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68 | 3 Orderly Bodies: Dancing London, 1900–1914 I’ll try anything once, except incest and morris dancing. —Linzi Drew, a British stripper (also attributed to Oscar Wilde, Sir Arnold Bax, Sir Thomas Beecham , and George Bernard Shaw, among others)1 Elizabeth Burchenal seems to have been the first twentieth-century American to voyage to London in search of folk dance roots, going perhaps as early as 1903. Around 1903 or 1904, she traveled from village to village in Denmark, Norway, Germany, Sweden, France, Ireland, and Spain collecting folk dances that she subsequently published in New York. She then visited England to see morris dancing at Bampton and Bidford, which Cecil Sharp had only recently collected and published.2 Burchenal was, though, but the first of a cadre of American pilgrims of English origin in search of a usable folk past—both of their own roots and of an Anglo-American tradition that they could, in the most benevolent construction , “share” with newcomers. The roster of visitors illustrates the elite character of the revival project as progressive reform, but it also illustrates the larger tensions in this gender- and social-class-inflected Progressive-Edwardian-era project between social (and socialist) reform and paternalist if not imperial (and imperious) social control. Pittsburgh’s Mrs. James Dawson Callery’s husband was president of Baragua Sugar Company and chairman of the board of the Philadelphia Company, the Duquense Light Company, and the Pittsburgh Railway Company. Helen Osborne Storrow’s husband, James Jackson Storrow of Boston (he and his wife lived on an estate in neighboring Lincoln), was an investment banker and social reformer, and he and his wife were major philanthropists to heritage, environmental, and Girl Scouts projects.3 Few of the pilgrims may have been as wealthy as Mrs. Callery or Helen Storrow, and most worked for a living as part of the growing (semi)professional class made up of people such as teachers and social workers, but they Orderly Bodies: Dancing London, 1900–1914 | 69 were all sufficiently wealthy and privileged to afford to travel to Europe on holiday and to do so first class. Mary Wood Hinman, for instance, was a leading settlement house worker from Chicago’s Hull House. In the years before World War I, and before leaving to try her hand at acting in Los Angeles, she ran pageants and programs of folk and interpretative dance at the progressive Francis Parker School, where one of her young protégés was the distinguished modern dancer Doris Humphrey.4 Not surprisingly, the largest contingent of American devotees of English Country Dance came from the city prized for its Anglophile elites with English heritage: Boston. In addition to Storrow, they included Harvard professor of dramatic literature George P. Baker and two adventuresome enthusiasts who were introduced to ECD on the Storrow lawn in Lincoln in 1913 or 1914, Louise Chapin and Dorothy Bolles. These four Bostonians later took on major institutional roles as ECD organizers and dance teachers in the United States.5 Americans visiting England to learn country dance encountered an exciting movement, but they remained largely oblivious to an underlying fractiousness that swirled about Sharp. In fact, the Americans were sometimes unwittingly the subject of disputes, but in truth, sometimes they appeared deliberately to aggravate the conflict. The most profound and earliest dispute involved the two people who took the lead in the revival in England, Mary Neal and Cecil Sharp. Their relationship began at about the same time as Burchenal would have arrived in their midst, although there is no evidence she met with either of them until a few years later. Mary Neal The English folk dance revival may properly be said to have begun with Mary Neal, a woman every bit as imposing and outspoken as Sharp. Sharp had put his experience with the Headington Morrismen behind him and moved on to collecting folk song. It was Neal’s success with folk dance that reawakened his interest in dance in 1905. Born on June 5, 1860, and christened Sophia Clara, Mary Neal was the daughter of a well-to-do Birmingham button manufacturer. Tall, curly haired, and, according to her lifelong close friend, the suffragette Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, “extremely emaciated,” Neal’s “vivid blue eyes” lit up a room. “She brought into the atmosphere the sparkle of a clear, frosty, winter day.” She was also a woman with strong opinions and a sharp tongue (no pun intended) that made her quite Sharp’s equal...

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