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I well remember the first time I saw Morris dancers. I was at University in Plymouth during the 1970s and there was a team at the University. They gave a demonstration dance and my visceral response was ‘Why on earth would anyone want to do that?’ It’s a question which I still ask myself, except now it’s why on earth do we do this? If you ask around you’ll get a variety of fairly standardised responses. ‘Because it’s there’; ‘Because it’s traditional’; ‘Because it keeps me fit’; ‘For the social side’. None of these, I think, hold the whole truth. Certainly Morris is there, can be traditional and social although I doubt if it keeps anyone particularly fit. What seems more likely is that there are a combination of factors which apply. For me, and I believe for many others, the result of dancing Morris well is what is known as ‘Flow’. Reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book ‘Flow; The Psychology of Optimal Experience’ recently I saw a lot of parallels with my own experience of Morris. According to MC Flow is ‘a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished and that becomes a landmark in the memory for what life should be like’. It’s more than enjoyment, it’s that feeling when a difficult figure works; when you come off buzzing from the pleasure of a dance which went exactly how it was meant to; where all of the team danced in concert and produced something to be proud of. MC suggests that there are a assortment of factors or elements which go to making a Flow experience and I believe that these apply to both Morris dancing and teaching. 1 – Confronting an achievable task:- Difficult as they may seem at times, the dances have usually been performed before by others and must therefore be achievable. Those which have not are often the concoctions of teams and teachers and are susceptible to alteration to make them achievable. 2 – Concentration on the Activity in hand. Exercise of self-control over ones actions:- Although it often seems that many in the team are dancing on auto-pilot, on those occasions when Flow is achieved it is obvious that a level of concentration beyond the normal is achieved. The whole set knows when something special has been achieved, indeed, it takes the whole set to achieve that special something. I don’t believe that one dancer alone can do so in a six person dance. 3 – Clear Goals with Immediate Feedback:- Even in practice the feedback from the Foreman, (and I use the term in a positional, non-sexist way intending to be inclusive of both male and female Foremen) is immediate, in public performance, even more so. When the goals of the dance are achieved the public response can be amazing. 4 – Acting with deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life. Concern for the self disappears:- Although I have written above of the dancers who perform on auto-pilot, there is (for me at least) an overwhelming involvement in a ‘Flow’ dance which overrides all those other daily cares and frustrations to point where focussing on the dance nullifies the outside world to a great extent. Somehow, and without making it sound to mystical, a ‘Flow’ dance is removed from its mundane surroundings. When all of these factors come into play, for all of those dancing, then Flow is achievable. It happens perhaps two or three times a year, no more, by my estimate; after all it requires all six dancers, not to mention the musician, to achieve Flow for any one of the team to achieve it. It should be easier for less people though, and perhaps in this lies the root of jig dancing? On the other hand, perhaps the innate difficulty of achieving Flow with a cast of seven or more is one of the achievable challenges which make Flow! Rob Pilgrim
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