This story by Nicole Plett was published in U.S. 1 Newspaper on April 29, 1998. All rights reserved.
Does spring in central New Jersey make secret pagans of us all? If the recent glorious sunshine and riot of brilliant blossoms make you want to thank nature for spring, you may be a candidate for the dawn dances annually on May 1, at the Mercer Oak in Princeton Battlefield Park.
Traditionally, the Millstone River Morris will lead the May Day dances, joined by Shandygaff Longsword, Griggstown Lock Rapper Sword, Handsome Molly, and the Maypole Dancers. Together the groups welcome May in a tradition that dates from ancient times.
Dances performed for an invisible audience of spirits are among the oldest dances there are. In practically every culture outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, ritual dances that get in touch with the powerful forces of nature are indispensable to sacred practice. The potent exchange of energy between performers and audience is a transformative experience for dancer and dance-watcher alike. Together, everyone joins to curry favor with the spirits whose goodwill is considered vital for the community's well-being.
The Millstone River Morris dancers are just one of the groups around the world that will "dance up the sun" on May Day. "For centuries in small villages in rural England, Morris dancers have marked the seasons, brought hope, good luck, and the promise of fertility, have represented tradition and continuity, have entertained their neighbors, and have vexed high-minded persons," says their squire, Curtis Hoberman.
Ritual dances like the Morris were not danced for the social pairing of men and women, but were danced instead by teams of people to mark specific seasons and events like May Day, the solstices, First Night, and Twelfth Night.
Popular in medieval times in England and Scotland, the origins of Morris dancing are currently lost to history, but subjects of heated debate. Among the many theories is that the dancing was part of an ancient religious festival or combination of festivals such as Beltane or Flora. Some teams restrict the Morris dance to men only, although Millstone does not.
The most widely known Morris form comes from the Cotswold region of Oxfordshire and is danced by sides of six dancers bedecked in ribbons with bells on their legs, and handkerchiefs or sticks in their hands. The springtime ritual may have been intended to reawaken the earth with the pounding of sticks, waving of handkerchiefs, and ringing of bells. Morris sides, or teams, are often accompanied by fools, hobby horses, and other fanciful creatures.
Millstone River Morris has been dancing the Morris since 1982 and practices weekly throughout the year on the Princeton campus. Millstone's "kit" or costume is white trousers (for men and women), shirts, and handkerchiefs, with bells on the legs, and braided baldrics (the ornamented belt worn over one shoulder to support a sword) in orange, yellow, and green.
For Mary Zikos, a dancer and Princeton University employee, the May Day Dance is as much of a tradition today as its was for English farm people of centuries past. She's been joining the dawn dances at Princeton Battlefield Park for almost 15 years, and always takes May 1 as a vacation day from work.
She says the area's active community of ritual dancers grew out of the folk and country dance scene that began in the 1970s. The ritual dance "teams" draw most of their members from the Princeton Country Dancers, the English and American contra dance group that meets weekly at the Susanne Patterson Center. "It's very incestuous," she says. "I've danced on all four ritual teams, and tried them all out."
Zikos is one of the founders of Handsome Molly, founded in 1993 and the youngest of the four groups. It specializes in an 18th-century English form that mocked the nobility's codified Playford social dances with comic travesty. Its upstart practitioners all wore disguises so as not to suffer retribution. The Molly Dancer, a man dressed in a woman's colorful fake finery, is accompanied by 10 dancers in black clothes, disguised by blackened faces.
"There are as many reasons to dance as there are dancers," says Zikos. "You may love tradition, you may love to perform, or you may love to meet at the ales." The "ales" are contemporary meetings of ritual dancers in cities such as New York and Toronto, where as many as 20 dance teams come together to dance in the streets during the daytime, and party at night. And these aren't Budweiser parties either. "There's all kinds of home brews and special beers. These are people who know the difference between Samuel Smith and Sam Adams," she says.
Although a 5 a.m. wakeup call on May 1 sounds slightly unbelievable, Zikos says about 100 people will be there at the park, its elegant sloping expanse ringed by evergreens and decorated just now with exquisite, hovering white dogwood blossom. The number includes about 40 dancers and about 20 spouses and children attached to the dancers. Among the rest of the onlookers, some are regulars who once happened to drive Princeton Pike at dawn, and now return annually to repeat the experience.
"If you look off across the fields you see beautiful budding things," says Zikos. "And when the dancing is over, the team dances off into the woods until they're out of sight, disappearing into the mists. It's very romantic."
Just as all the ritual dances are seasonal, celebrating and marking nature's year, the Morris dance was probably about fertility. The dancers carry sticks -- straight tree limbs almost three feet long that are stripped of their bark. In one dance, the dancers motion with the sticks as if they were setting young plants in the earth.
"These dances were what made the routine of rural life tolerable," says Zikos. "It's essential to have lots of different festivals to break up the monotony of work." Not that routine and monotony are strangers to the contemporary workplace, on this proverbial cusp of the millennium. "Yes," says Zikos, enthusiastically. "We need more cheese rolling days!"
-- Nicole Plett
This article was published for May Day in 1998.