City Folk: English Country Dance and the Politics of the Folk in Modern America

4 Planting a Colony in America

90 | 4 Planting a Colony in America Miss Burchenal and all that crowd know what poor stuff they are passing off as folk-dance and they know that if I come & see it I shall have to show them—and those they have taught—how wrong they all are and so queer their pitch. —Cecil Sharp to Maud Karpeles, January 8, 1915, New York City On December 23, 1914, the SS Lusitania docked in New York Harbor bearing renowned folklorist Cecil Sharp, chair of the English Folk Dance Society. The man cut an impressive figure. Sharp’s square-jawed visage, firm posture, and formal dress belied his fifty-four years and the chronic asthma that left him often weakened and sick. Mrs. May Eliot Hobbes’s description of him in 1911 when he entered a drawing room captured the imposing sense of the man: “the piercing blue eyes—falcon-like—the strong nose, the firm set of the head on the shoulders, the superb carriage, which he retained even when more bent with increasing age. There was a controlled suppleness in the whole body, loosely knit without being wobbly and this is what made his dancing unique in its grace and ease. It might be summed up in two words— ‘line and carriage.’”1 Sharp was not, however, the first English dancing master to visit Progressive Era America. His arrival had been preceded by visits from three other teacher-performers who were at once his protégés and competitors, and they embodied different expressions for the dance. Sharp prevailed, and his victory enshrined a particularly constrained bodily expression for English Country Dance that had a lasting impact on the shape and form of the dance in the United States. As important, though, Sharp put in place a leadership that embodied the nascent country dance movement with traditional gender roles and as white, Anglo-Saxon, and elite. Planting a Colony in America | 91 Mary Neal and Florence Warren The first two English folk dance teachers who went to America preceded Sharp by four years. On December 3, 1910, the SS Arabic set sail from Liverpool with Mary Neal, the fifty-year-old leader of the Espérance Girls’ Club, and the group’s leading dancer, the twenty-four-year-old Florence Warren. The girls had developed a remarkable performance morris side, and Warren had joined Neal on the trip to help demonstrate the dance. In the next three months, Neal led a triumphant tour of New York and Boston, awakening new interest in the old English dances among public-school educators and Anglophile reformers . The timing of their visit and practical considerations made morris dance rather than country dance Neal’s focus, though the one quickened later American interest in the other. Kimber and the more flamboyant and showy morris dance had excited the early interest in English folk dance, and in 1910 the Playford repertoire remained largely unknown. Equally to the point, morris could Cecil Sharp. (Reproduced courtesy of EFDSS) 92 | Planting a Colony in America be demonstrated by individual dancers; unlike the country dances, it did not require a set of at least four and often several more dancers. Eight days after departing from Liverpool, the two women arrived in New York to a rude awakening: Neal’s feud with Sharp had preceded them, and all their engagements had been canceled. Neal was told that a friend of Cecil Sharp’s in New York had gone to all the societies and educators in New York and told them that the education authorities in the United Kingdom had “thrown [them] over.” Sharp’s “friend” appears to have been Elizabeth Burchenal. As early as September 1908, Sharp’s publications and public presence had attracted Burchenal’s attention, and she had written him while collecting dances in England. “Especially” desiring to “see some of the morris men dancers in the country” during her time in Oxfordshire, Burchenal had sought Sharp’s help in winning her access to Kimber.2 Nothing more is known of their exchange at the time, but she had probably returned the favor. Burchenal returned to England in 1910 (though it is not clear that she attended the summer school) and concluded that Sharp and not Neal best represented the English tradition. As she wrote Sharp a year later, “It was a great thorn in my side to have Miss Neal here last winter representing herself as...