The Northumbrians by Dan Jackson

Author:Dan Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hurst
Published: 2019-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

5

HARD WORK AND HEDONISM

He seldom thinks, that sits at ease,

I’ warm an’ cheery room,

While at his feet the big coals blaze,

O’Geordy’s dreary doom

Alexander Barras, The Pitman’s Social Neet, 1897

Ah me lads, ye shud of seen us gannin’,

We pass’d the foaks upon the road just as they wor stannin’;

Thor wes lots o’ lads an’ lasses there, all wi’ smiling faces,

Gannin alang the Scotswood Road, to see the Blaydon Races.

Geordie Ridley, ‘The Blaydon Races,’ 1862

Northumbrian ‘rapper’ is the acceptable face of English folk dancing. There is no danger here of men in bells and feathers mincing around a maypole; rapper is fast, complex and vigorous, danced by men in mining gear—a long-sleeved vest, knee-length ‘pit hoggers,’ long stockings and clogs. The rappers’ ‘swords’ (basically metal strips with a handle at each end) were once used to scrape the sweat and coal dust off the backs of pit ponies, and in the dance’s intricate finale they are woven together into a five-pointed star which is then brandished in panting exultation. This style of dancing—which to see in the flesh is utterly exhilarating—is like a cross between a whirling Jewish mitzvah tantz and an Irish slip jig and melded older traditions of medieval long-sword dancing with industrial themes. When the famous compiler of English folk dance and song Cecil Sharp saw the Rappers of Winlaton go through their paces he wrote that

it would be difficult to exaggerate the force and energy with which it was executed when I saw it … the great difficulty is to catch its barbaric spirit, to reproduce the breathless speed, the sureness and economy of movement, the vigour and abandonment of the ‘stepping.’1

The earliest record of this kind of sword dancing in England dates back to the Tyne Valley in 1715 and flourished within the growing number of mining communities in Northumberland and Durham. The vigorous steps themselves seem to embody so many of those typically Northumbrian traits that those places were known for—especially an intense solidarity with the marras (workmates) you laboured with in dangerous conditions, and the lust for life that was so often made manifest above ground.

This Northumbrian dance tradition is little known, but after all it was Nan Liscombe, the daughter of a Tyneside clog dancer and publican, who taught Gene Kelly how to tap, while David Bowie and Kate Bush learned how to dance under the tutelage of Lindsay Kemp from South Shields. A preference for vigorous styles of dancing is still manifest in the North East and exemplified by the music and dance of ‘makina’ (the stress is on the second syllable). This is a form of high energy Spanish techno characterised by hard trance music, which has created ‘a genuine youth culture phenomenon in the North East in general, much like grime has been in London, or bassline in Sheffield.’2 The dance steps of makina, also known as ‘New Monkey’ after a Sunderland nightclub where it first flourished, can appear like a frantic sailor’s hornpipe accompanied by turbocharged 178 beats-per-minute synth and amusing, bawdy lyrics delivered with swaggering rapid fire eloquence.

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