I’ve never liked the use of the word “tradition” to refer to a locality’s sub-style of Cotswold morris and its repertoire of dances. For one thing, there is more to a locality’s morris tradition than that. “We do the Bampton tradition” — no, you don’t; you do dances from Bampton in the Bampton style. The Bampton morris tradition includes much more: The context in which it occurs, who does it, when they do it, where they do it, why they do it, what they do besides the actual dances, and so on.
For another thing, what do you call it when a team develops its own repertoire of dances in its own style? Something contradictory like “new tradition”, maybe, or, slightly less oxymoronically, “invented tradition”. Never mind that it isn’t, initially at least, traditional.
But it’s the term we’re stuck with.
Nearly all revival Cotswold teams dance one or more of the traditions collected from about two dozen localities. Some teams take pride in doing many, even “all”, of the collected traditions; others feel it’s better to focus on a small number, a few focus on a single one.
It’s pretty common for teams to develop new dances in the style of one of the collected traditions. But relatively few teams make the attempt to develop their own “invented tradition”. Rarest of all is the team whose sole performance tradition is their own invented one.
This, from a certain perspective, is puzzling. After all, pre twentieth century, it’s more or less what every morris team did. The Headington dancers didn’t do Ducklington or Bampton or Wheatley dances, and the Ducklington, Bampton, and Wheatley teams didn’t do Headington dances. Each team took pride in dancing only its own dances in its own style. From the evidence it does seem they cross-pollenated — or, expressed differently, they stole dances from each other; clearly the Bledington, Longborough, Oddington, and Sherborne versions of “Trunkles”, for instance, all derived from one original dance. But if they lifted a dance idea from another team, they still did it in their own style.
Then again, revival morris isn’t traditional morris: Traditional morris teams didn’t usually practice every week year-round, dance many times in a months-long dancing season, go to weekend-long morris ales expecting to dance a dozen different dances including several mass dances, or stage pickup morris events with sets including dancers from several different teams. There’s no reason to expect revival morris’s choices regarding dance styles and repertoires to be the same as those of traditional teams. On the other hand, there are still traditionl teams — Bampton, Headington, Abingdon, Chipping Campden — that still do exclusively their own traditions, and at least in the case of the latter two they prefer and expect that no one else do their tradition. It’s still a viable thing to do. But very few revival teams emulate them in this. Maybe more should. It’d be interesting.
Inventing a Cotswold-like tradition is hard, though; much harder than inventing a dance in an existing tradition.
I’ve seen a few invented traditions, and in my view there are a couple of things that commonly go wrong. They’re results of the temptation to make the new tradition distinctive by throwing in as many novel ideas as possible. Let’s have the sets be a different shape! Let’s use these figures I just came up with that have never been used in morris dancing before! Let’s structure the dances differently!
One problem with this is that often the many novel features actually don’t fit together very well. You end up with dances that are kind of disjointed messes. Another is that the result deviates so much from what we’re used to in the collected traditions that it really doesn’t come across as being within the Cotswold framework. The latter isn’t a problem at all, really, if the style and repertoire ends up being compelling, entertaining to watch and fun to dance. An alternative to Cotswold, equally satisfying but different? Bring it on! But that’s even harder than developing a new tradition within the Cotswold bounds. If you think you have it in you, by all means do it, but it’s a lofty goal.
How, then, to approach creating an invented tradition that does hang together well, and that fits within Cotswold?
I once heard from Phil Underwood of Thames Valley Morris of an encounter he’d had with a group of school kids’ fathers that annually performed a single morris dance for a school festival. They had no other involvement with morris dancing, and they’d started some years before by having someone teach them a Bampton dance. Then they did it once a year, in isolation from the morris world. By the time Phil met them, the dance was still recognizable but quite a lot different from Bampton as it is conventionally done. Phil chose not to tell them “No, you’re doing it wrong, here’s how it should go.” Instead he worked with them on fixing up some problems — keeping the lines straight and the rounds round, that kind of thing. Then he taught them another Bampton dance — but adapted to the style their first dance had become. I don’t know what ever became of this group, but potentially what Phil had found and supported was a new tradition evolving in the wild, unintentionally, and probably in much the same way as the, erm, traditional traditions did.
So there’s one answer. To develop a new Cotswold-like tradition, start with an existing tradition, do it for ten or twenty years, and never ever “correct” it. Never read Bacon, never watch any videos of other teams doing that tradition (or of yourselves doing it years earlier), and for God’s sake never go to a morris event where people will tell you what you’re doing wrong.
That may not be feasible for your team, though.
But maybe you can do something like that.
You start with an existing tradition — Bledington, for instance. Or Adderbury. Or whatever. Pretty much by definition, that will be something that works well, fits together, is definitely Cotswold.
But if the way you’re doing it starts to drift, people will correct you. You will correct you, if you compare what you’re doing to what other people are doing. “That’s not how Bledington is supposed to go!” they, or you, will say. The problem is, you’re doing Bledington, and Bledington has rules, and you will be pressured to stay within those rules.
So you break out of the game by not doing Bledington. You start with Bledington and immediately make changes to it.
Maybe there are some aspects of Bledington you don’t like. Not a fan of hook legs? Change them to galleys. Think half-gips are boring? Replace them with crossovers. Don’t like emulating helicopters? Do the hankies differently.
And if there’s nothing about Bledington you don’t like… Make changes anyway. Changes for the sake of changes.
Don’t change everything. Don’t even change a lot. Bledington works, and the more you change it, the more likely it is you’ll make it not work. The point is, first, to get rid of anything you actually dislike, and second, to make it not be Bledington. Change just enough to make that clear. It’s obviously based on Bledington, but it isn’t Bledington.
And don’t call it Bledington. It’s not.
If it isn’t Bledington, it doesn’t have to be Bledington — it doesn’t have to play by Bledington’s rules. You’re not doing it wrong, because it’s your tradition. It’s not defined by Bacon or Sharp or anyone but you. If it drifts over the years, that’s fine. It’s more than fine, it’s a positive development: It’s becoming more and more its own thing. And if five years in you decide, we’re tired of doing the upright capers like this, let’s change them to that, well, that is also fine. You sort of can’t do that to Bledington — but you can do that to your own tradition. Look at Bampton: Once in a while, they go ahead and change something. They can. You can too.
Freed from expectations to conform, your tradition is free to evolve. Maybe in ten or twenty years the Bledington roots of it will be so thoroughly buried as to be invisible. And there you are, the kind of result the school kids’ fathers had, but without the years of morris exile. Your own tradition, unique to your team.