Dance, Authenticity and Cultural Memory: The Politics of Embodiment

Theresa Jill Buckland

Yearbook for Traditional Music, Vol. 33. (2001), pp. 1-16.

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 DANCE, AUTHENTICITY AND CULTURAL MEMORY:
THE POLITICS OF EMBODIMENT
By Theresa Jill Buckland

The recent shift of scholarly focus towards the body and performance has helped to
raise the profile of dance as a significant academic site for cultural investigation
and to open up channels for dialogue with other disciplines in the humanities and
social sciences. Chapters on dance may now be found in collections on gender, the
body and ethnography, for example and there is abundant evidence of the impact
of poststructuralist and postmodemist thinking in mainstream dance literature
itself.' This interest may engage with ethnographic approaches to dance to
formulate questions around "whose body in performance?'so that issues of
gender, social status, kinship, ethnicity and power can be addressed, as well as
more reflexive concerns related to bodily experience. From an ethnological
perspective, such contemporary aspects of study in relation to the moving body
may be examined diachronically, particularly in dance practices where the past is
perceived as being of key significance.
It can be argued that dance has a particular propensity to foreground cultural
memory as embodied practice by virtue of its predominantly somatic modes of
transmission. Indeed in traditional forms of danced display, it could be argued that
longevity of human memory is publicly enacted, demonstrating the ethereality of
human existence and the continuity of human experience, as successive
generations re-present the dancing. Not all traditional forms of dance ceremony
can be interpreted as functioning in this manner, of course, and I would not wish to
align my argument with that of Bloch's Cartesian understanding of formalised
movement in ritual (1989 [1974]), which casts dance as essentially unchanging,
non-discursive and socially non-transformative. Nonetheless, there are certain
traditional forms of dance, which participants, as performers and audience alike,
have celebrated as manifestations of cultural stability and continuity.
Most frequently, in Europe, such dance forms have been associated with the
classic folk paradigm. According to this framework, the longevity of ceremonial
dance performances within a community signals evidence of authentic ritual, more
often than not a speculation often accompanied by inter-connected assertions of
ancientness, purity and legitimacy and evolutionist notions of pagan origins.2 Such
was certainly the case with two unusual dance ceremonies in England which I
studied during the 1970s and 1980s.~Related in generic type, the Abbots Bromley
Horn Dance in the county of Staffordshire in the north midlands and, the Britannia
Coco-Nut Dancers of Bacup, further north in the Rossendale Valley of Lancashire

' As examples of the former, see Wolff 1990, Sherlock 1993 and Thomas 1997; of the latter,
see Foster 1996, Moms 1996 and Desmond 1997.
For a consideration of the concept of authenticity within the development of folklore
studies, see Bendix 1997.
The fieldwork to which this discussion is related was undertaken at the Institute of Dialect
and Folk Life studies, University of Leeds in Abbots Bromley from 1974-1976 and in
Bacup from 1977 to 1983 as part of undergraduate and doctoral degrees respectively. This
article draws together two papers presented at symposia of the ICTM Study Group in
Ethnochoreology in Copenhagen, 1988 and Skiemiewice, 1994.
2 / 2001 YEARBOOK FOR TRADITIONAL MUSIC

had long been accorded folk status as former pagan rituals. Both practices adhere
to Cecil Sharp's oft-cited criteria of English ritual dance (1975 [1909]: 10-12) in
that they were:

1. spectacular in the sense of being performed for an audience;

2. danced at a particular point in the local calendar;
3. involved special costume;
4. performed usually by men;
5. enacted by specially selected performers;
6. known in performance detail only to the elite group.

In this present consideration of authenticity and dance, my aim is not to

change the designation of the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance and the Britannia
Coconut Dance from 'ancient ritual' to 'invented tradition' (see Hobsbawm and
Ranger 1983), nor is it solely to explore whose purposes such a protestation of
mythic origin might serve (see Cohen 1985: 98-99). Both dance ceremonies have
indeed been challenged, by writers outside their communities of enactment, as to
their 'real' as opposed to professed age. More detailed discussion on their
res~ective written and oral histories can be found elsewhere4 but I will. of
nedessity, later return to this tension between historicity and cultural m e m o r y . ' ~ ~
focus principally, however, concerns the performers of 'authentic tradition': with
respect to the horn dance, in terms of social identity and place, and in the case of
the coco-nut dance, with regard to local history as an embodied practice.
Situated in the county of Staffordshire amid mainly agricultural land, the
village of Abbots Bromley is noted internationally for its annual custom of Horn
Dance Day, which takes place on the first Monday after the first Sunday after 4
September. The performake consists of twelve participants: six dancers each of
whom carries a set of horns mounted on a wooden pole, a man dressed up as a
woman known as Maid Marion, a fool in a mediaeval-style jester's costume, a
hobby-horse, a boy carrying a small bow and arrow and two musicians-a
melodeon player and a child on a triangle. The distinctive feature of the custom is
that the horns are no ordinary red deer antlers but those of reindeer, Rangifer
Tarandus (L). Weighing between some 25 and 16 lbs, the span of the six sets of
antlers ranges from 101 cm to 77 cm. A radiocarbon date test (Buckland 1980) run
on the little white horn established in 1976 that this particular horn was possibly a
thousand years old, although reindeer have been extinct in Britain since the end of
the Pleistocene era (Corbet 1974: 182-83) until re-introduced in the second half of
the twentieth century. The custom, however, is attested well before this date, the
earliest detailed reference occurring in 1686 (Plot: 434) that speaks of its practice
'within memory'. This is corroborated by an annotation to a copy of Plot's text by
a locally born man stating that he had often seen the dance performed before the
Civil War (began 1642). There is a further reference to a hobby horse dance in
1532 which Heaney (1987) has suggested was likely to have been performed at
Abbots Bromley within living memory, taking its occurrence back possibly to the
fifteenth century, although, as he states, this is no proof that the horns and hobby-

For the Horn Dance see Rhodes (1934), Rice (1939: 67-91), Cawte (1978: 65-68, 76-79)
and Buckland (1976, 1980). For the Britannia tradition see Buckland (1990) and
forthcoming.
BUCKLAND DANCE. AUTHENTICITY & CULTURAL MEMORY 13

horse were associated in performance at this date. Subsequent written references

prior to the nineteenth century are complex in their relationship to one another (see
Buckland 1980 and Cawte 1978: 65-79) but it appears most likely that with
undoubted breaks this custom has been practised over a period of some four
hundred years and, as such, is unique in its recorded longevity.
The choreographed movement content consists of a single file processional, a
circling figure with interweaving and a meeting, falling back and crossing over of
two opposing files, using a walking step throughout. The pedestrian nature of the
dance is no doubt largely dictated by the weight of the horns which are carried
from the village up to neighboring Blithfield Hall and around the surrounding
farms during the day. Ln recent years, a van has helped conserve the dancers'
energy between more distanced locations on the route but the physical strength
needed to perform throughout the day should not be underestimated. The presence
of the antlers, regardless of the relative choreographic simplicity of the custom,
attracts audiences not only from across Britain but from all over the world. The
appearance of an audience from outside the village is though by no means a recent
development. Even in Plot's account of the seventeenth century, reference is made
to the 'forraigners too, that came to see it' (1686: 434). As early as 1841, the Horn
Dancers themselves were well aware of the age of their dance when, to watching
audiences as they traveled 'about the country, to Races', they distributed copies of
Plot's d e ~ c r i ~ t i oBy
n . ~the end of the nineteenth century, special trips were being
made by local learned societies to view the horns and there were articles about the
custom published in the national papers and in the journal of the Folk-Lore Society
which had both a national and international membership (see, for example, Burne
1896). The existence of this rural custom with the unique reindeer antlers caused
many scholars to speculate upon a possible pagan origin (Buckland 1980: 5-6).
The interpretation of the dance as a pagan fertility custom of ancient pre-Christian
gods only added to the villagers' understanding of the dance's antiquity. Further
mystique was added with the mention of Celtic gods and the ideas of scholars
became common currency in the village as they filtered through the media
(Buckland 1976: 69-73). Abbots Brornley became almost synonymous with its
reindeer antlers to the outside world. Increasingly the horns became viewed as
symbols of local identity and questions of ownership and control of the horns were
undoubtedly boosted by their growing fame.
Status and economic benefits often accrued to the performers of
ceremonial dance traditions in England in the nineteenth century (see Chandler
1993: 119-146). The leader of a ceremonial dance tradition would be able to draw
upon the habitually large families, and friends living close by, within a village or
town to organise the dance event. Kinship and residence patterns often coincided
in early nineteenth century rural England. Ceremonial dance teams tended to be
identified with the community from which they appeared since most settlements
rarely supported more than one team at this period. Thus was the case with the
Abbots Bromley Horn Dancers in the nineteenth century. Oral tradition traces the
first identified leader of the horns, Grandfather Bentley, to the end of the
eighteenth century. His stepson William Fowell, born in 1857, continued to lead
the team and the dance has been in the hands of the Fowell family ever since.

A note to this effect occurs in a copy of Plot (1686) once owned by James Broughton.
Broughton MSS, MS no. S 1539, William Salt Library, Stafford.
4 / 2001 YEARBOOK FOR TRADITIONAL MUSIC

Figure 1. The Abbots Bromley Horn Dancers performing in Abbots Bromley,

September 1974.

They claim that their connection with the tradition goes back four hundred years
but in the absence of written documentation this has proved impossible to verify.
Nevertheless, the identification of the Fowell family with the Abbots Bromley
Horn Dance clearly is acknowledged within the village. By 1939, a former
headmistress of the local private school could state in her published history of the
village that 'the dance has become almost a family concern' (Rice: 74). There were
other families involved in the tradition at the end of last century but the leadership
was maintained within the Fowell family who has then exercised control over
recruitment. An old inhabitant may have said to the old headmistress, when she
was collecting information for her book, that 'anyone can dance the horns' but in
practice this was clearly not the case. On fieldwork in the village in 1975, a former
schoolteachertold me:

They'd never ask the parson to dance for example or anyone of standing. You
had to be born and bred in the village and in with the family.

This statement not only confirms the importance of kinship and residence patterns
in the maintenance of the dance custom but also addresses the issue of social class.
Occupations known for the dancers of the turn of last century include a bricklayer
and woodsman. The Fowell family in the next generation made their livelihood by
a variety of unskilled and semi-skilled jobs. In the 1970s, most of the dancers had
not received full-time education beyond the age of sixteen and did not belong to
the professional classes.
At the end of last century, the local annual holiday of Abbots Bromley lasted
four days, during which time the dancers traveled throughout the area. But new
patterns of work and leisure caused this purely local holiday to disappear. During
the twentieth century, the decline in employment available at the local private
school, from the Bagot family at Blithfield Hall, and in agriculture forced many
BUCKLAND DANCE, AUTHENTICITY & CULTURAL MEMORY / 5

families to look outside the village and its immediate surrounds for work. The
Fowell family was no exception. With the necessity to find employment outside
the local community, the traditional holiday period of Abbots Bromley was
weakened. Employers outside Abbots Bromley would be reluctant for prospective
Horn Dancers to take holidays at different times from their other workers.
Consequently some dancers were forced to take a day off work with no pay if they
wished to perform in the Horn Dance. This fact sheds light on former leader Alfred
Fowell's statement:

We were all poor then. All the chaps were poor. That's all I ever wonied about. I
used to worry about the money. As long as I had enough to pay those chaps it was
all right, I didn't worry.

A day off work meant a day with no wages and so, at the very least, the Horn
Dancers needed to collect enough money to cover their b s s of earnings. This
problem of needing a day off work in order to perform in the Horn Dance has
certainly prevented some dancers from participating. With the large audiences of
the post World War Two period when private transport enabled more people to
attend, particularly after work, the financial takings from the watching crowd have
inevitably improved. The share-out of the collection, at least since Alfred Fowell's
leadership in the 1920s and 1930s has been on a democratic basis. As Alfred
Fowell described it:

The kiddies [i.e. children] got the same as the men. I always insisted upon that.
They always did the same distance as the men so they don't get less than the men.

In the twentieth century other opportunities arose for the dance to be

performed within the village. In these, the Horn Dance was no longer the main
focus but part of other activities. The Horn Dancers became a regular item at the
village fete. Such a small-scale affair, however, was by no means as prestigious for
the dancers as their own Horn Dance Day and, as the fete was a charitable event
for the local community, no collection of money was made for the dancers to share
out between them. Not all dancers were available or eager to appear at the local
village fete and so an attempt was made by the leader to ensure that whoever
turned out to dance throughout the year without receiving payment should be
entitled to a place in the team on Horn Dance Day. This was yet again a
democratic solution, but one which would lead to other problems in its
implementation.
A summary of the villagers' perception of the custom made in 1939 was
perhaps just as relevant in the 1970s for a large section of the community:

The Abbots Bromley attitude to the Horn Dance is a curious one, for in it there is
an odd mixture of pride and indifference, of jealousy for ancient village rights in
the horns, of acquiescence in ignorance of their history, of pride that the custom is
'lost in antiquity', of carelessness as to what becomes of the properties. (Rice: 67)

Much of the high feeling concerning the horns centers on the relationship between
the dancers, the village (often as represented by the vocal middle class through the
parish council) and the vicar. At first sight, the history of the vicar's role appears to
be a positive one. In the 1880s, the vicar arranged for new costumes to be made for
the dancers. Formerly they had worn ribbons attached to their ordinary clothes but
6 / 2001 YEARBOOK FOR TRADITIONAL MUSIC

an old set of vicarage curtains became transformed into a new uniform. When
these wore out some twenty years later the vicar and his churchwardens organised
a fund to replace them in 1904 (Rice: 73-74). Again after World War Two the
vicar along with the local gentry and the director of the English Folk Dance and
Song Society were instrumental in providing new costume^.^ But the vicar's role in
this was largely self-determined. The parish of Abbots Bromley actually imposed a
responsibility upon the incumbent; the vicar, as the local representative of the
Church, is in fact the custodian of the horns. But the ambiguity and potential for
disagreement lie in the customary belief in the village that 'the Horns belong to the
parish, not to the vicar'-nor indeed may the horns be taken out of the parish. In
the seventeenth century the links between the Horn Dance and the church were
possibly much clearer. The Horn Dance was performed as a means of raising
money with which 'they not only repaired their Church but kept their poore too'
(Plot 1686: 434). According to oral tradition, the dancers were still performing at
the Church on behalf of the parish poor every Sunday in the early 1800s. At any
rate the horns were certainly kept in the church tower during the nineteenth century
and were later moved down inside the Hurst chapel so that visitors to the Church
could view them more easily. Rice (1939: 67) states that

[pleople are proud that the homs have been in the custody of the church for
generations, but they are at once roused to anger if any vicar ventures to act
regarding them without the consent of the dancer^.^

Indeed, at the turn of the century the vicar refused to allow the horns to be taken
out of the Church on some occasion but the churchwarden acted in the interest of
the dancers in defiance of the vicar's ruling. A similar contretemps arose in the
1970s when a situation occurred in which a new vicar refused the dancers
permission to remove the horns from the Church. By this time, the dancers had
acquired a set of replica horns so that they could perform the Horn Dance at an
increasing number of engagements outside the village. On the occasion of the
disagreement, the new vicar had decided to introduce a flower festival into the
village and had filled the church with flower decorations. Underneath where the
horns are kept, flowers were displayed in very expensive glass. The recollections
by the vicar and by one of the Fowell family are interesting for their contrasting
values. The new vicar believed that the dancers were prepared to perform in the
village using the replica horns but as he recalled they

refused to do it without the real ones and we had thousands of pounds worth of
glass underneath them in the church. But they wouldn't be reasonable, they had
to have their horns and they won.

The version of the same incident by one of the Fowell family contrasts sharply
with these values; quite simply the horns had been in the Church and village longer

See correspondence between Douglas Kennedy and Lord Bagot, 20 September 1946, 24
September 1946, 26 September 1946 and 24 July 1947 and the Reverend Ladell and
Douglas Kennedy 23 July 1947 and 31 July 1947, Vaughan Williams Memorial Library,
English Folk Dance and Song Society, Cecil Sharp House, London.

I myself fell foul of the complex feelings and village politics surrounding the horns when
undertaking arrangements for repair and carbon-dating of one of the homs.
BUCKLAND DANCE, AUTHENTICITY & CULTURAL MEMORY / 7

than the vicar's flower festival and therefore, in the dancers' eyes, the horns should
take precedence. So too by implication should the wishes of the Fowell family in
connection with the horns. It was not perhaps a slip of the tongue when the wife of
a former leader said 'the family belongs to the Horn Dance, has done for years and
years.' The total identification of this family with the right to cany the horns has
been an essential factor in the continuity of the dance event.
The fierce pride and independence of the family can, however, be viewed as a
detrimental force. An incident occurred between the vicar and the leader of the
Horn Dance in the late 1930s which was to have grave implications for the future.
So resolute was the then leader, Alfred Fowell, that not only did he refuse to have
anything to do with the Horn Dance until his death but, as he said: 'My sons out of
regard for me don't dance it either'. Perhaps typically, the row was over whether or
not the Horn Dancers should lead a procession in the village, as had been their
habit. The vicar's attempt to usurp the dancers' customary prestigious position was
later to cause problems. In the immediate future, the maintenance of the dance
event by the Fowell family remained unthreatened. The role of the leader was
undertaken by Alfred's brother, James, who led the Horn Dance until his death in
the early 1960s. James had three sons who became involved but, with one section
of the family now estranged, the recruitment of sufficient dancers became difficult.
In 1955 the local press reported on the villagers' certainty that the dance was
doomed to extinction-a man from outside the village had participated.8 A friend
of the Fowell family, Jack Brown, who was a member of the local branch of the
English Folk Dance and Song Society, lived in the nearby village of Colton. He
recalled that in those days it was unusual for a real outsider to be asked to dance.9
In 1963 another break with tradition occurred when the fifteen-year-old
granddaughter of Jim Fowell appeared in the Horn Dance. Although this event was
even reported (inaccurately it must be said) in the national press,'0 the fact that she
was dressed up in the Jester's costume and not as a Horn Dancer may have
appeased the village traditionalists. In any case her appearance on Horn Dance Day
was not regular and the team soon returned to its all male composition. The
shortage of work and affordable housing in the village, however continued to
undermine the traditional kinship and residence patterns. Two of James Fowell's
sons who succeeded to the leadership of the Horn Dance left the district to work
outside the area, leaving James's youngest son, Douglas, who was the team's
musician. With a family of six children, however, Douglas had been forced to find
suitable accommodation outside Abbots Bromley in the nearby village of Colton.
Slowly old ties with the village changed and new friends were made in Colton. The
villagers of Abbots Bromley may have disliked the appearance of the Fowells'
friends from Colton in the Horn Dance but even more wonying for some was the
regular inclusion of the girls in the 1970s. This feature also disturbed ultra-
traditionalists of visiting followers of the English folk dance revival movement
who had been brought up on the ideas of ceremonial dance, gender and
authenticity propagated by Cecil Sharp and his disciples. Controversy therefore
existed not only in the village but also within certain sections of the folk revivalist
audience who visited the custom.

Birmingham Mail, 12 September 1955.

Personal correspondence, 8 March 1976.
'O The Guardian, 10 September 1963.
8 / 2001 YEARBOOK FOR TRADITIONAL MUSIC

Reasons for the girls appearing in the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance cannot be
directly attributable to the largely middle class movement of women's liberation
current in the 1970s which was causing waves in the folk revival movement as all-
female moms teams began to proliferate throughout England. By a strange quirk
of fate, the member of the family best placed to continue the tradition had six
children but they were all girls. The only other Fowells still living in Abbots
Bromley in the early 1970s wanted nothing to do with the Horn Dance following
Alfred Fowell's dispute with the vicar. Added to this was the effect of the ruling
that those who were willing to perform throughout the year were guaranteed a
place in the team on Horn Dance Day-and of course the most easily available and
reliable of dancers were Douglas Fowell's own daughters. For the only daughter
still resident in Abbots Brornley during the 1970s the situation was clear:

Old villagers prefer to see some Fowells in it, it doesn't matter what sex.. .It's only
the newcomers who object. It's not right for them to take charge of it.

The issue of local residence became an important factor in the debate. The
family considered that it had been forced out of the village largely through
personal circumstances and the lack of appropriate housing. New housing estates
had been built for those with middle class incomes who wanted to participate fully
in village life and traditions. They found the most famous of their village activities,
the Horn Dance, being organised by people who lived outside the village and who
furthermore did not appear to be conforming to traditional norms. Gender became
a key issue, as did local residence. When Douglas Fowell invited a friend from
London to perform, the relationship between village and dancers worsened. As a
former dancer who is not a member of the family commented, 'it's not proper now
though--they have strangers in it'. Adverse comments were made on the
appearance of the dancers. Some of the costumes had not been replaced since just
after World War Two, which together with the contemporary fashion for men to
wear their hair long and even to sport an earring did not please older members of
the village. Led by the local doctor, the parish council requested meetings with the
dancers to clarify and assert control over the tradition. The new vicar, realizing the
force of opinion between the dancers and the parish council, tried not to side with
either faction. As he perceptively realized, speaking of the dancers, 'I suppose they
still do it because of tradition but if you ask me it's more like family pride'.
Yet the tenacity of the Fowell family has enabled them to maintain their
traditional control of the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance. The issue of gender was
settled in part by the return of Douglas Fowell's brother, Dennis, to lead the Horn
Dance. The scattered descendants of his father, James Fowell, were recruited back
into the dance and male great-grandchildren emerged to continue the tradition. As
my university supervisor, A E Green, commented on my field notes:

Most of the participants don't live in Abbots Bromley anymore and some of the
younger. . . weren't even born there. It's as if they're saying: we're still around,
the conservative, the independent, the disreputable and it's still our village even if
circumstances have forced us into leaving.

The attempts to control the Horn Dance by the established middle class and
incoming middle class met with little success. In spite of wider changes in socio-
cultural and economic patterns, the dominance of kinship patterns overrode other
BUCKLAND DANCE, AUTHENTICITY & CULTURAL MEMORY / 9

concerns of gender and local residence so that the Horn Dance continued to be led
and controlled by the Fowell family.
Gender and local residence were significant aspects in maintaining the
performance of the Britannia Coconut Dancers every Easter Saturday in the small
town of Bacup, situated on the western edge of the Pennine hills. Bacup is a fairly
typical develbpment of England's Industrial Revolution, reaching its peak of
prosperity in the mid to late nineteenth century. The precursors of the Britannia
coconut Dancers were established in 1857 and, during the nineteenth century,
there were a number of such dance teams in the locality and elsewhere in the
country (Buckland 1986, 1990). For much of the twentieth century, control of the
movement content of this tradition was the responsibility of a small group of men,
usually eleven at most at any one time, with its membership ranging from one
year's duration (which is relatively rare) up to above thirty years. Most dancers
averaged seven to ten years in their membership, although there were those with
some twenty and thirty years' experience. Recruitment was largely as workmates,
neighbors, or drinking companions. There were occasional kinship ties but the
social organization was not-based on father to son transmission but more often
involved brothers-in-law or uncles and nephews. It was always an all-male activity
with no evidence of challenge to this fact.

Figure 2. The Britannia Coco-Nut Dancers performing the Coco-Nut Dance at a

folk festival in Fleetwood, Lancashire, August 1980.

Unlike the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, there are no unique artifacts around
which the custom centres but rather a dance, the choreographic content of which
was guarded by the dancers (see Buckland 2001 [1991]). 'Tradition' was nearly
always cited by the Britannia Coconut Dancers as a reason for continuing to be a
member of the team and it is those selected aspects of the 'tradition' to which the
dancers give bodily re-enactment through the repeated performances of their
unique system of codified movements that forms the focus here. Anthropologist
10 / 2001 YEARBOOK FOR TRADITIONAL MUSIC

Paul Connerton in How Societies Remember observes that we preserve versions of

the past by representing it to ourselves in words and images (1989: 72). He
usefully distinguishes between two modes of social practice:

incorporating practice, that is a bodily practice in which "transmission [occurs

only during the time that the bodies are present to sustain that particular activity"
and inscribing practice as a means of recording "something that traps and holds
information, long after the human organism has stopped informing."

Obviously, dancing may be transmitted in both ways: as an incorporating practice,

through kinetic transmission, and as an inscribing practice, through documentary
techniques of photography, film, video, notation and computer images." Not all
such techniques were available to the Britannia Coconut Dancers owing to the cost
of such equipment in the late 1970s and early 1980s and the need for particular
types of specialist knowledge. But obviously written verbal description and,
increasingly, video became available to them as a means of inscribing their
tradition for transmission. The Britannia Coconut Dancers perceive their repertoire
as complicated: it consists of a coconut dance of twenty figures which can be
performed by eight men standing in one file, two files or quadrille formation,
together with a processional version and a set of five garland dances in quadrille
formation. The coconut dance in its processional form is semi-improvisational in
that it is the decision of the leader of each file of four which dance figures they will
perform. In whatever form, the coconut dance is undoubtedly unique and in
comparison with other English group ceremonial dances, it is relatively complex.
In 1929, the Britannia Coconut Dancers came to an agreement with the
English Folk Dance and Song Society that the dancers would retain sole rights
over the enactment of their tradition (Buckland 2001 [1991]). The incorporating
practice would remain strictly within the control of the Britannia Coconut Dancers.
Each member signed a form agreeing not to teach the dances to anyone outside of
the team.'' The then English Folk Dance Society charged the team to 'maintain the
Tradition at its best'.I3 The dancers certainly attribute great value to their
maintenance of the repertoire, particularly the coconut dance, through
incorporating practice and themselves draw a distinction between incorporation
and inscription. Derek Pilling, a dancer for over thirty years, replied to my query as
to whether the age of the dance tradition mattered to him:

I think it does. Because it's something that, you know, has been handed down and
handed down and it's all been handed down by word of mouth and practical help
in learning the steps. It's not something you can just go and pick a book up, read
about, go and do it. Impossible. It's got to be - it's that sort of dance that it's got
to be handed down from man to man.14

l 1 For discussion on recording techniques of dancing see, for example, Morais (1992) and

Van Zile (1999).

I Z This rule was broken once when it was agreed that one of the dancers could teach a group

of local girls and boys one of the garland dances to perform before the Pope. In recent years,

the signing of the form to agree not to teach the repertoire to outsiders has become less

s stematic.

"The drafts of this agreement are housed in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library.

English Folk Dance and Song Society, Cecil Sharp House, London.

l4 Interview with Derek Pilling, 21 April 1981

BUCKLAND DANCE, AUTHENTICITY & CULTURAL MEMORY / 11

Here the values of interpersonal contact and choreographic complexity combine.

Indeed, several of the dancers from the 1950s, although a film of the coconut dance
had been made of them, were convinced that it was impossible to learn the dance
through watching a film, however many times. Today, with the advent of video
and its home use, dancers are less convinced that the coconut dance cannot be
learnt by means other than direct interpersonal contact. But now that they have
secured their unique status, they appear less bothered by the appearance of film
and video cameras. In the 1930s, when they were first filmed by the English Folk
Dance and Song Society, the director, Douglas Kennedy had to write to reassure
them that the film would only be used for scholarly purposes.'5 Such anxieties later
subsided as the dancers' status as a unique custom became firmly established.
Since the late 1970s, the video camera has become increasingly commonplace
-and yet the dancers themselves appeared never to have inscribed their own
practice on video, whether as an archival document or as a teaching tool. Indeed, I
was surprised to learn from a new recruit that he was using a copy of my video
recordings (given as a gift some years before to the team) in order to learn parts of
the dances with which he was not too familiar. Incorporating and inscribing
practices here inter-relate. Given the numbers of private video cameras and
television crews at their Easter performances over the years, it may appear a
superfluous activity to record the repertoire themselves for posterity. But this
would presuppose that the team performed their repertoire in its entirety at Easter--
in fact during the 1970s and 1980s they did not. Nor indeed as I discovered was all
of the repertoire performed at other venues during the year, such as at fetes,
carnivals or festivals. When I began studying the team in 1976, I had never seen
them perform a particular garland dance (referred to as number four) in public. The
reasons for this were various (Buckland 2001[1991]). I never pressed the dancers
to see it since I was interested in their own selection of dances for ~erformance.
But by 1983, after long association with the dancers, they perceived me as their
official historian and, since I usually canied some inscriptive devices at Easter,
their documenter as well. On Easter Saturday 1983 at their habitual stop outside
the local fire station, the dancers took up their garlands and I pointed my video
camera at what I believed to be yet another performance of the popular choice of
garland number two or three. As the strains of unfamiliar music began, one of the
dancers turned to me and said 'this one's for you'. They then proceeded to perform
garland number fourI6 and thereafter it was regularly performed in public.
There was, however, during this period, another dance in the repertoire which
the dancers rarely performed in public and never at Easter. This was the Figures
with the Nuts, a version of the Coconut Dance performed in quadrille formation. I
had not seen this dance performed since 1983 although newer recruits often asked
to perform it. In June 1992 it was restored to public performances. When they had
finished their performance, a number of the dancers rushed over to me and asked,
"did you get it?"I7 This dance, lengthy in duration compared with much of the

Correspondence from Douglas Kennedy to the then leader Arthur Bracewell, 18 January
1938. Kennedy recollected in personal correspondence to me, 8 June 1981 that he was
requested to destroy any notes that he had made on the Coconut Dance when the English
Folk Dance and Song Society made another film in the 1950s. Kennedy honoured their
request.
l6 VHS copy in my possession.
l 7 Videoed at Abingdon Mayor-making ceremony, Berkshire. In my possession.
12 / 2001 YEARBOOK FOR TRADITIONAL MUSIC

repertoire and needing plenty of space in which to perform, appears never to have
been a popular selection for performance. Why then retain such dances? The
following discussion between Melvin Lord (a dancer from the 1960s), his wife and
myself throws some interesting light on the dancers' attitude towards their
repertoire:

We used to practice it purely to keep it, you know, so we didn't lose it but for no
other reason that I could remember. That was the only reason that the 'Figures'
were ever done, at practice, so at least the troupe knew how to do the ~ i ~ u r e s . "

When his wife reflected that this seemed a waste of time and effort, he continued:

It's just so it's never lost. I mean, unless you keep up with it, you forget how to
do it. And some of the older members pack in and then you can't teach someone
else to do it because it's too complicated.

His wife was not convinced and he rejoined:

But it's part of history being lost, isn't it. That's the main thing. It's part of
history being lost.

Only through regular bodily practice, embodying the past in the present, as a
"danced ritual" is the continuity maintained for a present and potential audience--
as I indeed witnessed well over ten years after this interview took place.1g
In practicing the Figures, the dancers were acting almost as ciphers, as vessels
to transmit codified movement information, which, because it was known as the
traditional repertoire, was perceived as too important to lose. As guardians of their
knowledge, there is a sense of anonymity, of roles being undertaken for past,
present and future communities of performers and audience--in this sense, a classic
note of ritual is sounded. As one elderly lady in Bacup explained to me:

You see, they've always done it. Like it's repeating itself and repeating itself and
repeating itself. You see what I mean? As one finishes, another takes over. 20

The ones that take over are almost always born and bred in the locality, known to
many in the local audience, but each dancer, as part of the traditional regalia, is
disguised with a black face. There are interpersonal ties, which are valued within
the team and with their local audience, but there is also this more abstract concept
of 'Tradition', which perhaps paradoxically can only be realized through the
embodiment of individuals. In a town which has suffered economic decline and
population loss throughout this century, the Britannia Coconut Dancers' ritual
performance on the one day at Easter brings a sense of continuity, prosperity and
identity. Dancing as an incorporating practice is able to assert a personal
continuity, which is valued as true Tradition. For the Britannia Coconut Dancers,

Interview with Melvin Lord, 28 March 1979.

l9 This dance is also now more regularly performed as newer recruits appear not to share the
apparent dislike of it by older members who have either died or now left the team since my
initial fieldwork.
20 18 July 1979.
BUCKLAND DANCE, AUTHENTICITY & CULTURAL MEMORY / 13

this mode of transmission was highly valued and in their own eyes elevated them
above teams in the English folk dance revival of the twentieth century.

It is of course neither possible nor desirable to disregard professions of distinction

espoused by the Horn Dancers and Coconut Dancers in locating their practice
within the dialectic between revival and tradition. In the shift away from the
shackles of nineteenth-century folklore theory, such oppositional constructs were
the subject of deconstruction in the 1970s and early 1980s by a number of scholars
concerned with traditional performance.2' More recent work has sought to examine
the workings of such theory as cultural memory: identity and acceptance as
'authentic tradition' bring a form of symbolic capital and the politics of
participation may be fiercely contested." It is hardly surprising that the
maintenance of these two internationally regarded traditional performances as
unique and ancient is subject to internal controls in which the rights and privileges
of participation are in large part determined by ties of blood in the case of Abbots
Bromley and kinetic transmission in that of Bacup. In both too, physical location in
terms of sharing knowledge and lived experience of local culture looms large in
the criteria of inclusion. The enactment of the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance to
raise money either for the poor in the seventeenth century and in the nineteenth for
its participants (at least as part of its performance rationale) aligns the custom with
numerous incorporating practices in England prior to the twentieth century in
which traditional rights were routinely demonstrated through incorporating
practices in contradistinction to the legitimacy of the documented law.23 By the
later twentieth century, the rights sought were those of participation in the
performance, in and of itself. Recognition of the activity as an 'authentic tradition'
had long been won--what mattered in the 1970s became the authenticity of the
person. Similarly in Bacup, financial gain came to be replaced by symbolic, yet
materialized and embodied, capital: the distinction of the authentic person through
knowledge and expertise acquired not through the inscribing processes of books,
available to all, but through the physicality of dance, access to which was
controlled. Inscription may have long been rated more highly than incorporating
practices in contributing to social status within most arenas in Europe affording a
relation with the past, which may be re-visited and analyzed in order to question.
Embodied practice, however, in signaling a unique distinction underlines the
power of the performative and the continuing relevance of a mythic past in
contemporary life.

21
See, for example, Buckland (1983), Handler and Linnekin (1984), Harker (1985),
Sughrue (1988) and Boyes (1993).
22 This conclusion draws of course from Bourdieu (1993). For examples of recent work
which examines the legacy of the rhetoric of folklore and authenticity, see Boyes (1987-88),
2megat (2001) and Buckland, forthcoming.
23 See Bushaway (1982) and Hutton (1994).
14 / 2001 YEARBOOK FOR TRADITIONAL MUSIC

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Dance, Authenticity and Cultural Memory: The Politics of Embodiment
Theresa Jill Buckland
Yearbook for Traditional Music, Vol. 33. (2001), pp. 1-16.
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[Footnotes]

21
Tradition, Genuine or Spurious
Richard Handler; Jocelyn Linnekin
The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 97, No. 385. (Jul. - Sep., 1984), pp. 273-290.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8715%28198407%2F09%2997%3A385%3C273%3ATGOS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-%23

References Cited

Black Faces, Garlands, and Coconuts: Exotic Dances on Street and Stage
Theresa Jill Buckland
Dance Research Journal, Vol. 22, No. 2. (Autumn, 1990), pp. 1-12.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0149-7677%28199023%2922%3A2%3C1%3ABFGACE%3E2.0.CO%3B2-L

Staffordshire Folk and Their Lore

C. S. Burne
Folklore, Vol. 7, No. 4. (Dec., 1896), pp. 366-386.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0015-587X%28189612%297%3A4%3C366%3ASFATL%3E2.0.CO%3B2-S

NOTE: The reference numbering from the original has been maintained in this citation list.
http://www.jstor.org

LINKED CITATIONS
- Page 2 of 2 -

Tradition, Genuine or Spurious

Richard Handler; Jocelyn Linnekin
The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 97, No. 385. (Jul. - Sep., 1984), pp. 273-290.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8715%28198407%2F09%2997%3A385%3C273%3ATGOS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-%23

NOTE: The reference numbering from the original has been maintained in this citation list.