Good news about Morris dancing

A couple of weeks ago I asked whether Morris dancing was in danger of extinction. I'm pleased to report that a new movie, currently being prepared for release, seems to find otherwise. Director Lucy Akherst explains.

Reports of the death of Morris dancing have been greatly exaggerated.

Last week it was claimed that the pastime could die out within 20 years because young people have no interest in it. I beg to differ. If an urban sophisticate luvvie like myself can fall in love with it, anyone can.

Beyond the old adage, attributed to everyone from Thomas Beecham to Winston Churchill, that you should try everything once apart from Morris dancing and incest, I knew nothing about the subject until recently.

My life as an actor consisted of racing around Soho and going to private clubs with other actors, musicians and fashion journalists. I'm, you know, pretty cool.

Coldplay contributed a song for my short film, for heaven's sake. Yet at the same time I was exasperated by some aspects of my profession.

'I've stopped going to the cinema,' said my friend Liz. 'I'm fed up with wasting £9 just to watch people pointing guns sideways before splattering someone's brains across a window to a funky soundtrack.'

I knew what she meant. I was equally fed up with being sent scripts where the lead female was 'feisty, intelligent and nobody's fool', yet still had to take her clothes off time and again.

Which is why when I met Charles Thomas Oldham (known to all as Chaz) and read his screenplay for a heartwarming comedy about Morris dancing, I offered to direct it.

Morris: A Life With Bells On is about Derecq, an avant-garde Morris dancer, and his struggle to modernise the dance in England.

Our hero journeys from the West Country to California, fights bureaucracy in London and comes home for an unashamedly happy ending.

The film's England is an idyllic one, with rolling green hills and thatched cottages cast in the warm glow of perpetual summer. There is no violence, no sex, no nudity.

The characters are good, decent people. I was curious. Was that just the script or was the Morris world populated by the self-same people?

The more research I did, the more intrigued I became. This wasn't, it seemed, a dying art practised only by old, bearded men in the shires.

My inquiries turned up youth sides, ladies' sides, those dancing to electronica with luminous staves and the 'hard men of Morris' who jump higher and hit harder than anyone else.

Also, far from being the po-faced guardians of ancient tradition, they were well aware Morris dancing is inherently comedic and were happy to laugh at themselves.

'You've got to, otherwise you would be missing the joke of the century,' one dancer said. 'What people don't seem to realise is that Morris is both fun and funny.'




Ours was a low-budget film. The production base was a farmyard - it was common during negotiations with agents to have my conversation punctuated by the clucking of chickens.

The production office was a cottage which doubled as make-up studio, wardrobe department, green room and my bedroom. And if the cottage had been pre-booked by someone else for a weekend, we all had to get changed in the back of a Transit van.

We were at the bottom of the heap when it came to agents' priorities, so alternative ways of contacting actors sometimes had to be employed.

Consider Dominique Pinon, star of countless French films including Diva and Amelie, for example. Chaz had written the part of Jean-Baptiste (a whelk fisherman who is shipwrecked on the Dorset coast and dances 'trance' Morris after drinking hallucinogenic cider), with him in mind, but we had no idea how to get the script to him.

Zooming through Soho one day, Chaz found himself being watched by a scruffy chap smoking a cigarette - it was Dominique.

Chaz took a deep breath and launched into an explanation of the film and the part. Dominique looked nonplussed but asked for a script to be sent to him.

He took the part. I had dinner with Dominique the night he arrived for the shoot. 'So what is it about, this film?' he asked.

'Didn't you get the script?' 'I did,' he replied, 'but my written English isn't so great.'

'Why did you take the part, then?' He shrugged in the way that only Frenchmen can. 'Because this tall, red-haired madman rushed up to me in the street ... '

He had no idea what Morris dancing was. We showed him some videos and told him that for his trance Morris, he should imagine dancing to Pink Floyd Live At Pompeii.

He narrowed his eyes and took a deep drag on his cigarette. 'Okay,' he said finally, and that's exactly what he did.

Naomie Harris flew straight from the Pirates Of The Caribbean premiere to our shoot, where she gamely walked along the beach in the rain, wearing a summer dress, laughing romantically with Chaz (as Derecq). She says we looked after her better than many Hollywood film units.

Gradually Morris began to cast its spell over our actors and crew.

The climax of our film was set at the Wimborne Folk Festival, whose organisers kindly allowed us to open the proceedings. We came, we danced, we danced again, we danced once more and then one final time in front of the bemused crowd.

As we were packing up, a bearded Morris man approached Chaz.

'I zeen you danzin',' he drawled in an accent as rich as clotted cream, before leaning forward and tipping him a conspiratorial wink. 'I zeen worse.'

That night, our Morris side, including Chaz, Clive Mantle, Richard Lumsden and Ian Hart, were having dinner.

'Did you see those other dancers?' said Clive. 'We were miles better!'

Richard nodded enthusiastically and then caught himself.

'This is how it starts, isn't it?' he said. 'This time next year we'll be doing it for real.'

Derek Jacobi even suggested he be credited as Derecq Jacobi in homage to our lead character.

On one (rare) hot day we were filming a crowd scene. When we had finished I was surprised to see a lot of people still hanging around. One lady said: 'It's been such a lovely day, it seemed a shame to go home.'

It occurred to me that she was right. So Chaz and I had a word with the sound department, got our lads together, played some of our Morris music and everyone had a dance. And I mean everyone - young, old, cast, crew, country folk and townies.

In test screenings, our audiences have been giving us absurdly high recommendation rates.

We have received letters from people around the world, all wanting to see Morris. It appears to capture the heart of every English person, Canadian, Russian and American we have shown it to.

In spite of the current financial climate, or maybe even because of it, the world, it seems, feels like having a dance. With bells on.

More information at the link above. You'll find details of the movie at www.morrismovie.com, including a very entertaining trailer.

As a decades-long fan of Morris dancing, I'm delighted to hear of this film. It should be a lot of fun. For those of you who are a bit sceptical, and aren't sure that anything so rustic and - let's face it - seemingly so utterly gay (in the San Francisco sense of the word) as men prancing around with bells round their calves, waving handkerchiefs, I strongly suggest suspending judgment and going to check it out. You might be surprised!

Oh- and if anyone of the male sex takes my words as suggesting that he might like to try his luck with me, using bells and handkerchiefs as a seduction technique, I'll introduce him to another old British tradition: the quarterstaff! (No, Lawdog, pink gorilla suits won't work either!)

(Ladies are, naturally, exempted from that promise.)



Peter