Border dancing in the fens
As Part of the WHADDON WHITSUN WEEKEND – 3 and 4 June 2017. On Sunday, dancing will be occurring in the streets of Whaddon from 10.30 onwards, there will be four morris sides. These are Devil’s Dyke MM (Cotswold style), Manor Mill Morris (North-west style), SlackMaGirdle (Border morris style) and of course Sutton Masque!
Recently, we attended Chippenham Folk Festival for the very first time. What a fabulous event that was. We spent two days dancing at various spots in the town, along with numerous other sides of varying traditions. We also entered the parade. The atmosphere during the whole event was just sparkling… (As were a few of the beverages we consumed… tis traditional after all to dance at ‘watering holes’). A few photos from the day are shown on our photos at recent events page.
This year the Inter Varsity Folk Dance Festival is taking place in Cambridge from the 24th to 26th February. You can read all about it here. If you like a ceilidh or three (or in fact more!) this is your thing. If like folk dance this is your thing. In fact this could well be your thing whatever your interest in dance is as there is such a huge range of workshops going on.
By very kind permission of Boggarts Breakfast we dance a couple of their dances so I was very excited to find out that they will be leading one of the workshops at IVFDF this year. The chance to meet them and learn from them is one that I do not intend to miss.
Late as usual! But this time by design, we’ll be dancing for the Ely Lates (that is, the Christmas market on the 15th.)
You’ll find us in the marketplace, wherever we can find a space large enough and a crowd tolerant enough not to run us off. Starting from about 6pm ish, and going on until we get tired. By that time, it’ll be dark, so you can spot us by the illuminated hats 🙂
So today we were part of the International Community Celebration which was part of the Newmarket Music Festival. There were international children’s choirs (Canada and Romania), Irish dancers and our good selves. We had a blast of a time and that was not completely because we were dancing next to the Rutland Arms Hotel where we availed ourselves of a beverage or two. The sun shone and the audience were appreciative and we even got some of them to join for a dance.
The truly amazing part was that we were dancing at the Bill Tutte Memorial who broke the Lorenz cipher in WWII. So of course we had to dance Lorenz’s Butterfly lent to us by Boggarts Breakfast who can rest assured that we are taking very good care of it.
On Friday evening we will be at The Lamb and Flag Welney with our good friends Ely and Littleport Riot from 8pm.
Sutton Masque will be dancing at Ely Folk Festival on Sunday 10th of July. We’ll be in front of the Cathedral from 11.15 in the morning, and in the afternoon we’ll be on the festival site itself.
It looks like they’re happy to have us! This was spotted in the festival programme:
But the feeling is mutual. We are very excited to be there and – always subject to acts of God and illness – we should be fielding a decent sized side of 8 enthusiastic dancers.
Well it has been far too long since I last put fingers to keyboard in this place. A bit of illness and other such happenings in life and before you know it, six weeks have gone by.
Enough of that though, I should get onto explaining the title of this piece of rambling nonsense. So the first of the firsts will be tonight when we venture into another county for the first time. Yes, Norfolk will be subjected to our presence at the King’s Arms in Shouldham from 7:30pm.
The second of the firsts will be this Sunday when we shall join the host of other morris sides dancing for Ely Folk Festival. We are very excited about this as it is our first festival booking, not just our first time at Ely. We hope though that this will be far from the last.
