root salad Way Of The Morris
Tim Plester’s documentary about Adderbury Morris is a moving experience. Colin Irwin meets the directors.
“W
e were thinking of starting the film with moments from comedy sketches where people
use morris dancing as the butt of a joke. Absolutely any comedy programme uses it at some point…Blackadder…The Vicar Of Dibley…Catherine Tate…as long as there are comedy sketch shows there will be a sketch somewhere with morris dancers as the butt of a joke…”
Tim Plester has the missionary zeal of the born-again morris man. In a pub in North London drinking green beer (I kid you not), eating vegetarian scotch eggs and discussing the brilliance of last month’s fRoots cover star Sam Amidon while getting psyched up for the start of the pub quiz, Plester is well aware of the irony of his own conviction. Indeed, he’s made a movie about it…
Previewed at David Owen’s 5,000 Mor-
ris Dancers extravaganza at London’s South Bank last year, Way Of The Morris, his film with co-director Rob Curry, has come a long way, officially premiering at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas and showing at various other festivals around the globe. This summer it’s being shown at Sidmouth and Towersey folk festivals, fol- lowed by a small-scale cinema release in September with a DVD after that. Docu- mentary rather than story, it features real people, proper dancers and no actors – apart from Billy Bragg, Tim Plester has known virtually everyone else in it all his life. It’s a terrific film following Tim’s own relationship with morris in a strangely moving way that taps into wider truths and the primary importance of dance as an integral part of community, connecting with those who lived and died in the vil- lage many generations earlier.
This is something that the comedy scriptwriters who’ve constantly homed in on it as a soft target for the clichéd jokes that have indoctrinated the nation into tit- tering at the very mention of morris, just don’t get. Tim Plester knows this only too well, for he too used to be one of those sneering heretics. Brought up in one of the great strongholds of morris in the Oxford- shire village of Adderbury, where his father and uncle both danced, he com- pletely rejected his local heritage.
“There’s a photo of me as a child in 1976 in morris gear which they made spe- cially for me. They dressed me up and took me down to the village and apparently I wouldn’t even get out of the car. They gave up on me after that.”
Tim Plester’s long and painful conver- sion into loving and participating in a tra- dition he’d long rejected is the crux of Way
Of The Morris. “The boring cliché is ingrained and I fell victim to it. That’s what we tried to confront. It’s quite a challenge to make a film about a subject that instantly triggers a certain response.”
O
He took on that challenge in partner- ship with old friend Rob Curry, who comes not from Adderbury but Kilburn and knew nothing of morris, Cotswold, Border or otherwise. “On one level our harshest audience will be dancers and you have to make a film that speaks to them and says something to them about their lives, possi- bly something they’ve never even thought of themselves,” says Curry. “But if you make it only for them you’re missing a trick. You’re missing the opportunity to take something that people think they know about and make them look at it again. If you go to Cadiz or Jerez and seek out some backstreet flamenco bar with proper authentic Spanish beer and you’re there drinking sherry and basking in the ambience it’s really exciting. Yet going to an English village seeing morris dancers is considered ridiculous…”
ne of the most poignant and powerful pieces in the film depicts a visit to France where the Adderbury Village Morris side
were almost entirely wiped out during the Battle of the Somme in the First World War. Traditional dancing wasn’t revived in the village until 1975 when a new side of young dancers symbolically gathered outside the house of the sole survivor of that early 20th Century side, Charlie Coleman, the village blacksmith, as morris finally returned to Adderbury.
“Personally that really hit me,” says
Plester. “After shunning the morris for so many years I didn’t know about that side of the story, and it really changed things for me. It was then I started to look at the idea that what you’re really doing with these dances is connecting with the people who were lost and, as much as you can from notes written down at the time, perform the dances in the same way they did. Brian, who plays the Fool in the team now, remembers Charlie Coleman coming out to watch them dance outside his house and being very emotional, saying he thought he’d never see dancing there again.”
It was in France, in fact, when Tim Plester finally cast his indoctrinated preju- dices aside and the film shows him grasp- ing his own village legacy and taking his first steps as an Adderbury Village Morris man. It’s not an affectation for the film, either; he’s now a fully-paid up member of the side, as passionate as the others and playing a full role in the annual Adderbury Day Of Dance in April (there are actually
three sides in Adderbury now but the film doesn’t delve into the split that occurred when breakaway dancers insisted they should be dancing steps collected by Cecil Sharp rather than those notated by local villager Janet Blunt).
There are groans as I bring up the other morris film… Morris: A Life With Bells On, a very different type of movie, which came out in 2009. “If we’d made a documentary about the Iraq war you wouldn’t be asking what we thought about a crime thriller about Iraq – they’re totally different films,” says Rob Curry. “My major comment is that it seems odd to make a comedy about something that people already laugh about,” says Tim. “When I saw it I was very pleased it wasn’t anything like the film we were making. There was a long period when we were filming and people kept saying ‘You know there’s another film being made about morris?’ What are the chances of that? We thought we would definitely be on safe territory with the subject. Once I’d seen their film I was confident we should carry on what we were doing. If anything it made people think about morris and our film will benefit from that.”
We order another pint of green beer and never speak of it again…
www.wayofthemorris.com F 21 f
Photo: Judith Burrows
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