Taking art to the streets of London（在线收听）

BBC Learning English

People and Places

 Molly dancers

William: Hello and welcome to People and Places –

the programme where you meet

someone remarkable every week.

My name’s William Kremer. Now the name of this programme,

People and Places, is particularly apt for today’s

programme, because the person we’re about to hear from has

a special relationship to a particular part of England.

His name is Tony Forster and he’s the boss of The Pig Dyke

Molly Dancers. Molly dancing is a traditional form of

English folk dancing – but it’s not something you see

everywhere in England. Where is Molly dancing from? Listen

to Tony Forster and see if you can hear the answer:

Tony: Molly dancing is a form of dancing that used to be

done in the Fens erm… about a hundred years ago, two

hundred years ago – and the Fens at that time was lots of

very isolated villages and droves – just one or two houses

at the end of a long road.

William: Did you hear the answer? Tony Forster said

Molly dancing used to be done in the Fens about two hundred

years ago. At that time, villages in the Fens were very

isolated – they were very far away from other villages and

towns.

Tony: Molly dancing is a form of dancing that used to be

done in the Fens erm… about a hundred years ago, two

hundred years ago – and the Fens at that time was lots of

very isolated villages and droves – just one or two houses

at the end
of a long road.

 
William: A fen is a piece of very flat, wet ground.

What we call ‘the Fens’ is a large area in the East of

England, covering parts of Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire and

Norfolk. In the past, a great part of this area would flood

every year, and the villages and towns would become like

little islands. This explains the isolation of the Fens.

Today, the Fens are no longer very isolated, but because of

their history, they have kept a very strong sense of

identity and tradition.

But although molly dancing is a tradition in the Fens, the

Pig Dyke Molly Dancers aren’t content to simply carry on

doing things they way they’ve always been done. They have

modernised molly dancing – they’ve changed it slightly so

that it’s more appealing to modern audiences. But how have

they modernised it? Listen to Tony Forster again:

Tony: We decided we needed to modernise it and the dances

that were written down are really very simple dances, so we

decided if it was going to work for the 21st century then

it needed to be more interesting dances, more interesting

appearance and an emphasis on entertainment and making

people go away thinking, ‘Wow! We enjoyed that!’

William: Tony wants molly dancing to ‘work for the

21st century’. He said that his dancers decided that if

molly dancing was going to work for the 21st century, then

… then what? Listen again:

Tony: We decided we needed to modernise it and the dances

that were written down are really very simple dances, so we

decided if it was going to work for the 21st century then

it needed to be more interesting dances, more interesting

appearance and an emphasis on entertainment and making

people go away thinking, ‘Wow! We enjoyed that!’
 

William: Tony said that if molly dancing was going

to work for the 21st century, it

needed to consist of more interesting dances, more

interesting appearance and an emphasis on entertainment so

that people go away from the dance, thinking
‘Wow! We enjoyed that!’

Well, you’ll know from the picture of the Pig Dyke Molly

Dancers on the

People and Places webpage that that their appearance is

certainly very

‘interesting’. With their thick make up, big wigs and

striking black and white clothes, they look more like heavy

metal rock stars than folk dancers! Why did they decide to

start wearing black and white? Well, Tony Forster has an

answer to that:

Tony: I will tell you the story that I tell about why we

wear black and white and you can believe it or not – which

is that when we started we were, we did lots of research

and we looked at the photographs of the old molly dancers a

hundred years ago and we could only find one thing in

common which was that they were all in black and white. So

we thought ‘Well that’s obviously the way to go’ so that

’s why we wear black and white.

William: Tony said that when they were researching

molly dancing, they looked at photographs of old molly

dancers a hundred years ago. They could only find one thing

that all the old dancers had in common – there was only

one characteristic that they all shared. Yes, you guessed

it – they were all black and white! But… I have a feeling

Tony’s pulling my leg!

Now if you’d like to download the script from this

programme, and find out more about today’s language, then

check out the People and Places webpage on BBC Learning

English dot com. You’ll also see that there’s some links

to see more of the Pig Dyke Molly Dancers. Goodbye.