Molly dance
Molly dancing is a form of English Morris dance from East Anglia, traditionally done by out-of-work ploughboys over the winter. First attested in the 1820s, the tradition was especially associated with Boxing Day and Plough Monday. It was largely ignored by folk dance collectors, who did not consider it worthy of study; they collected only a handful of dances before the practice died out in the 1930s. From the 1970s, there was a revival of interest in molly dancing; in 1977 two Cambridgeshire teams resumed dancing on Plough Monday and many other dance teams have since included molly dance in their repertoire, of which the Seven Champions have been particularly influential.
History
[edit]
Molly dancing is a dance tradition from East Anglia, first attested in the 1820s. The first recorded use of the word Molly in relation to this tradition was in 1866.<ref>Template:Cite encyclopedia</ref> The dance was performed on Boxing Day (26 December) and Plough Monday (the Monday after 6 January).Template:Sfn The tradition had died out by 1940.Template:Sfn The term Molly dancing probably derives from the word Molly meaning an effeminate, homosexual, or cross-dressing man, referring to the invariable presence of men dressed in women's clothing among the dancers; an alternative possibility is that it is a corruption of Morris dance.Template:Sfn
In 1911 Cecil Sharp interviewed a man from Little Downham about Plough Monday dancing, but he did not consider it worthy of further study, and the practice was largely ignored by collectors of folk dances until the 1930s.Template:Sfn In 1930, Joseph Needham and Arthur Peck collected four Molly dances from a dancer from Girton and a concertina player from Histon, near Cambridge;Template:Sfn they continued to collect information about Molly dancing over the following three years.Template:Sfn William Palmer recorded a broom dance performed by the Little Downham dancers in 1933.Template:Sfn In 1978, Russell Wortley and Cyril Papworth published four dances collected from the Comberton Molly dancers.Template:Sfn
The recorded dances are largely ordinary social dances of the period, rather than special molly dances.Template:Sfn Needham and Peck proposed that a previous dance tradition, perhaps a kind of sword dance, had at some point been lost, and molly dancing had been revived using social dances.Template:Sfn Most commonly, molly dances were danced in longways sets and were accompanied by popular tunes.Template:Sfn The music was provided by a fiddler – or, from the latter half of the nineteenth century, concertina- or accordion-player – who was usually hired for the occasion rather than being a farmworker like the other performers.Template:Sfn
Traditions
[edit]Traditionally Molly dancing took place over the Christmas season,Template:Sfn particularly on Boxing Day and Plough Monday (the first Monday after Epiphany).Template:Sfn Pre-revival molly dancing was an all-male tradition, though women sometimes joined in the dancing.Template:Sfn Unemployed farmworkers danced both to entertain themselves and as a way of making some money in a season where there was little demand for agricultural labour.Template:Sfn In some cases, the money raised was used for charity – as for instance in Brandon Creek, near Littleport, where until the 1850s it was used to buy food for local widows.Template:Sfn
Molly dancers dressed in ordinary clothes decorated with ribbons and rosettes, wore top hats, and blacked their faces as a form of disguise.Template:Sfn One or more dancers dressed in women's clothing – in some accounts half of the dancers were dressed as women.Template:Sfn Along with the dancers, molly teams were accompanied by various other men who performed specific roles, including an umbrella man, to protect the musician from the weather, a sweeper who carried a broom and would clear a space for the dancers, and the man responsible for the money box.Template:Sfn The Molly team seen by William Palmer at Little Downham in 1933 consisted of six men, one dressed as a woman; of the remaining five, one carried a broom and money box, and one played the accordion. The musician wore ordinary clothes, while the other men wore frock coats and top hats; all five had blackened faces and wore ribbons on their clothes.Template:Sfn
Revival
[edit]
Molly dancing was revived in the late 1970s, when teams began to once again perform the preserved dances.Template:Sfn At this time, Cotswold-style morris dancing was the most common type of display dance performed by folk dancers; a growing number of people who disliked Cotswold morris were looking for alternatives.Template:Sfn
By 1976, Russell Wortley was teaching Molly dance based on the material he had collected,Template:Sfn and in 1977 the Cambridge Morris Men resumed Molly dancing on Plough Monday.Template:Sfn The Mepal Molly Men, who based their dancing off of the recollection of two of the dancers from Little Downham in the 1930s, also began to perform in 1977.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Another early side, the Seven Champions, were inspired by the style of the Shropshire Beldams, a Welsh border morris side; the Champions became one of the most influential teams in the molly dance revival.Template:Sfn By the year 2000, over 20 dance teams included molly dancing in their repertoire.Template:Sfn
Modern molly groups tend to reject many of the conventions of Cotswold morris (e.g. the white clothes, bells and handkerchiefs); stylistically they favour more simple choreography, heavier stepping, and are described by Elaine Bradtke as "more rough and wild than graceful".Template:Sfn Many restrict their performances to the winter season, or specifically celebrate Plough Monday.Template:Sfn