Black Faces, Garlands, and Coconuts: Exotic Dances on Street and Stage

Abstract

During the late 1920s, representatives from the English Folk Dance Society came across an unusual custom in a narrow valley in the northwest of England. Every Easter a small group of men would dance through the local streets, accompanied by a silver band and led by a whip-carrier who cleared a space in which they could perform. On the face of it such ceremonial activity was similar to the annual practices of English morris and sword dancers whose repertoires and customs Cecil Sharp had rescued from oblivion in the early years of the century. Certainly, in broad terms, the custom conformed to Sharp's definition of the morris as a ceremonial performance by men only, in special dress, and at a particular time in the local calendar (1909:10-12). Yet these dances performed by men from the slipper factories and mines of the Rossendale Valley in Lancashire bore little resemblance to anything published in the Morris Book(s) and Sword Dances of Northern England. Not only did the dancers have blackened faces, carry half-hoop garlands, wear skirts, and perform what looked like nineteenth-century ballroom dances, but their performance was also characterised by the execution of a complex and rhythmical dance which they called a "coconut dance." With the death of Cecil Sharp in 1924, the task of collecting the repertoire of this unusual group fell to his former assistant, Maud Karpeles. The performers, who referred to themselves as Coconut Dancers, or sometimes more familiarly as "Coconutters" or "Nutters," resisted this attempt to document and disseminate their much prized coconut dance (see Buckland 1989), but they later came to enjoy the patronage and increasing fame which association with the English Folk Dance Society brought them. Today, this same group, the Britannia Coconut Dancers of Bacup, Rossendale, is proud of its unique dance, the origin of which, in true "folk" fashion, is reputed to be lost in ancient mystery. The Britannia Coconut Dancers and the Concept of "Otherness" The coconuts are not in fact actual coconut shells but circular pieces of wood, normally maple, used for its hard "ringing" quality. These wooden discs are attached to the palms of the hands and above each knee with leather straps, and a slightly larger circle of wood is positioned on the right side of the waist. Throughout the performance the dancers primarily strike the palm nuts of each other, and occasionally their own. In one figure, the knee nuts of adjacent dancers are also tapped. In addition to the coconut dance, which can be performed in two files of four, in a file of eight, or in a square formation, the Britannia Coconut Dancers include in their repertoire five figures of a garland dance, similar to a set of quadrilles. On Easter Saturday the dancers, in single file on either side of the road, advance through the streets of Bacup using a running pol ka step, and halt at staggered intervals to perform two or three figures from the coconut dance. Along the left side of the street the nine musicians steadily march in single file playing...

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