People have often wondered how my mother came to remember these dances in such detail after so many years. There were several reasons for this. Pleasures were few and far between in those days, so that people savoured them to the full and thought about them long afterwards and remembered them all their lives. Indeed, it was not uncommon for the older people in our village to remember even hour-long sermons and to be able to recite them verbatim thirty or forty years after the only occasion on which they had heard them. My mother had this capacity. She always had a very lively and retentive memory, - when she was over 90 years-of-age, she had no difficulty in learning poems in Welsh or English and often did so. And she had a photographic memory, - she could study a dress or a piece of embroidery in a shop window and come away and reproduce it exactly in the minutest detail. What is more, after seeing a dance, she liked to persuade the other children to dance it with her. This they did when they were in the woods collecting firewood, out of sight of the grown-ups. And finally, there was the atmosphere of guilt and disapproval that tended to hang over anything connected with the dance in those days, that could not but intensify the awareness of a sensitive child. Once her memory had been stimulated, it was not surprising that it gave up so much that had lain dormant for years. We get the same experience at our Unit in our dialect work. Our early sessions with our informants can often be singularly unproductive and the informants themselves can hardly remember anything; and then, suddenly, their memory seems to begin functioning at top speed and they throw up such a wealth of information that my students sometimes ask me uneasily whether I think their informants can be inventing it all just to please them! Impromptu invention of this kind of material is far from easy or probable. What is happening is that the memory is being stimulated to tremendous activity in a certain direction and ultimately yields an immense store of information. At first, I sent all my notes on the dances to Mr. Walter Dowding, who was for the next year or two, my link with Cymdeithas Ddawns Werin Cymm. It was Mr. Dowding who received the first copies I ever made of my notes of all the dances, translated into English for his convenience, and he and Mr. Bernard Hayes worked on them. If I remember rightly, my notes of the Nantgarw dances first reached the Society in the form they had taken after Mr. Dowding had tried to put them into the format usually taken by dancing instructions. It was not until a year or two later that Mrs. Blake herself got into touch with me and requested a copy of my original Welsh notes for Mr. Gwynn Williams and herself. From that time onwards all my dealings with the Society were directly with Mrs. Blake,who came to see my mother and me on several occasions. People sometimes ask who accompanied the dancers at the chapel tea parties. Well, like so many other places in Wales, Nantgarw had its village harpists, the brothers Richard and Eli Tomos, usually known as Richard and Eli Danial, and one or other of these, would usually accompany the dance. I have a child's memory of them both. Richard had the reputation in the village of being the more accomplished harpist of the two. He was a sighted man and Eli, the last of them to die, like so many Welsh harpists was a blind man. Sometimes, however, if the harpists were unavailable, someone would accompany the dancers on a tinwhistle. My mother remembered her brother, Emwnt, being roped-in for the job on one occasion. Stepping must have been quite a popular accomplishment in the village at this time. I have just mentioned the harpists, Richard and Eli Daniel. Their sister,Annie Jinkins, was a well preserved elderly woman when I was a child and quite portly. She was a member in our chapel - unlike her harpist brothers who, true to type, never darkened the door of the chapel. In her younger days, Annie Jinkins must have been quite a dancer, because, on numerous occasions I heard the grown-ups around me talk about her prowess in stepping and the fact that she and her brother Richard had once gone on a tour of America where they had made enough money, it was said, for Richard and Eli to live in moderate comfort for the rest of their days. Armie's great turn was to "step" on a saucer. She would turn the saucer upside-down on the floor and seemed to perform the whole dance actually standing on it, turning backwards and forwards while steppers did. But my family were convinced it was a very clever trick and that she did not really put her weight on the saucer, because it went clink, clink, clink throughoutthe performance! Nantgarw stepping, as far as I am aware, was like any other kind of stepping except that the performers seemed to turn and twist their feet more and that it was punctuated by vigorous sideways kicks. I personally have not seen anyone else do this. On the few occasions when I have seen Dawns Gwyl Ifan, the "stepping" at the beginning has been unrecognisable to me. It has not been intricate enough, that is, it is too monotonous, because the dancers do not turn and twist the feet while they step, and it lacks the sideways kicks. In this part of the dance, the Groes Wen performers gave each other plenty of space so that they could kick without kicking the shins off each other. On the occasions when my mother saw this dance performed in modern times, she was nonplussed by the stepping and she asked me each time "Stepo yw hwnna ta? " (Is that stepping?). My mother saw modern performances of Dawns Gwyl Ifan and Dawns Glamai several times and they gave her much pleasure, because they were recognisably the same dances as she had seen in her childhood. Her big criticism of the performances, however, was the effeminacy of the men. She used to exclaim: "Beth sy ar y dynon i bod nhw'n dawnso fel mynwod? Odd y dynon slawar dydd yn dawnso fel dynon!" (What is wrong with the men that they dance like women? The men long ago used to dance like men!). I've always thought I understood what she meant after seeing a group of young Breton country people give a display of their national dances. I don't suppose itwas a very professional or even a polished performance, but throughout, I was conscious of the delicate, dainty movements of the young women while aperpetual foil to the vigorous, virile, almost boisterous movements of the young men. The men leapt much higher, they kicked much higher, and there was, throughout, that touch of male exhibitionism that seems to me as essential feature of folk dancing as the more reticent movements of the women. I was conscious of the same thing in Rumania a few years ago. The girls were often demure, but the men just had to call attention to themselves - with shouts if there was no other way. Even when the teams were standing in a row, waiting for the opening bars of the tune to be played, and the girls were standing in a modest,almost self-effacing way, the whole stance of the men, the way they held their bodies, the lift of their heads and their roving, challenging eyes, simply compelled attention. A girl may need to be coy as well as daintily feminine as, for example, when she coquettishly tilts her flowers in the direction of one young man after another in Dawns Glamai, but what is lacking more than anything in these dances, it seems to me, is a vigorous projection of their essential masculinity by the male dancers. In so far as my opinions in the realm of folk dancing have any value, it seems to me that the group dances have been revived with signal success. I am less sure about the solo dances. I have never seen Dawns y Marchog being performed and I have no idea how far it really is recoverable, although I know that some work has been done on it. I have seen Dawns Morfa Rhuddlan, however, several times and it seems to me that this dance presents special difficulties. In the first place, the original dancer's feet were hidden by her longdress and all my mother could ever say about her footwork was that the feet sounded as though they were making intricate movements on the stone floor, but that the effect was of someone moving smoothly as though on a wheel. It does not seem to have been possible to attach any of the known folk dance steps to this description. Indeed, in a performance that I saw some years ago, the steps were more like those of the waltz, probably because the wrong Morfa Rhuddlan air was used, and the dancer ended by prostrating herself on the ground, quite ignoring the explicit description given of the way the original dance actually ended. The whole performance struck me as basically wrong, not to mention that the atmosphere created was sentimental rather than emotional. Sentimentality is hardly a national trait of the Welsh, as anyone familiar with the stark realism and the lack of sentimentality of so much of Welsh literature he well aware. Hence, anyone who interprets a folk dance sentimentally must surely be on the wrongtrack. Sentimentality certainly did not characterise folk dancing in our area; indeed, I doubt very much whether it characterises genuine folk dancing anywhere at all. We have so few solo dances that it must be a great temptation to seek to recover this one. The theme, moreover, makes it especially attractive. It would be foolish to claim that it can never be recovered; but certainly, at the present stage in the revival of folk dancing in Wales this is one dance that seems to be out of reach. By all means, take a look at it now and again at your private sessions. But I beg of you to treat it with circumspection and not to perform it in public until you are confident that Ann Lansan herself could view your performance with equanimity. What you seem to have now is a modern dance inspired by the description available of the original dance, but totally alien to it in the movements evolved for it and in its emotional tone. Indeed Dawns Morfa Rhuddlan seems at present so irrecoverable that I think your modern dance should not even bear its name. I sincerely hope I am not hurting anyone in saying all this; if I have done so then I do apologise. But I am concerned that two things militate against a successful recovery of this dance: the first is inherent in thedescription itself - the fact that it was not possible to describe the steps used by the original dancer; the second is quite simply the break in our folk dance tradition, which has swept away, possibly beyond recovery, so much of the wealth of inherited knowledge that would be at the disposal of a dancer like Ann Lansan. I have always thought that Gymdeithas Ddawns Werin Cymru has donea wonderful job of interpreting my very unprofessional notes and turning them into the living movements of the dances that you all perform with such grace and skill. Mrs. Blake has played a central part in this very difficult task and I still treasure the letters she wrote to me during the time when she was puzzling over the problems they presented. My mother never failed to be amazed and moved when she saw modern presentations of the dances because they had been so successfully resurrected. At the same time, I am aware that in turning those amateurish notes of mine into the living dances, it had to be borne in mind that the dancers who would perform them were absolute beginners in the art of folk dancing, having to be taught the most elementary skills of the art, belonging as they did to a people whose dancing tradition had been broken and who, therefore, lacked that wealth of built-in knowledge that comes with a living tradition. This knowledge, had it been available, would surely have influenced the way in which my descriptions would and could have been interpreted. Can we hope to see the day when the tradition will be so far re-established that the experts will want to look again at the original descriptions and may even see in them aspects that were hidden to them or too difficult for them in the early days of our dancing tradition? If that day dawns, Mrs. Blake's work on behalf of Welsh folk dancing will have come to full fruition. The teacher always knows that his work has been successfully accomplished when his students begin to propound reliable and penetrating theories of their own.

  Diweddarwyd 02/11/2002 - Last Update