Nothing brings visitors here like a reference to Morris dancing. Which is borderline weird given (a) that I get mercilessly mocked (even by other blog contributors) for loving Morris dancing and (b) that I know very little about it and rarely get a chance to even see any.
One thing I do know about Morris dancing is that the old idea that it came from Morocco and/ or Spain (i.e “Moorish”) is widely agreed to be a fiction.
I’ve never been wholly convinced by the “fiction” viewpoint. Ok, the past is always fictionalised. But, people always moved around the accessible world, so any concepts of ancient cultural forms being somehow distinct is absurd.
So, I’m – partly just for the sake of argument – going to dispute the “not at all moorish” idea, here.
There’s plenty of archaeological evidence of trade with the Mediterranean before the Roman invasion. I can easily imagine pre-Roman Brits – let alone medieval villagers – being so impressed by the marvellous otherness of Phoenician traders that they recreated what they remembered, in their own idiom. After the crusades, there must have been many ex-soldiers who had absorbed a fair bit of North African culture in their travels.
Flowing white clothes, streaming coloured ribbons, male-only dancing, the ways in which percussion sounds are generated – it all seems pretty damn “North African” to me. Credit where it’s due, I think.
(Plus in your faces, BNP, with your ludicrous attempts to co-opt traditional English cultural forms into your racist project, as if English culture was somehow NOT formed through constant migrations and invasions.)
Here are some you-tube clips of North African men dancing in a way that could go on as Morris dancing without rehearsal.
Iraqi men dancing
Kurdish man dancing
And here’s an American Morris group, acquitting themselves well enough at the art to show that nationality doesn’t matter anyway.