Apple Tree Morris dancers will dance up the sun in Sebastopol on May 1
You gotta get up early—really early—to see this yearly performance
What are you doing at 5 am — er, maybe 4:30 am— tomorrow morning? If you’re like me, you’ll be pulling on your long johns and a warm jacket and heading out to see the Apple Tree Morris dancers dance up the sun on May Day morning.
The performance, for which the group practices all year long, happens just once a year at 5:30 am on May 1 behind the Sebastopol Youth Annex at 425 Morris Street. (They advise folks to get there by 5:15 am.)
Morris dancing is an English folk dance tradition. A mention of it appears in Shakespeare (“a morris for May Day”) in All’s Well that Ends Well, and there are earlier mentions of the tradition in church records.
Sebastopol’s Apple Tree Morris was founded by Kalia Kliban and Jon Berger, who brought the tradition with them when they moved here from Berkeley in 1998. (The Berkeley Morris group, where Kliban and Berger first met, will be dancing up the sun at Inspiration Point in Berkeley’s Tilden Park tomorrow as well.)
Berger said that the Morris tradition—both music and dancing—was first described in detail in the 19th century.
“What we do today is largely related to the work of a Victorian dude named Cecil Sharp, who was fascinated by the folk dances and songs of England. He went around and found Morris teams and wrote down what they were doing in exquisite detail, so we have a pretty good idea what was going on at that period,” Berger said. “Also, in the 1940s or 50s, there was a guy named Lionel Bacon, who also annotated Morris dances from around England, and the Bacon Book is kind of the standard reference book that we all use.”
Different towns in England, mostly in the Cotswold region, had their own variations of Morris dances and songs. You can see the various Morris traditions listed here.
Berger said that Apple Tree Morris does dances from several different traditions. (Berkeley Morris, in comparison, only does dances from the Leafield tradition.)
What does Morris dancing look like? Imagine a bunch of people—guys and gals—dressed in white shirts and pants, with bells strapped on their calves, leaping and capering about at dawn with slashing sticks (ergo, the need for all that practice) and swooping hankies. (This probably takes practice too, but no one’s going to get a broken nose from a hankie.)
There’s some controversy about whether Morris dancing was once an all-male tradition. “Well, there’s a large can of worms,” Berger said, when I asked him about this.
Berger said that some people say that women have danced the Morris dance all along; others say that women first became involved in Morris dancing after World War I.
“In World War I, the English military still had the principle that their regiments tended to be composed of all men from the same village. So as a result of that, in a lot of the villages in England, all of their young men were killed in the war, because when a regiment got taken out by German mustard gas, that’s every man from that particular village. As a result, in a lot of villages in England, there was just nobody left to do the Morris, so the women took it up.”
While there are some single sex teams, most Morris teams now have both men and women.
Both Berger and Linton Hale, who’s been dancing with the Apple Tree Morris team for 15 years, emphasize that Morris dancing is a performance tradition. It’s something the dancers do, while the audience watches.
“It’s not like contradancing or English country dancing,” Hale said. “It’s not participatory.”
Berger said that tomorrow, after the Morris dancing is over, there may be some participatory folk dances that audiences can join in on if they like.
There are Morris dancing teams throughout the English-speaking world, including several in California. This means that a wave of people all over the world—from New Zealand to England to the U.S.—will be dancing up the sun on May Day morning.
“Interestingly, I think—although I haven't checked this recently—that the Sebastopol May Day dance out is the last in the world. The May Day dance out starts in New Zealand and then as sunrise progresses around the time zones, the sun hits us last.”
It’s a magical moment.
“There’s this wonderful moment when the sun comes over the hill,” Hale said, “and we have a bagpipe and everyone stops and watches the sun come up.”
Think you’d like to be a Morris dancer? Apple Tree Morris is actively seeking more dancers for their team. Find out more here.
Thank you Laura. This was worth getting up REALLY early for! Happy May Day!