By Hana Sakurai Wernham, First Year English
On the 30th of April, my flatmate and I proudly told our incredulous friends that we were fully intent on waking up at 3:30AM the next morning, catching the last night bus into the city and scaling Brandon Hill to watch Morris dancing until sunrise.
They didn’t believe that we would even be able to wake up, let alone venture out into the cool night to probably become unwilling stars of A24’s next folk-horror film documentary. So when my alarm rang out at 3:30AM on the 1st of May, I slipped out of bed fired with a determination to prove them wrong.
The first of May, known by some as May Day, by others as Beltane, marks the midway point between the spring equinox and summer solstice. It marks the triumphant arrival of summer and in Bristol is celebrated, I have discovered, with much verve.
I consider myself folk-adjacent. I have historically found Morris dancing charming but a bit weird, tales of local mythos enchanting but obviously not true, folk music lovely but a little boring. I’ve not transformed into a fully-fledged folk fanatic (yet) but I have certainly come away a little more convinced of its magic than I was before.
Bus timings meant that my flatmate and I were a little early to the May morning affairs, so we sat on a bench in the dark as we awaited the promised meeting time of 4:30AM. The jingling of approaching bells, growing in volume as dancers walked towards us up the hill, was a comforting sign of human life in the before-dawn black.
A crowd of about 60 people had gathered by the time it all kicked off. The earliest dances were the most magical; in the half-light, performers’ faces were obscured and the sounds of bells, accordions, and colliding sticks, struck more resonantly as the darkness sidelined the visual for the auditory.
There were multiple Morris dancing troupes, or sides, performing at Brandon Hill. While I’d not given it much thought before, I did think that being a man past the age of sixty was a prerequisite for the role. I was quickly proven wrong.
Among the groups were Heaps Morris, an all-female Morris side clad in very charming pink tights. Then there was Molly No-Mates, a drag king Molly dancing troupe with waistcoats and sharpied-on moustaches. They sported gay and trans flag handkerchiefs, and I was surprised to see an LGBT+ presence in such a traditional practice.
But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. The revival of English folk practices is inevitably bound up in questions of national identity. Who are we, considering our past and present? What kind of person is Morris dancing ‘for’? It’s not all that surprising that those with politicised identities are interested in disrupting and reshaping what it means to be ‘traditionally English’.
I would direct those concerned about the so-called loss of English culture to any park, community hall or common on key dates in the pagan calendar. There they will find that English culture is alive and well. Indeed, if the Farages of society spent less time complaining about the erosion of tradition and more time on Headfirst, the world might be a nicer place.
As the hours passed, I learnt that Morris dancing is much trickier than it looks. One wrong move and suddenly your partner is behind you, the symmetry of the dance has been broken, and you’ve flung your stick to the floor (or worse, accidentally thwacked someone with it). Someone forgets to shout ‘chorus!’ and you’re all jigging in the wrong configuration entirely. It’s organised frolicking easily turned to chaos.
The musicians hold it all down, though. As long as your fingers aren’t too stiff from the cold, folk melodies flow smoothly from muscle memory. They are complicated and decorated but they’re supported by unrelenting drumming that keeps everyone in time.
After the sun had risen and the dancing had stopped, I went back to bed. When I woke, I was unsure whether what had transpired a few hours earlier was some kind of mad dream. So a couple of days later, I went in search of more folk festivities to confirm I hadn’t made all this stuff up.
On the first Saturday of May, Jack in the Green, a nine-foot-tall foliage-clad man (beast?) makes his way through Bristol, followed by a procession of leafy musicians and members of the public. I caught Jack in Kingsdown near campus after the procession had stopped at a nearby pub for lunch and a pint.
I followed Jack in the Green to Redland. Along the way, he stops at various checkpoints and people come out of their houses to watch his procession dance around him. Watching with me was a slightly confused American dad who tried his best to answer his young daughter’s queries about Jack: ‘Who is he? Why is he here? What if he gets stuck? How can he walk?’ The dad, stumped, answered after a pause, ‘you’re asking some really good and hard questions.’
There were girls in green tailing the procession, skipping around and wishing passersby a happy summer. There is something very moving about this act of honouring the simple passing of the seasons, the always-triumphant arrival of the sun.
The unglamorous truth, however, is that Jack is a middle-aged man dressed as a tree. Even still, I think there must be real magic in the fabric of Mayday.
Featured Image: Hana Sakurai Wernham
