Modern Morris

That’s the paganist roots myth busted, then. Now, how about the fact that ‘morrissing’ is a male-dominated sport where women struggle to get a foothold? (After all, the definition in the Merriam-Webster dictionary says morris is ‘a vigorous English dance traditionally performed by men wearing costumes and bells’) Alex smiles: ”It’s a non-story these days, to be honest. The real troopers were the women in the 1970s. They blazed a trail with the Morris Federation in 1975, which was originally set up for women who wanted to dance morris, and who had previously not been allowed to.” Since then, morris dancing has become an inclusive sport; dancers are all about the dances, not the gender of the people who dance them.

“With the jumping,” she explains, “we have to give the impression that we’re basically floating. In most of our dances, our hankies are used to give the impression that we’re jumping twice as high. Morris is an air dance; it’s not really an earthy dance.” Alex reckons it takes about a year of morrissing regularly to really start to get the patterns, shapes and stepping, but she said there’s so much to learn that it’s a bit of a life’s work. While the Boss approach is definitely to learn the traditional dances, its ambitions are to put more of a stamp on their dances too. “I think we’re really developing a style now,” says Alex. “But that takes a long time, right?”

Boss Morris has a deep love and respect for the form; it’s not a case of coming in learning the steps, modernising them, trying to push some boundaries and ultimately making your own mark. The love of the art itself is enough, and there are so many other morrissers out there to learn from and be inspired by. When asked about rivalry between sides, Alex is thoughtful. “If we see a team with lovely patterns in the dancing – in unison, with tidy lines and shapes – we’re impressed. It’s a thing of beauty to see a whole Morris side off the ground in unison with their hankies aloft.”

The music is an area where Boss is happy to subvert the norms. They perform to live melodeon music when morrissing locally in the streets near Stroud, but they’ve been asked by many bands over the years to choreograph dances to more modern tracks. Alex said: “We take the building blocks of the morris dance – some stepping, a caper that would fit, or maybe a stick clash – and we make up original dances to completely different music.”

And they’re in the process of developing their own Boss Morris remixes too: “You can basically morris dance over anything that’s rhythmic so dance music is really good for that. It’s so good at festivals or clubs and it’s an amazing way of taking morris to a totally different audience,” Alex explains. Boss has performed in lots of clubs and at festivals such as Glastonbury and Womad, as well as being backing morris dancers for folk icons like Shirley Collins.

Footy shorts aside, the costumes are fantastic. Recently, they made T-shirt dresses emblazoned with big suns for summer solstice; another time they painted culottes with little diagrams of their dance moves. Says Alex: “We try to weave symbolic meaning into what we’re wearing. For instance, Stroud is really well known for its cloth making so quite a few of our costumes have red squares on the fabric, which is symbolic of the red cloth that used to dry on the fields outside the town.” And then there are the animal heads and the face paints; Boss is definitely the boss of weird beasts. In fact, they’re slightly taking over Alex’s house, shed and her car. “There’s one in the sitting room and Eugene, the sheep, is sitting under a chair in my dining room. I’m kind of known for it around town; people say, ‘oh, there goes Alex’s car, stuffed with animal heads.’”