| FIGURES OF THE DANCE | |||
| Dance Around | Big Star | Small Chain | Circles |
| Small Stars | Rights and Lefts | Special Centre | Final Figure |
This and the Abram dance are the only two known circle dances in the NW tradition. As collected it was done at a walk. Wakefield walk? I think not. In and out of the repertoire as it’s best done with a balanced team of 4 men 4 women. The “Mulberry Bush” tunes harks back to the fact that the nursery rhyme originates from a bush reputedly growing in the middle of the exercise yard at Wakefield house of correction, or HMP Wakefield as it’s now known. Curiously one of the oldest trees in Carr Lodge park is a mulberry though it seems unlikely that there is any connection there. Collected @ 1970 TO.
MemoriesA long time ago when my kids were still too young to be left at home we were out at a gala. Up comes the Hindley dance. As I passed the kids on the first run round the circle I could see a look of horror on their faces. Coming back as I passed they yelled out "Dad it's a single step! You're doing a polka!" "I know that" I yelled as I sailed on "You know that. It's just taking a while for the message to get down to my legs". Cleethorpes and Hindley seemed at one time to be a recipe for disaster. Our reputation as the "Zero fault" Morris came unstuck so many times! OK some were unforced errors, as Derek would point out "It's not easy to dance accurately when you've just had a bell fly off into your eye". Maybe it's the strange, well to us anyway, use of a circle dance in a processional tradition. I mean you just don't get anywhere. You go into a centre with Barbara as your partner you come out and there's Pat. How does that happen? Trefor screams out "AGAIN". In we go when you come out you've got Ken as a partner - it gets worse! To make sense of the dance we insist we must have a matched set, four men and four women. One day at Cleethorpes we figured we would lay the ghost. But not enough men! The regiment of women held a council of war in the pub. The proposed solution was that Meg danced as a man, wearing a spare cap as an indication of her switched gender. We did the dance, perfect performance. Meg's walking around asking why the men find it so difficult. The two men and a dog watching have no idea of why the team are punching the air and swapping high fives, and Barbara slips away to get a badge made that reads "I'm dancing as a man". Theres no way she's going to wear a cap. Whitby one year. The captain Cook monument. Filled with confidence the team elect to do Hindley. Doug gets to call and gets distracted. The call goes out for the next figure and the team mill about in confusion and decide the safest bet is to sit down whilst Doug gets his act together. Doug realises the problem within a few milliseconds. The figure belongs to another dance! Team 10, caller null points. Doug offers to fall on his sticks, and no one in the team thinks this would be such a bad idea. Some time later Doug runs into another dancer down at the Plough. "The curse of Hindley struck again". "Yes I know" says the other dancer "Every other dancer I meet insists on telling me about it". Exit Doug planning a career switch.