‘It’s a competitive, macho discipline’. Not a description you’d normally associate with the hankies-and-ribbons world of English folk dance, but bear with us.
This is Damien Barber, pioneering folk figurehead, answering the charge that, despite all efforts, folk dance is still, to the man on the street… well, a bit silly. He understands that point of view:
‘People don’t make these things up. Stereotypes come from somewhere. If it [folk dance] has got a bad name, it’s because the traditional dancers do it so badly. They see it as a social thing. We set out to do something different.’
Norfolk-born, but settled in Yorkshire since the turn of the millennium, Barber has been garnering high praise for injecting new spirit into traditional forms. f’Roots magazine even describe it as ‘phwoar-inducing’.
Originally a soloist, he now heads the Demon Barbers, a group who, along with contemporaries such as Bellowhead, are taking traditional folk forms to new levels.
Their live performances - the Demon Barber Roadshows - have grown into sprawling jamborees of traditional dance and music, featuring an extended family of performers of all varieties. (Quite literally family in some cases - the close-knit bunch incorporates brothers, sisters, wives, girlfriends in the way folk music often does.)
At the heart of the Roadshows is the traditional music with which Barber first made his name. A professional musician since the age of 18 – ‘after knacking up my A-levels’ - Barber spent time honing his trade as an accordion/concertina player in Ireland before settling in Yorkshire, becoming five-times finalist in Radio 2’s Young Tradition Awards on the way.
There’s also traditional morris and clog-dancing, with which many will be familiar.
But for real spectacle, it’s hard to beat the rapper dancing – a spiralling team dance, performed with swords of sprung steel. Barber became a founder member of Black Swan Rapper, after being switched on to dance by his girlfriend, a dancer with Kate Rusby’s old team, Black Adder Step. A new team with people who had never danced before, Black Swan Rapper had a clear mission from the start:
‘We set out to be the best team in the country. This wasn’t just an excuse to meet my mates down the pub. We wanted to be the best.’
That said, meeting mates down the pub has given them a great showcase opportunity. A Black Swan Rapper pub crawl is not a pub crawl as you and I know them. A rapper pub crawl sees them walk into a bar, in full dance outfit, clear a space and perform a set for the locals. A bunch of flouncy folk dancers, interrupting people’s pints - surely that’s asking for trouble? ‘We had a few hairy moments in Glasgow,’ smiles Barber.
The rapper dancing does much to illustrate the point about the agility and competitiveness of this type of dance. Clog dancing originated in the mills of Lancashire and rapper dancing in the pits of the North East. Tough, physical, working men letting off steam and showing off how fit they were. Try telling one of them you thought folk dance looked stupid and they’d flatten you.
With their show at York Theatre Royal, the Demon Barbers are taking folk dance into unfamiliar territory, with a new piece in which cloggers and break-dancers dance off against each other, with some beatboxing and meaty percussion thrown in.
It’s what might happen if you raided the family’s DVD collection and spliced your cousin Dave’s Run DMC video with your Gran’s copy of Riverdance - slightly disorienting at first, but accompanied by the growing realisation that ‘hey, maybe there’s something in this’.
Barber, with due enthusiasm, wants to pursue this direction further:
‘I’m aiming to create a full theatre piece based around a fusion of traditional dance with modern.’
An English Riverdance, then?
I get a wearied look in response. ‘We don’t call it that.’
OK, so the analogy falls short. It’s difficult to see a chap like Barber producing something as pompous and self-aggrandising as Michael Flatley would and has done, for a start. But, it’s to be hoped this grand ambition reaches its fruition sometime soon. With their electrifying shows, the Demon Barbers are applying the defibrillators to folk tradition. It may just shock you how entertaining it can be*.
Rob Peacock
*[and we may just have to electrocute you for that extended metaphor, Robert - ed]
