Comments | watervole: A north west morris dance

watervole

A north west morris dance

Jan 18, 2009 21:22

“CORFE MULLEN”

Corfe Mullen is old English for ‘the mill in the gap’.

Many of the figures in this dance are inspired by the movement of mill machinery: the water wheel rotating, the cogs interacting, the movement of mill stones turning against each other. (I originally named the figures with names like ‘cogs’ but eventually decided that ( Read more... )

folk customs, morris dancing, folk

Comments 9

reapermum January 18 2009, 22:11:56 UTC

'The Keel Row' which was a well known song and dance tune from the North West of England.

I've always thought of the Keel Row as a North Eastern song, specifically Tyneside, about the keels taking coal out of the river to load the east coast colliers taking it to London.

watervole January 19 2009, 05:29:55 UTC

You're correct! I'm very bleary right now. Sleeping badly - I'll go back and correct.

Morris/Mumming Workshop sweetheartwhale January 18 2009, 22:46:07 UTC

Consider yourself on call for Redemption 11. There is always a lot of interest in the folklore related panels and the Hafla, as we've seen, which is partly Arabic folk dance/baladi, has become a fixture. I'll run the choices by the committee once we have a list but personally I'd say we could maybe have something like "traditional folk dances and plays" under one roof. Could you bring an introduction to both Morris and Mumming into one 2 hour workshop or would they need separating?. A bit of history,say and quite a lot of dance. I've done Morris workshops at Days of Dance in Saltaire and they were *very* popular with dancers from other fields.My tribal teacher ( Chris Ogden of Samara Dance and 400 roses- google her!)has done tribal dance routines based on Morris .And I saw an article in the Mail today, BTW about an upcoming film on Morris dancing - a sort of dance documentary. The director has found that, contrary to expectations/popular belief, a lot of younger people were interested in the dance ( ... )

Re: Morris/Mumming Workshop watervole January 19 2009, 05:36:10 UTC

Mumming and morris (with the possible exception of sword dances) have very different roots. Not really good to combine in one session.

Mumming costumes in chaos makes sense, but I can't decide whether the actual play would work better on stage or in the bar...

I may do some of this at Odyssey, but I'm sure Redemption can get something too. There's a lot of material to use!

(there's an outside chance I'm in the crowd scenes in that movie - I was there for part of the shooting and I was in costume...)

were_gopher January 18 2009, 23:36:15 UTC

HAve you seen this?

http://www.morrismovie.com/

Workshop sweetheartwhale January 19 2009, 11:09:38 UTC

oks - A Morris dance workshop and a mumming play workshop/reheearsal then. the idea of mumming in the bar appeals. We could collect for the charity :)

Re: Workshop watervole January 19 2009, 11:52:37 UTC

Naturally, the collector is always a scripted character "Tosspot" and "Little Jimmy Jack" are common ones.

decemberleaf January 19 2009, 12:34:28 UTC

Corfe Mullen is old English for ‘the mill in the gap’. So "mullen" = "mill" in Old English? "This one is mostly for decemberleaf" : Thanks, Judith!!

watervole January 19 2009, 12:44:57 UTC

If you ever see a picture of Corfe Castle (which we often get tourists looking for in our village, though it's actually half an hour's dive away), you'll see that it is truly 'the castle in the gap'.

There's more than one gap in Dorset - grin.