The Stevenage Sword Dancers are a Rapper and Longsword dance team based in Stevenage in Hertfordshire, England.
Our standard rapper dance is evolved from the traditional Newbiggin
dance. After twenty-something years away from its homeland, the dance is still
surprisingly true to the original; we have mainly built up a repertoire of extra figures
which we use to vary the dance to suit the occasion. It is a fast, exciting dance, best
seen at close quarters in a pub. For encores, we dance a second rapper based on the Swalwell tradition. Again, with some additions but still maintaining
its own distinctive style, which is slower and more measured than Newbiggin.
Our Longsword
is descended from the Greatham dance, which is performed properly by the Redcar Sword
Dancers (as they have made a point of telling us - but they sometimes try
to dance the Newbiggin rapper. ) As it takes up more space than the Rapper, it is
normally performed outside and danced mainly in the summer.
.
The music for Rapper is a fast jig tune (6/8 time, at 130-160 beats/min) such as Cock
o' the North or Tenpenny Bit. Typical instruments are Fiddle, Concertina, Accordion,
Whistle, Mouth organ and Melodeon. As well as these, we have danced to the Bagpipes
(Highland , Border & Northumberland), Banjo, Guitar, Tuba and Suzaphone as well as the
occasional ceilidh band. A typical tune and speed is this clip, by our first musician, Bob Day (400k) . Our piper, Ian Lawther, can be heard at his
own web site.
The Longsword music is slower, in 4/4 time, such as The Oyster Girl or The Keel Row .
Back in 1973, one Brian Kell from Co Durham found himself working in Stevenage. After dancing with Sallyport Sword he naturally missed the masochism of gashed knuckles so trawled the local folk-song clubs to recruit an unwitting bunch of southerners to share the pain. The embryonic SS made their debut at the '73 Cambridge Folk Festival. 1974 saw their first regular 'dancing out' in pub tours around Stevenage, visiting five, six or even seven pubs in an evening. In the next year the side expanded from the original 5 to about ten members. The team was given much encouragement by Morris Sunderland, then squire of the Morris Ring and fool of Offley Morrismen. He persuaded us into the Ring in 1975. Some highlights in the team's history have been:
1973 Cambridge Folk Festival
1975 Ipswich ring meeting- where a loose sword caused 300 watching morrismen to hold their breath until it was recovered. (All part of the show, honest!)
1979 Isle of Wight ring meeting- open-top buses, low flying trees and bare-ass morris on the ferry slipway at Cowes (Yes,
I still have the photos, P.. Morris!)
1981 Towersey Festival - mystical, firelight longsword and Great Western
Morris with rapper on stilts.
1987 Selm,Germany. Where Mark Harris discovered what our sashes are
for - to tie to the nearest bar when beer and gravity conspire against you.
1991 Osnabrück, Germany, filling up a coach for Derby Morris, to visit Osnabrücker Trachtenkreis dance team, with a
scratch side collected from around the country - puzzled looks at motorway stops across 5
countries as we took every opportunity for a practise.
1991 Rose of Tralee festival, Ireland with Redbornstoke Morris, Iron Men &
Severn Guilders; all Guinness & no sleep!
1995 Osnabrück with Derby Morris again for
Osnabrücker Trachtenkreis' 40th anniversary
1996 Scarborough International Sword Dance Festival, A fantastic
gathering with about 15 overseas sides and 30 UK sides, but not enough time to see them
all!
1997 Canal Tour with Jack the
Rapper from Norway, Grand Union Canal, Aquavit and Stockfish. Pity
about the dancing!
1998 March - DERT at Gateshead Winners of the blindfold Rapper class.
1998 Whitby International Sword Spectacular ,
1998 Killala, Mayo, Celebration of the doomed 1798 French invasion in
support of the uprising against the English. (why??!)
1998 September - 25 years old!
1999 March - DERT at Gateshead - no team, so judging.
1999 May - Osnabrück with Derby and Chapel en le Frith
MM
2000 March - DERT in the Dome missed it!.
2000 May - Covent Garden & Old Bank of England for Norwegian Conference
2000 May - Whitby Millenium Sword Spectacular
2000 September - Quidditch match with White Rose, Huddersfield
2001 March - DERT in Masham Balck Sheep Brewery three of us (only for the beer)
2001 May - Hosts to Osnabrücker Trachtenkreis visiting Stevenage,London & Derby MM
2001 December - Oxford with Mabel Gubbins - Four men and a Thrale (thanks Andy!).
2002 February - Italy - Rocca Grimalda Carnival.
2002 December - Oxford with Mabel Gubbins - The Bloodbath tour aka "When Peter* met Julie" (*Mr Bump).
2002 July - Berlin - sword dance seminar for Potsdam-based dance group.
2003 March - DERT in Glasgow - in the pubs for a change.
2003 May - Osnabrück
2003 September - 30 years old! - and still going.
2003 December - Oxford again with Mable Gubbins - Debut of the S-Sword Oxford branch and winners of
the Blood Sports prize.
2004 May - 4th International Sword Spectacular at Whitby. Forging transatlantic links with the great Great Meadows teams from Boston
Dance, of course! Our main
occupation is in regular 'pub tours'. From September to May, we we go out every other
Friday night to terrorize the customers of five or six peaceful drinking houses. Our
'season' ends with a Day of Dance, on the first Saturday more than a week after Mayday. The rest of the year we socialize with local (and distant)
Morris sides until about August, when we take a month off to get away from each other.
We practice (nearly) every Tuesday evening from about 8.30 in Stevenage. Contact one of the team to check exactly where and when.
Our approximate dance program is usually published in 'Unicorn'. As we mostly dance for the customers in the pubs we visit and tours are only set up a couple of weeks ahead, anyone wishing to see us in action should contact the side for details. The regular team is currently about seven in number with several 'away' members who meet up with us periodically to make sure we are still dancing and see if they still can. New recruits are welcome as the oldest member of the regular side would like to retire but we can't spare him yet.
For anyone listening in black and white, our kit is:
Rapper (ráp'er) 1. A person talking fast
and noisily to a musical background. (viz 'morrisman')
2. A flexible metal blade about two feet (60cm) long by one inch (25mm)
wide with a fixed wooden handle at one end and a swivelling or fixed handle at the other.
3. A fast dance performed by five masochists, linked hand-to-hand by
rapper swords in time to a jig tune. The dancers weave the swords in a variety of
convolutions while scraping skin off their knuckles and beer-glasses off nearby tables.
Between figures a simple 1-2-3 1-2-3 clog-step is danced, often in time to the music. In
some figures the rapper Lock or Nut is displayed, which figures in our badge.
The dancers are normally accompanied by two 'characters' who get in the way and
distract the audience from the dancers' mistakes - a tail-coated 
Tommy and transvestite, busty, and
(preferably bearded) Betty. The dance was created about the turn of the century by the
inhabitants of North-east of England to keep warm in the winter. It owes its origins to
the much older Longsword dance. To put it another way...
The longsword used in the English traditions is a rigid steel blade with one wooden handle, or a wooden blade, about three/four feet (100-120cm) long and 1-2 inches (25-50 cm) wide. Though called a sword, the edges are not sharpened unless the team is in a bad mood. The dance is normally at brisk walking pace and performed by (generally) six dancers who weave between each other in a number of set figures to make up a complete dance.
The longsword is an ancient traditional ritual dance, probably pre-dating the Morris, with roots and relatives all over Europe. Its traditional roots in England are mainly in Yorkshire. It is generally danced in a 'military' style with precise, emphasized footwork with the team dressed in military-style uniforms. A few sides, including Stevenage, dance it in a smoother, ritual style.
:The many English longsword dances are well documented in Longsword Dances from Traditional and Manuscript Sources by Ivor Allsop.
Two examples of European longsword dances can be seen at Boerke Nass (Belgium) and Korcula (Croatia).
The Newbiggin dance is described by Marjorie Sinclair & Elsie Whiteman in the EFDSS publication 'The North Skelton Sword-Dance and the Newbiggin Rapper Sword-Dance'. The figures were taught by Mr William Clark of Newbiggin (Northumberland) at an EFDS meeting in Buxton in 1927. The figures, with additions and variations, are descended from the North Walbottle dance described by Cecil Sharp.
The Swalwell (and North Walbottle) dances are described by Cecil Sharp in 'The Sword dances of Northern England' 1911.
The Fox in our badge is taken from the pub we used to retire to after practices, 'The Twin Foxes' in Stevenage, itself named after a notorious pair of local poachers, the Fox twins.
A post WW2 'New Town' in Hertfordshire, England. 30 miles (50Km) north of London.
Read all about it in the Knowhere guide to Stevenage
Brian came to Stevenage after dancing with Sallyport Sword. Having got the side started, Brian moved with his job to Whittlesey in Cambridgeshire where he was instrumental in reviving the Straw Bear custom in 1980 (usually the second Saturday in January) and more recently a Longsword team, Wype Doles.
The excellent Folk dance & song magazine produced by Theo Thomas & friends, covering the Beds, Herts & Cambs area. - Unicorn Magazine, 6, Dudley Street, Luton, Beds, LU2 0NT
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