Thursday, November 02, 2006

Morris Dancing

I'm reading the new Terry Pratchett book Wintersmith right now and it mentions morris dancing. Now this isn't the first time Pratchett's mentioned morris dancing and in a newspaper article that Pratchett once heatedly criticized, they also said that the fantasy genre was nothing but "lords and ladies morris dancing to greensleeves" or some such nonsense. Pratchett got a lot of flack for criticizing this article because it was trying to praise JK Rowling while putting down all other fantasy authors. Personally I think Pratchett was too polite. I would like to find that reporter's house and have a stampede of morris dancers level it.

At any rate, all this inspired a great curiosity to actually SEE some morris dancing so I looked it up on YouTube. Pratchett always seems to associate this dance with some sort of dark portent, but as far as I can tell it's England's form of square dancing with a bit more do-si-do and a little less swing-your-partner. But go ahead and take a look at these videos to decide what you think of it. They say it can be done with swords, which would be AWESOME, but sadly I could not find any examples of that...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rw8Cf1rPmio
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2YplTOOtEI&NR

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EDIT: Well, I still couldn't find morris dancing with swords but I did find this video. I think it's more Asian style sword dancing and it's Star Wars themed! Anyway, these kids are AMAZING and the little girl's like a billion times cooler than Amidala.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=2DpFFIJKDBI

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