f24 “W
e don’t want to be seen as preaching but one of our tag lines has always been to take the
tradition into new areas. It’s an underly- ing passion of ours and I always liked the idea of doing bigger and bigger shows, wondering how we could take the Road- show to mainstream audiences. One of those ideas was to get involved with a dance company and work with pro dancers.”
It started to take shape when Black
Swan Rapper, the York-based dance side formed by Damien in 2001, were invited to perform at British Dance Edition, a big showcase of contemporary dance in Leeds.
“We were crapping ourselves because we had our opinions about what the con- temporary dance people would be like and I’m sure they had certain opinions about us too. But they were a lot more open than we expected and we went down a storm. After that I had a word with the artistic director of Yorkshire Dance and said ‘Look, I’ve have had this idea of doing a bigger project with other dancers, what do you think?’”
It was the start of a relationship which eventually led to the exciting fusion of dance counter-cultures we see in Time Gentlemen Please! So far they’ve only per- formed the show twice – in Leeds and Wakefield – selling out on both occasions. But, their Time Gentlemen Please! promo vid got 4,000 hits on YouTube in three days – more than their other vids have achieved in two years – all of which augurs well for the tour they plan in the autumn. Maybe, just maybe, we are seeing the beginnings of that much-touted but highly elusive holy grail, an English Riverdance…
They cough, shuffle and mumble in embarrassment at the lofty connotations of that very notion, but it has clearly occurred to them before (“think River- dance with a false moustache” is one of the lines on their publicity). It certainly has the potential to capture the imagina- tion of a wider world with no previous interest in either folk music or dancing. “One or two people have suggested that…” muses Damien. “It’s early days, but there are people who’ve come to see it who won’t come to gigs, but when you say it’s a theatre show they are much more interested. It crosses age gaps, everything from tiny kids to grannies in a safe environment.”
“It’s not just a matter of throwing dance on stage, there are some serious issues too about the whole social integra- tion of different cultures and how impor- tant traditional song and dance is and how valid it is today. We’re getting a bit of a connection with the street dancers ourselves. I hang out with the street crew at Bradford on a Sunday afternoon and learn some of their stuff. One of the breakdancers is setting up a dance battle in Leeds and is desperate to get some clog dancers along to dance for his crew. These guys are very cool street dancers and they were thinking ‘what the hell is this guy bringing us to see morris dancing for?’ but they absolutely loved it. So the connection between the two groups is as real in our world as in the supposed reali- ty on stage.”
With the folk world acutely aware – sometimes even paranoid – about the mis- representative stereotypes that are habitu- ally so damagingly attached to it, it’s illumi- nating to hear about the sweeping preju- dices heaped on a different counter- culture.
“The street dancers in the show like it because it breaks down barriers for them too. We all think we’re the only ones who have stereotypes put on us, but we’re not. Everyone has an idea of what they think street dancing is and if they see it they think they’re walking into a gangster bat- tle on the street. But it’s not like that at all. It’s just kids having a laugh. They’re a nice bunch of lads and lasses having a craic.”
The timing of Time Gentlemen Please! could hardly be better, following on from two excellent, high-profile national TV shows. Still Folk Dancing After All These Years was an effective, non-patronising guide to English dance traditions likeably presented by Rachel and Becky Unthank, whose own clog dancing remains a staple part of their stage act with the Unthanks. It was an encounter with the Unthanks’ clogging, in fact, which inspired conduc- tor, TV producer and presenter Charles Hazlewood to head for Newcastle to film the superb Come Clog Dancing, in which he set out to get a quizzical local commu- nity clogging again. His initial approaches to persuade volunteers to join his great clog experiment was met by blank stares and a widespread assumption that the roots of the dance lay somewhere in Hol- land rather than the cotton mills of Lan- cashire. Yet Hazlewood’s mission climaxed with a wonderfully entertaining sequence when crowds of unsuspecting Saturday shoppers in Newcastle’s Eldon Square were ambushed by a ‘flash mob’ performance of over 200 dancers, most of whom had never heard of clogging, let alone attempted it, two weeks earlier.
Hazlewood’s guide through the intrica- cies of clog was Laura Connolly, the first person to major in “foot percussion” at Newcastle’s folk degree course and now a
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