alex_beecroft

Yesterday my new morris side, Sutton Masque – a mixed Border Morris side – welcomed in the official start of summer on the 1st of June by dancing outside a couple of pubs in Ely. It was freezing, rainy and grey. A hardy Greek family sat outside The Cutter, under the porch heaters and watched us dance by the river. I hope we were a properly bizarre glimpse into the literal local colour for their holiday. We certainly appreciated having them as an audience because none of the natives had dared venture out.

Later we went down to The Fountain and danced there for another hour, still in the drizzle, with the light failing around us. Here our only audience was an Australian couple in fantastic Aran beanies (I covet a beanie like theirs.) They took our picture and told me they liked my face. I take that to mean that they liked my face paint. This made me very glad, because my attempt to look like a Wood Wose takes me a good half hour of preparation before I even make it out of the door. The dark green of the background colour doesn’t half stain your flannels when you wash it off!

This is my face:

taken after we’d given up on dancing and gone inside to play music and eat birthday cake. (Happy birthday Neil!)

I’m very proud of our new kit, which is dark green and gold, with a wild-man-of-the-woods, Jack-in-the-Green feel to it, and I am even beginning to get used to dancing in a top hat. You can see the full outfit here if you like, because the above is the indoors look without the tattered jacket.

In more relevant writing news, I’ve been spending my time finishing the first Porthkennack book for Riptide Press. Currently called Foxglove Copse, this is a contemporary m/m romance set in a fictional Cornish town with a slightly gothic twist. I’ve also done the first content edit pass for my huge long queer historical fantasy The Glass Floor, which should be coming out next year, and found a new home for Labyrinth, which had been contracted to Samhain Publishing but for which I got my rights back recently.

Right now, I’m working on the third book in my queer space opera trilogy Lioness of Cygnus 5. Have I told you about this? I don’t think I’ve told you about this. But it probably justifies its own post, so I’ll do that next time.

Mirrored from Alex Beecroft - Author of Gay Historical and Fantasy Fiction.

This was a great do! I’m still not quite up to dancing, but I can now breathe well enough to play the whistle. As my ladies’ side, Ely and Littleport Riot, had decided to come even though they did not have any of their musicians, that wasn’t a problem – I just turned up as a musician for both Coton and the Riot. Two full days from 9 am-5pm of dancing in various picturesque Yorkshire villages along with almost 150 other morris dancers of the full spread of traditions. Longsword, North West Clog, rapper, border and Cotswold, plus the 400 Roses who are a unique combination of morris with tribal belly dance.

I Christened the new top hat which I got for my birthday, and by the time the weekend was closing, and I was standing on a cobbled street at the brow of a hill, looking down on a stone town straight out of a Hovis advert, playing as the lone musician left for Coton, I felt I had earned it. The past few years I have felt a little bit like an impostor among the musicians, but this time around I had a moment of feeling sure I belonged. In celebration I’ve gone out today and bought some white feathers to put in my hat brim, so in future photos the hat will look even more splendid.

I was one of only three musicians who stayed to the very end, for the traditional massed dance-off that closes the do. If you listen very hard you can just about hear me, but tbh I am rather drowned out by the melodeon and accordion  next to me. I know I was there, though!

The ladies in coloured waistcoats with red hankies are my side, Ely and Littleport Riot, the gents in black and white are my other side, Coton, and the ladies in the extravagant skirts are the belly-dancing morris side 400 Roses:

Mirrored from Alex Beecroft - Author of Gay Historical and Fantasy Fiction.

I’m blogging over on the LGBT Fantasy Fans blog today on a subject close to my heart – ritual dance.

http://lgbtfantasyfansandwriters.wordpress.com/2012/12/03/dancing-with-destiny/

Which was prompted by a great time at Mill Road Winter Fair at the weekend. One problem with playing music for one side while dancing for another comes when both sides turn out to the same event. Then who do you support? Crisis! Clash of loyalties! Woe is me! Who should I let down this year? Or can I figure out a composite kit and support both? I will give you a clue:

There seems to be no rule that the waistcoat you wear for the Riot can’t be black. So with a black waistcoat and a zebra blanket thrown around the shoulders for those chilly muso moments between dances, I mostly fitted with both sides at once. And boy did I need that blanket! It was perishing.

I must say, it’s excellent practice for your breath control – finishing a dance, then taking half a minute to throw on a hat and cloak & going out to play the whistle. I was out of breath most of the time, but I don’t think it showed.

Mirrored from Alex Beecroft - Author of Gay Historical and Fantasy Fiction.

I’ve had Ely Apple Day on my mind for a week. I blogged about it last week, full of enthusiasm with the memory of good dancing and good music on a day when it didn’t rain, even though it looked like it wanted to. I’d been looking forward to seeing the photos, but when we did, several members of the side noticed that everyone was wearing blue. The idea of our kit is that our white shirts represent the white skies of the Fens, our black skirts represent the rich black Fenland soil, our red handkerchiefs represent the blood spilled in the Ely and Littleport Riots after which we’re named, and the many different colours of our waistcoats represent the individuality of each dancer.

This is totally scuppered if we all go for the same colour, and somehow, despite differences of shade, we all seem to have gone for variants of blue. This could mean only one thing – time to make another waistcoat. I wanted lime green, but they didn’t have enough of that on the roll, so – in an unexpected move which surprised even myself – I’ve bought some royal purple material instead

with some tacky yet sparkly buttons to match. This should clash in a most satisfactory way with my orange hair and lime green shawl. Good taste being yet another of those things which the true zen masters of folk have ascended beyond.

Speaking of Ely Apple Day, I had a lovely exchange with a member of the crowd who had drawn up to watch us.

“Where are these dances from?” she asked me.

As I’m sure you know, the same question can have several appropriate answers depending on the context, because the context helps clarify what is actually being asked. I’m not much good at picking up the subtle clues which show what the context is, so I started off by trying to explain that these were dances from the Welsh Borders, but there were other styles of morris dancing from other areas, such as Cotswold and North West Clog, and that the local style – Molly – was similar to what we were doing, but slightly different.

But by that point I could tell from her continued look of bemusement that I was not really answering the question she’d intended to ask. Then I put together her Mediterranean looks and slight lisp of an accent and struck out with what I thought might be a lucky guess. “The prevailing theory is that the Morris dance is originally from Spain,” I said.

Her face cleared – this was obviously what she’d really been asking about all along. “I’m from Catalonia,” she said, “and our dances are just like this. I wondered if there had been some sort of cultural exchange programme.”

I laughed. “There was indeed. It was in the 15th Century.”

And this is why history, and Folk, are neither boring nor irrelevant – because the cultural ties our two countries had five hundred years ago still help make sense of our behaviour, and allow us to feel like part of a family, even today. It’s a small world and dancing makes it a better one.

Music does too. On a different subject, we were walking around Cambridge today, and in three different places we were surrounded by music played live on the painted pianos that have been scattered around the town

http://elfringham.co.uk/cambridge-street-pianos-2/

proper music, mind you. People had obviously discovered they were there, gone home for their sheet music and come back prepared. There was some wonderful concert standard stuff going on al fresco, in the balcony of the shopping centre and outside in the park.

Mirrored from Alex Beecroft - Author of Gay Historical and Fantasy Fiction.

And I don’t just mean my hair (though, seriously, that mop needs a cut.)

Nah – not a post about my hair. The genuine Olympic torch containing fire from Olympia passed through Huntingdon on Sunday morning. Knowing that loads of people would turn out to see it, the town council decided to organise a bit of a fete around it. “I know,” they said to themselves, “what we need to welcome the sportsmen is a Day of Dance, because dance is so well represented at the Olympics.”

(Or something like that. I may be putting words into their mouths.)

At any rate, the upshot of their cogitating was that they invited Ely and Littleport Riot to dance in the square and entertain the people waiting for the torch to jog past. We of course said ‘yes please!’

Those of us – like me – who are the kind of grouches who get all huffy about sport were brought round into genuine excitement by the promise that there would also be a group of Hungarian dancers visiting from Huntingdon’s twin town, Szentendre. The Olympic torch, I can take or leave, but actual folk doing their actual folk dance is much more my thing.

We arrived at 7.45am and found hordes of people already there. I think you can tell I was enjoying myself –

(Portrait of the artist as a middle-aged folk dancer.)

We felt we had to raise our game a little because the Szentendre dancers were so good. Lo! There was much thigh slapping and boot-heel clicking and super-voluminous skirt twirling.

Some of it while balancing bottles of booze on their heads!

The Riot watched with much admiration, and a lot of commentary. We all agreed that the men’s dances are very similar in spirit to our morris jigs – there’s a lot of “I can leap higher than you! Look, ladies! Look at how springy and sprightly I am. I’m much better than him! Flock to me, little birdies” sort of thing about it. And while the women’s dancing is much lower key and more stately, it’s clearly designed to show off a lot of leg. We felt like undisciplined violent thugs in comparison. Or well, I did. I quite liked it.

At some point the Olympic torch passed by:

After which everybody in the marketplace did Zumba for a bit, lead by the teachers of the local Zumba class. Szentendre were unfairly good at that too! Then we were delighted to be invited to the tea in the town hall, where we danced for the mayor and various other organizers, Szentendre danced again, and then – joy – we got a chance to learn a dance from them.

This was a very simple circle dance, suitable for teaching someone who’s never danced before, but I still found it a lot harder than it looked. Hard to get my head around the asymmetric patterns of the stepping, and hard work physically too.

It was glorious. And they even let us be in the group photo.

Well worth getting up very early on a Sunday morning for. Even if the Riot almost managed to live up to the history of our name when one of the organisers told us we weren’t allowed to have any of the cakes we’d been promised. They had undercatered and now they were afraid  that if they let us eat, other more important people wouldn’t get any. Fortunately hangings and deportations to Australia were averted when someone nipped out to Marks and Sparks and came back with a couple of tubs of chocolate rice crispie cake. Which was infinitely better than custard danish pastries any day.

Mirrored from Alex Beecroft - Author of Gay Historical and Fantasy Fiction.

So, last Saturday was the first time since that terrifying day in September when I appeared at a public dance-out as Coton Morris Men’s solo musician, and the first time I’ve played for them as their solo musician and been in Coton kit. Here is the proof:

(Coton musician’s kit = anything you like as long as it’s black and white.)

I felt very official, and – while nowhere near as nervous as the first time – still pretty shaky-legged. But I was proud of myself for playing at four different venues around the town, in front of two other morris sides at each spot. Each with its own musicians who almost certainly knew the tunes better than me.

I’ve even managed to master the morris-musician’s magical ability to direct a focussed blast of air at the dancers, to keep them up during the highly technical levitating dances:

It was a great day. As you can see, it was warm enough to stand around in shirtsleeves (in March!) and we danced alongside Fenstanton Morris, Manor Mill Clog Dancers, Little Egypt and of course The Riot. The Riot were the hosts of the day and I was sorry not to be dancing with them, but at the same time I really felt like an essential part of Coton for the first time since I joined. I’m not quite sure which is ‘my’ side any more. Both, I suppose.

A dishevelled man swims out of the sea, crawls up the beach and with trembling hands holds up a sign that says “And now for something completely different…”

It will probably come as no surprise, to anyone who knows how I work, when I say that I’ve reviewed my progress on Elf Princes’ Quest and decided that with 11 scenes down, 22,000 words so far, and 17 scenes still to go, this is looking like a short novel instead of a novella. The whole “planning by scenes” thing is still valid, I suppose, as long as I remember that my scene length is a little less than twice what I think it’s going to be. I was going for a 30,000 word novella, and it looks like it will be a 50,000 word novel instead.

By this time I suppose the surprise is that I ever manage to write anything short at all.

Mirrored from Alex Beecroft - Author of Gay Historical and Fantasy Fiction.

This weekend saw me in two layers of thermals and a big black coat playing as one of Coton Morris Men’s musicians, and can I just say that (a) the inventor of handwarmers is hereby promoted by me to the status of a minor god, and (b) nobody told me that whistle players need to carry a windsock to make sure they stand with the wind behind them. Otherwise, while you’re trying to blow a note, the breeze blows back and all you get is silence and red in the face.

I have decided to drop all that Irish- tin- penny- nonsense at the front. The instrument doesn’t originate in Ireland, isn’t always made of tin, and even the cheapest ones cost about a fiver.

Here, for example, is an article about the oldest musical instrument in the world which is still playable, a bone flute from Jiahu in Henan province in China and here is a vulture bone one from Germany 35,000 years ago. Both of them are end-blown, from what I can see, so ‘flute’ is a bit misleading.

In deference to the fact that the whistle is one of the most ancient instruments on the planet, I’m adopting the plain Anglo-Saxon word for the instrument (hwistle) and just sprucing up the spelling a bit.

Speaking of Anglo-Saxon whistles, have a lovely video of someone who is either admirably non-gender-biased about their name, or not really Kate Corwen at all, playing one.

Mirrored from Alex Beecroft.

I was very bad last Saturday and totally forgot to attend a chat for members of the Macaronis.  In my defence, my husband had come home with tickets to see the Demon Barber Roadshow, and after that everything else fled from my mind.

Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t look at this picture without a massive internal squee.  Is this not the coolest thing ever?

So at the prospect of a night in the theatre watching a roadshow based on a fusion of hip-hop, clog, rapper and morris dancing, I dropped everything and ran out, only regretting that I hadn’t taken time to change into my morris kit first.

This will give you a better idea than I can about what I saw