The UK's largest association of morris and traditional dance teams
Article in The Telegraph, “Now a century on from their deaths a modern day troupe of young morris dancers are heading out to the Somme in July to perform at the cemeteries and memorials where the names of their forefathers are recorded. The dancers are part of a side called ‘Fool’s Gambit’ whose 16 members hail from across the country and are aged between 17 and 25.”
The Joint Morris Organisations welcome the return of Dancing England as an opportunity to showcase the best of our broad range of traditional dance to the highest standard. We look forward to some of our member teams participating and wish you every success.
If you had £1,000 to spend supporting morris, sword and traditional dancing, what would you do?
In addition to the current Bursary scheme, we have earmarked the funds from selling our new CDs to be used for new projects that will help young dancers. We expect this to be about £1,000 so we need your ideas. It could be something that you want to organise or an idea that could be arranged locally or nationally such workshops, dance tutors, or kit for a school side. Whatever it is, we want to hear about it. Please contact any member of the committee to put your ideas forward.
Buy the CDs directly from The Morris Federation and £10 from each sale – that’s everything except postage costs – goes to this fund.
Details of our annual day of dance and AGM are now available to download.
The day and AGM is being hosted by Mortimer’s Morris in Nottingham on 24 September 2016.
Is it just this winter, or are lots of the old ‘greats’ dying off? Maybe it’s just an age thing. We dutifully made our wills when we married (both been through divorce so it seemed good advice), naming parents and siblings and percentages of total inheritance etc. And sat back feeling pleased with ourselves.
But we have never given a thought about what will happen to the morris ‘stuff’ that we have. When I think hard about it, I realise that although our families know that we are mad about morris, they may not feel the need to pass on any photos or paraphernalia to one of the Morris Orgs. There was a recent incident of a notable person within the tradition who died and their family were found to be turfing all their books into a skip. Fortunately, someone within the morris happened by and was able to perform a rescue mission.
You may not think that you have much of interest to anyone else, but your photographs of dancing over the years, old kit, bits of notation, collections of badges, old programmes, musical instruments etc, may be worth considering. It’s all much less traumatic if you leave instructions.
The Federation is happy to store items in the archive, or redirect them to a more suitable home so that they are not lost to future researchers into the morris.
We had our first legacy donation last year too, to start a research project on women in the morris, such a lovely way to celebrate a life spent dancing.
So, why not stop and think about death for a moment, and let your family know what you want to happen to your morris ‘stuff’. Don’t let it end up in a skip. And maybe mention a legacy donation.
And here’s to the next life where there will be no creaking joints, no hangovers and no team politics!