The Black Jokers Morris Men
Boston 1980-1987
The name of the team or "side" I joined was the Black Jokers, which comes from a dance by that name in the tradition of Bledington. Although the music and dances were often the same from one village to the next, each village had its own stylistic details that distinguished its particular way of doing the dances -- a particular way of waving the hankies, certain peculiar footwork, and sometimes a unique dance figure among the more familiar elements.
Although I wasn't dancing with girls anymore -- the Jokers were an all-male side -- morris dancing appealed to me stylistically. It consisted of controlled bursts of energy; it was energetic, even athletic, both powerful and graceful (at least, if you did it right!). Below, I'm dancing on the grounds of my alma mater, Harvard College, next to an attorney named Steve Anderson in the spring of 1982.
Briefly, morris dancing comes from the Cotswolds, in the English midlands. Its origins are still unclear, but it certainly dates from at least the Renaissance (it's mentioned several times in the plays of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson), peaked in perhaps the 18th century, and nearly died out at the end of the 19th.
Fortunately, a schoolmaster named Cecil Sharp who initially was interested in collecting folk tunes also began to note down the steps to dances that accompanied some of those songs. The dances survived through the first and second world wars in isolated enclaves, and morris came back with a vengeance in the 1960s and beyond. There are now hundreds of morris teams around the world -- mostly in Britain and the U.S., but as far afield as New Zealand and Hong Kong.
I joined the Jokers in the summer of 1980 and was able to begin dancing out with them the following spring. I was lucky to be a member of the Jokers during some of their best years. Besides Howard and Steve, my colleagues included Larry Jennings, George Fogg, Curt Hayashi, Jonathan Stutts, Jacob Bloom, Joe Kynoch, Jeff Howry, Kris Arnold, Adam Moscowitz, Frank Attanasio, Bruce Brandt, Steven Roderick, Phil Zimmerman, Rich Jackson, John Krzywicki, and fiddler extraordinaire, Ishmael Stefanov-Wagner.
Sometimes we had as many as three sets (six dancers constitute a "set" for most morris dances) at rehearsal, and two sets at performances -- or at least enough extra dancers to give everyone plenty of opportunities to catch a break. If I didn't have the photo above, right, to show how high we leaped sometimes, I wouldn't believe it myself. That looks like our namesake dance, Black Joker, at Downtown Crossing, near Filene's Basement and Barnes & Noble, in the spring of 1983.
Between 1981 and 1987, I danced with the Jokers on the campuses of Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth, around the streets and parks of Boston, at the Bunker Hill monument, in the Isabelle Stewart Gardner museum, around the grounds of Harvard's Arnold Arboretum on Lilac Sunday, and in Rockport, Gloucester, and Providence.
At left, I'm doing longsword with the Jokers on the dock next to the U.S.S. Constitution ("Old Ironsides") as part of the Boston Harborfest on July 4, 1987.
We danced in Christmas and Spring Revels shows at Sanders Theater, and for First Night (New Year's Eve) shows downtown.
We danced in the streets of Montreal, at a quaint nouveau-medieval stone structure on the coast of Massachusetts known as Hammond Castle, and in rural Maine and Vermont (including the campus of Marlboro College, host of the annual Marlboro Morris Ale, which I attended a number of times with the Jokers in the 1980s).
On every May Day morning we rose in darkness -- like morris dancers around the world -- to get out to the Charles River and dance the sun up.
Because we were dancing at festivals, at tourist spots, wherever people congregated, we were photographed by hundreds, probably thousands, of strangers. I had to wonder in how many people's photo albums and slide carousels my image ended up -- like dozens of tiny pieces of my soul captured by total strangers, the way Native Americans once feared. On the other hand, an article on morris dancing in a free shopping circular called The Downtown Gazette (Nov. 17-30, 1983), I managed to turn up in every shot . . . with my back to the camera:
I danced with the Jokers a last time in mid July 1987 on a wharf of the Charles just before I hit the road to drive a meandering 5,600-mile route home to Oregon. I was able to dance with them once again when I returned to Boston in late 2003 on my book tour.
Go to Bridgetown in Portland