FOLK-DANCING. The term folk-dance is of modern origin. Its existence implies a certain complexity of development in the social order, and a distinction based, more or less roughly, on this complexity. In a primitive community the whole body of persons composing it is the "folk," and in the widest sense of the word it might equally be applied to the whole population of a civilized state. In its common application, however, to civilizations of the western type (in such compounds as folk-lore, folk-music, etc.) it is narrowed down to include only those who are mainly outside the currents of urban culture and systematic education, the unlettered or little-lettered inhabitants of village and countryside.
In a community of the lower culture all dancing is of the folk; the need for distinction arises when with social progress art-forms split away, develop a self-conscious technique and become the province of a profession and of the cultured. In a developed civilization we may say that folk-dancing is that dancing which has evolved among the peasantry and is maintained by them in a fluid tradition without the aid of the professional dancer, teacher or artist and is not, at least in the particular form ob served, practised in towns, on the stage, or in the ball-room.
Folk-dances may be ranged in two categories : (a) social, danced by all who choose, for their own amusement, at any time; (b) ceremonial and spectacular, danced in connection with seasonal festivals, by special, but not in the ordinary sense professional, performers, and having apparently a magico-religious function.
The precise relation between the social dance and the cere monial dance is hardly to be decided. To assign, as is sometimes done, a ceremonial or religious origin to social dancing as a whole seems in the state of the evidence dangerous. Though the folk-lorist is well aware that the serious ceremony of one stage of development may become the adult amusement of the next, and the children's game of the phase following that, and though there is evidence of borrowing from ceremonial sources for social purposes, it would be incautious in the case of the social dance to forget that the impulse to mere amusement is general and early, and to read symbolism into obvious actions of the body, the natural formations into which a number of dancers may fall, or the patterns they trace.
Seasonal and ceremonial dances may have become little more than a periodic diversion and show, but they bear their own marks, and inferences about origin and function may be drawn by exam ination of the festivals and concurrent ceremonies with which they are linked, features of the dances themselves, and the atti tude towards them persisting, however much meanings may have been forgotten, in the performers and the communities in which they survive.
Though in Europe the folk-dance is rapidly dying, no European nation seems as yet to have lost it entirely. From such records as there are, it would appear that with differences of spirit and detail the folk-dances of the several nations present strong analogies and are parallel in origin and function, but close and ac curate investigation has in most cases not been undertaken, and the materials for a detailed survey are not yet available. The folk-dances of England, so far the most thoroughly sifted, may be taken as in some degree illustrative. In England the work of collecting was carried out with great completeness by Cecil J. Sharp, to whom is due the fact that more is known about English folk-dances in detail, both for dancer and folk-lorist, than about those of any other nation. The English Folk Dance Society, which moved under his direction from its foundation until his death, carries on his work of restoring to the people the fine relics of a nearly dying art which he preserved.
The social dance of England is the country-dance; and it is in this that the distinction between folk-dance and art- or ball room dance tends to be obscured. Country-dances are danced by country-folk at the present day ; but by far the greater number, and the most varied forms come to us in the 17 editions (1650 1728) of Playford's "English Dancing Master," and smaller dance manuals. That the country-dance, as presented by Playford, is of folk origin there is no reasonable doubt, but for Playford it was already a ball-room dance fashionable enough to be worth a publisher's attention, and it continued to be so, until its demise, for fashionable assemblies in the 19th century. Nor do we seem to have any certain evidence to show whether the country-dance of the modern countryman is a direct folk-tradition or a surviving back-flow of fashionable forms from town ball-rooms. The latter is a view sometimes maintained, notably by Thomas Hardy. But the country-dance as a type is undoubtedly of folk-growth and has preserved characteristics of its original form, nor is the tech nique of the countryman in dancing it a ball-room technique.
The French cpntredanse appears, by the evidence available, to be in name if not altogether in substance, derived from the Eng lish country-dance.
The ceremonial and spectacular dances are three: the sword dance, the morris-dance and the procession. The sword-dance is danced at or near Christmas by teams consisting of men only. It is frequently connected with a play, of which an essential part is a mimic beheadal and resuscitation, the beheadal being present even when the play is absent or has lapsed. It is commonly ex plained as a ceremonial of imitative magic representing the winter death, and subsequent revival of a vegetation-daemon. At a deeper level there may be an underlying phallic symbolism, but the point needs further investigation for proof or disproof. Sword dances observed in Germany, France and elsewhere resemble those of England.
Both morris and procession are danced in the spring, the mor ris by men only and most frequently at Whitsuntide. Both are probably developments of a single type of ceremony. They may be explained with some likelihood as acts of apotropaeic magic, the perambulation of parish or district for the expulsion of evils and diseases. The use of sticks and bells, together with the former practice of dancing with blackened faces (to which the name morris, i.e., Moorish, "nigger," seems to be due) would be appro priate to a ceremony of this kind. (E. P. B.)