Could you tell me about Cecil Sharpe please?
Thank you very much for asking!
This is only really tangentially related to the original post as the original post talks about romance in old dance styles and I'm not.
Also I don't claim to be an expert on this, just an enthusiast so a. Don't take this as gospel if you find better info and b. If anyone has more info, give me a shout!
The original post asserts that dances lack romance and aren't as intimate as waltzes or other two person dances. While it goes on to argue the opposite there's also a secret third thing going on. In the 1900's Cecil Sharp (no e on the end I fucked up his name) began working on documenting various English folk traditions including Morris dancing. For context (I just checked the wiki because I know what he did not who he was) Sharp was a member of the Fabian society but described himself as a "conservative socialist" due to his dislike of the results of the industrial revolution and probably his slight opposition to the suffragist/suffragette movements. He documented various Morris dances which began a folk revival, in order to do this he had to go to towns which had kept these traditions alive and ask about them, document the music and the specific movements and then move on to the next one. At a similar time, having worked with Sharp previously on documenting folk traditions, Mary Neal, a socialist activist, had set up a women's Morris troupe, and criticised Sharp about his almost complete control over the revival of the tradition and his stubbornness when it came to the actual preservation of the dances. She thought that the dances required more energy and flamboyance than the way Sharp had documented them.
You see where I'm going here?
Cecil Sharp, a middle class, well educated man, decided to try and revive folk culture in England out of nostalgia for "the good old days of sleepy old England" as it were and in doing so, went to working class communities, documented their dances (which would probably have been passed down orally before) and set them in stone. Granted, yes, without him Morris dancing might not be alive today, but, Mary Neal would argue that the spirit of the dances has been lost and I would be inclined to agree.
The pace at which a lot of Morris music is set is too slow for starters, it often seems a bit dreary when performed by a traditional Morris troupe. Also a lot of the routines involve sticks! There's a dance that I can't remember the name of that involves short sticks and for one person to hit either side of a stick in someone's hand. Sharp would have you perform it at a walking pace but these dances represent various things and a lot of them would be angry or passionate or energetic but because of the work of one guy and his overbearing control over the folk revival it's lost all the fire and energy.
So to summarise, medieval dances or traditional dances are romantic, they are passionate, you do have partners in Morris dancing sometimes, most importantly though, they're about community and about bringing the people around you closer and they're about really bloody going for it. Chances are they've just been appropriated by people who wanted to play the hero.
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