Dance, Authenticity and Cultural Memory: The Politics of EmbodimentAuthor(s): Theresa Jill BucklandReviewed work(s):Source: Yearbook for Traditional Music, Vol. 33 (2001), pp. 1-16Published by: International Council for Traditional MusicStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1519626 .Accessed: 22/03/2012 15:09

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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 postmodernist thinking in mainstream dance literature itself.1 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.3 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

1 As examples of the former, see Wolff 1990, Sherlock 1993 and Thomas 1997; of the latter, see Foster 1996, Morris 1996 and Desmond 1997. 2 For a consideration of the concept of authenticity within the development of folklore studies, see Bendix 1997. 3 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 Skieriewice, 1994.

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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 respective written and oral histories can be found elsewhere4 but I will, of necessity, later return to this tension between historicity and cultural memory. My 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 performance 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-

4 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.

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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. In 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 description.5 By 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 Bromley 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.

5 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.

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BE

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 schoolteacher told 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

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 worried 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 loss 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

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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 costumes.6 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

[p]eople are proud that the horns 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 dancers.7

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

6 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.

71 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 horns.

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 carry 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,10 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 worrying 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.

8 Birmingham Mail, 12 September 1955. 9 Personal correspondence, 8 March 1976. 10 The Guardian, 10 September 1963.

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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 morris 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 Bromley 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

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 development 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

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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.1 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.12 The then English Folk Dance Society charged the team to 'maintain the Tradition at its best'.13 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.'4

11 For discussion on recording techniques of dancing see, for example, Morais (1992) and Van Zile (1999). 12 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 systematic.

The drafts of this agreement are housed in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, English Folk Dance and Song Society, Cecil Sharp House, London.

14 Interview with Derek Pilling, 21 April 1981.

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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.15 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 performance. But by 1983, after long association with the dancers, they perceived me as their official historian and, since I usually carried 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 four16 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?"17 This dance, lengthy in duration compared with much of the

15 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. 16 VHS copy in my possession. 17 Videoed at Abingdon Mayor-making ceremony, Berkshire. In my possession.

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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 Figures.18

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.19

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,

18 Interview with Melvin Lord, 28 March 1979. 19 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.

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.21 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.22 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), 2megac (2001) and Buckland, forthcoming. 23 See Bushaway (1982) and Hutton (1994).

BUCKLAND

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