of the nineteenth century, polka, waltz and mazurka were. descended from the peasant dances of Central Europe, the Polish polka and mazur, and the Austrian llindler. Would it be too utopian to dream of a merging of national dances into one great European tradition
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