Morris dancing

Have just detoured through youtube watching stuff that turns up when you search for 'stick dance'. I started with morris dance - actually I started with Dalek morris, but the video quality was a bit rubbish and there was lots of the same dance - and then I looked at a bunch of styles of morris with different sized sticks, and then there was finnish stick dancing, and some from India.

Conclusion: People putting videos on YouTube always leave in that bit at the start where everyone is trying to find their sticks and where to stand.

also

Conclusion: Give people sticks and they will do two things with them - thump them together while very nearly hitting each other and put them on the floor while jumping over them in complicated patterns until someone goes arse over apex.

Now my futuristic spaceship, which has sticks of future metal because there are a million uses for a decent stick, has developed a futuristic morris tradition. Possibly called moreless. Cause it's more or less morris.

Possibly this would only amuse me. Also I can't see it being relevant to a murder plot. I mean, you can hit someone with a stick til they die, but you don't need to be a morris fan to do it.

Another hypothesis: one reason these dances look daft is they're so slow, at least to start with. Dance music such as radio one plays has just a few more beats per minute. Morris to Swamp Thing would be a different animal. I found a page that reckons The average morris dance proceeds at 70 b/m. It's about double that for Swamp Thing, which isn't massively fast as modern music goes.
But then I found another page as reckons there's dances go 160bpm, so maybe I've only seen very slow morris.

There is a lot of very bad morris dancing on you tube. I'm not sure what good would look like, but it drops the sticks a lot less.

Also, morris with hankies is still just daft.

It looks a bit more sensible without the music.

Or when people are giving it a bit of proper thumping. I mean if you're going to hit sticks together then just making them touch like you're scared of them looks a bit daft. Hmmm, Witchmen morris gets more fun clacky dances.

Norwich has morris but there's more bells and less thumping. There's the Golden Star lot and the Kemp's Men, I don't know who else. Oh, this is in Norwich. Apparently I like the black face black coat bit clacking version much better.


I suspect I'd like to like morris dancing more because it looks like it ought to be what happens when you put martial arts to music, but then it gets a bit disappointing.


The thing is though, imagine all this, but in zero gravity.
Half a dozen men, big sticks, no brakes.
You'd clack to change direction or spin, and you'd have to be really really sure the other guy would be there or the pattern goes crash clank thud.
It's like combining morris with trapeze art.
Flying morris.

Hmmm, my current spaceship has constant gravity.
I just invented a reason for people to grumble about that :-)