Step Change
New views on traditional dance
Edited by Georgina Boyes
Francis Boutle Publishers
ISBN 1 903427 09 6
Paperback 201 pages 21 illustrations in black and white
Price per copy including postage: UK £10 Worldwide £12
The book
The study of traditional dance has changed dramatically over the last
ten years, bringing in previously unregarded types of dance and challenging
the assumptions of the early Folk Dance Revival. Step Change introduces
the enthusiast and the general reader alike to seven views of English
traditonal dance, some controversial, that reflect this new approach:
English sword dancing and the European context; ladies' clog dance contests
of the 1890s; ownership of the Britannia Coco-Nut dances of Bacup, Lancashire;
the tradition of 'Molly' dances of East Anglian farm workers and its reinvention
in the 1970s; the colourful life of nineteenth-century morris 'fool',
William 'Old Mettle' Castle; the folk dance revival as seen through the
Abbey School novels of Elsie J. Oxenham; and a fresh look at the achievements
of folk dance collector, Maud Karpeles.
Georgina Boyes is a folklorist whose major interest is in performance and theory. The author of over seventy academic articles on aspects of tradition, her book,The Imagined Village, was the first full-length study of the English Folk Revival and won the 1993 Katharine Briggs Folklore Award.
