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

Conclusion

| 261 Conclusion I hate to admit it, but I do think English Country Dancing is thriving more in the States. —Colin Hume, British ECD choreographer and teacher, 2002 I certainly hope . . . [for] a third revival in folk music. . . . A very encouraging thing is that there are some young musicians now. . . . Now if they can find a dance audience to play for of their own age—that would be the best thing. —Peter Barnes, ECD dance musician, 2004 London, June 2005. It is Thursday evening, “Beginners’ Night” for English Country Dancing at Cecil Sharp House in Camden Town, a North London district with a lively and youthful punk nightlife. The House—an impressive, heritagelisted , three-story, Georgian, purpose-built edifice—sits a few blocks away from the tube station in a prosperous, leafy residential area midway between Regents Park and Primrose Hill. Positioned on a triangle formed by the diagonal intersection of Regents Park Road with Gloucester Avenue, the House prominently faces outward from the triangle. As the national organization committed to folk song and dance from around the world, Cecil Sharp House hosts a range of folk dances, and this night is no exception. Downstairs in the basement, one room is packed with perhaps forty to fifty young people doing lively Irish set dances to recorded music; another small room is filled with a heterogeneous crowd of perhaps fifteen taking a flamenco dance class. But as the home of English Country Dance, the Folk Song and Dance Society reserves the main dance hall on the ground floor—a spacious, chandeliered Grand Ball Room—for its country dance session. The venue could not contrast more with the dances downstairs . There are about a dozen dancers milling about the hall, which is large enough to accommodate several hundred dancers; a few more will trickle in, but the small “crowd” accounts for the low level of energy in the room—and 262 | Conclusion in the dance. Most dancers are forty-something to sixty-something, although a couple of young people who are local college students hover anxiously on the sides. They are clearly neophytes. A small platform erected in the middle rear hosts the “band”—a fiddler or accordion player with a person on a keyboard—and the caller, a sprightly, older woman, Brenda Godrich, who is married to the fiddler. (Later a somewhat younger man takes a turn at calling .) Beginners’ Night is meant to welcome new dancers, but at least half the dancers are familiar to me from past years. The caller focuses her teaching on patterns of the dance, not the styling or body carriage. And the music has a raw energy that is mirrored in the repertoire , which alternates American squares, traditional village dances, and older, statelier dances from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The mixture of country dances—English and American and historical and traditional —and the apparent indifference to styling make the evening resemble a “kick-up-your-heels” ceilidh or barn dance, though the presence of such a small group in the vast hall makes the tenor of the evening much more sedate than a barn dance. New York, November 2005. The entrance to the weekly English Country Dance sponsored by Country Dance * New York (CD*NY), the lineal descendant of the New York branch of the English Folk Dance Society founded by Cecil Sharp in 1915, is quite unassuming and easy to miss. Located on Seventh Avenue on the northwest corner of 13th Street at the margins of the West (Greenwich) Village and Chelsea, the entrance to the dance is through a weathered side door of the Metropolitan-Duane Methodist Episcopal Church. Located across from a Gay-Lesbian Cultural Center in the politically progressive Village, the church describes itself as a “reconciling congregation.” Taped to the church door is a notice printed from someone’s home computer on a plain piece of paper announcing that there is dancing downstairs. One enters, ascends a few steps, and then passes ten yards down a hallway to a staircase. Descending the stairs two flights, music begins to be heard: it is lyrical and schmaltzy in three-quarters time, and one can discern the sound of a violin, piano, and recorder. The music is Baroque, with an elegant, smooth pace, perhaps 100 beats per minute. (Square or contra dance—American Country Dance—is usually more like 120 beats per minute.) Reaching the basement, one enters a gym. More formally called Metropolitan Duane Hall, the room is bare and the...