Are native traditions a way into the future rather than being a mere relic from the past? Molly Flatt takes a look into the revived world of Morris dancing and the increasing trend of forward-looking rusticity.
It was an unlikely pairing. You wouldn’t expect the sort of edgy, urban international hipsters that attend SXSW – the music, film, and technology festival and all-round trend-spotting mecca that sprouts from the desert of Austin, Texas each year – would have much interest in a bunch of bobbing blokes from a small Oxfordshire village with bells on their legs and hankies in their hands. But when Tim Plester premiered Way of the Morris, his documentary about “the origins and impulses behind Morris dancing and its place within enchanted England’s ongoing story”, alongside the Jake Gyllenhaal thriller Source Code and Jodie Foster’s The Beaver, their reaction suggested quite otherwise.
“We certainly didn’t come close to breaking any box-office records,” Plester laughs, “but we did succeed in attracting several small but perfectly formed audiences who, I hope, left the screenings with their notions of Old Weird Albion sufficiently shaken and stirred.” The film want on to scoop awards for ‘Best Independent Documentary Feature’ and ‘Best Documentary Film’ at the 2011 Southern Appalachian International Film Festival, was selected by the UK Film Focus as one of their ‘Breakthrough’ British films of the year, and both the British Library and The British Film Institute requested copies of the film for their archives.
Forward-Looking Rusticity
Plester’s success is not as surprising as you might think, and not just because nostalgia for the bucolic good life is a timeless cultural trope. A new strain of gritty, unsentimental and forward-looking rusticity has been bubbling away over the past five years or so. And to its disciples – in music, fashion and technology, as well as film – native traditions are a way into the future, not a relic from the past.
“We are just the next generation carrying on the folk tradition while making it relevant to our time” Mumford & Sons bassist Ted Dawes explained back in the band’s annus mirabilis of 2009. “Many people talk of our Bluegrass influence which is strong, but Bluegrass music was born out of Scottish and English folk music… We don’t fight our influences but instead embrace them and blend them into something fresh.”
The origins of the movement rather painfully dubbed ‘nu-folk’ have been ascribed to the creation of Fence Records in 1997. With artists such as James Yorkston, Pip Dylan and King Creosote, the Fife-based label established a sound that retained traditional British folk’s earthy vernacular but added a fresh, individualistic mash-up mentality.
By 2012, when nu-folk flagbearers Laura Marling and Mumford & Sons were shortlisted for the Mercury Prize, the genre was firmly in the mainstream. Following in the footsteps of Fence, both acts were nurtured by Communion, a Notting Hill based community of likeminded musicians and fans founded in 2006 by Mumford & Sons’ Ben Lovett, former Cherbourg bassist Kevin Jones, and acclaimed producer Ian Grimble. The group swiftly became Communion Records in 2009 and is currently releasing records from the likes of Daughter, the ethereal and melancholy 21-year-old Elena Tora, and modern beatnik Marcus Foster.
What all these musicians have in common is a fierce sense of pride in their heritage but also a commitment to making a traditional sound personal, relevant and innovative for a restless urban generation. No wonder the album accompanying Way of the Morris was voted ‘third best soundtrack of 2011’ by MOJO magazine.
Jerusalem: The Enchantment of Rural Life
Theatre has also fallen for the lore of the land. You can still find people pitching tents on Shaftesbury Avenue in order to scoop a day release ticket for Jez Butterworth’s play Jerusalem, two years after its première at the Royal Court.
Set on St George’s Day in a Wiltshire country fair, where local hellraiser and caravan dweller Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron evades the evicting council, leads the restless youth astray and spins folkloric tales, the play is starkly honest about how grubby, aimless and unromantic rural life can be. But it still enchants us. Rooster Byron is modern and ancient Briton in one spectacular shell – eccentric, irascible, damaged, glorious – and we can’t get enough of him.
“People are hungry for something and the play feeds that hunger”, Mark Rylance, who plays Johnny Byron, told Newsnight at the end of last year. Indeed, having garnered nine awards, ecstatic reviews, and having inspired equal transatlantic fervor in its sell-out Broadway run last summer, Jerusalem is far more than a whimsical hymn to twee Britannia. In the words of Telegraph critic Charles Spencer, it is in fact “a play for today’s England.”
Another recently written and acclaimed rural comedy is Stones in his Pockets, a two-hander written in 1996 by Marie Jones for the DubbleJoint Theatre Company in Dublin. Similar to Jerusalem, Stones in his Pockets positions rural Britain as a damaged but joyful alternative to an antiseptic modern world, as a Hollywood film crew descends on a quiet corner of County Kerry and chaos ensues.
Nicolas Kent, the outspoken artistic director of Kilburn’s Tricycle Theatre, who is stepping down in March in protest against coalition arts cuts, has chosen to stage an updated version of the play as his swansong. Having turned the Tricycle into ‘Britain’s leading political playhouse’, thanks to timely and provocative documentary dramas based around such topics as the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry and last summer’s riots, Kent evidently thinks that the play’s themes are still highly relevant and exciting in unstable times.
New Wave Ruralists
And the rural revival doesn’t stop at the entertainment industry. Thanks to the ‘Chipping Norton set’ – Kate Moss, Alex James, Jeremy Clarkson and David Cameron are just a few of the celebrities who have big old houses in small Oxfordshire villages – a lifestyle that combines city sophistication with cheese-making, pub-carousing and market-going is ever more desirable. Tourists may be content with Burberry’s sanitised version of Englishness but real fashion leaders – clad in a mixture vintage finds, Balenciaga’s hand-crafted Peruvian wools and Stella McCartney’s oversized eco-friendly knits – are increasingly starting to resemble the mad old men you can still find mumbling into their beer in a Cotswolds pub.
So what might the future look like for the archetypal new-wave ruralist? With Noah and the Whale pumping out of the radio and a local cheese on the oak kitchen table, will he accessorise the Morris outfit his grandfather wore with a Grayson Perry scarf?
“I’m most definitely a city dweller these days”, Plester admits, “and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. But Adderbury will always be the place I go to when I daydream. My own private Avalon if you will. A place where landscape and melody entwine. A place where my sense of smell intensifies and my taste-buds begin to itch a little. An ancient realm in which my whiskers start growing that tiny bit faster.”
