Ouse Washes Molly

Mucky Porter - The Dance

The next dance seemed to flow from it and established the other major feature upon which our dances are based. Mucky Porter is the name attributed, almost certainly correctly, to the landlord of the Inn at Southery at the time of the English Civil War. We did not set out to create a dance around that story. The initial impetus was to try to make something interesting based upon a traditional dance called Smash The Windows in which people dances round in threes. We started working on this at the same time as a number of us got interested in a collection of fenland stories recorded on cassette by the Norfolk storyteller, Hugh Lupton. The largest story of the collection concerned the aforementioned landlord, the story itself being called the Grey Goosefeather. As we constructed the figures of the dance we started to call them by names of the characters in the story. One was called Charlie Wagg, the fenlanders’ name for Charles 1st, another Old Noll, their name for Oliver Cromwell. Eventually the dance itself was named Mucky Porter and our Molly of the time, the inestimable Derek, took to telling snatches from the story as he introduced the dance. Then fate took a hand.

We danced at Whitby in nineteen ninety something. Whitby at the time had a reputation for getting as much as they could out of dance sides. As well as performing we had a large number of workshops to do, two of us started the day running the children’s morning workshop and some members also ran the belly dance sessions. Molly Derek was involved in all of this and spending two hours in the morning singing, the afternoons and evenings announcing were enough but what broke the camel’s back, or to be precise vocal chords, were the molly workshops. We were given a room the size of a normal house sitting room in which to hold these events. On the first day about 100 people turned up to have a go. We had to take them outside and dance in the road, a quiet one luckily and it was Sunday. Although we made representations to the organisers another venue could not be found for the following days and so we ended up running the workshops on the playground of the school. Each day we had at least 12 sets to teach, spread the length and breadth of the playground with no amplification so that those of us teaching spent those two hours shouting. All this was too much for Derek’s vocal chords and he, in fact, did them irreversible damage. He went for six months unable to talk above a whisper and when they did recover he took to using a very small and expensive radio microphone. This freed up a number of ideas but the best known is the fact that he took to telling the story of Mucky Porter while dancing. He became very expert, always finishing the story at the very end of the dance. He is not with us now but those of us who experienced doing the dance while the story was going on will never forget it. One of the last times he told the story and danced was actually at Sidmouth where Hugh Lupton was storytelling and it was very satisfying to see him in the audience.

The Dance

A Dance for six

• Dance across, working from the top down

• Can Can

• Zig Zag

• Triangles Chorus

• The line with Phil Cross and Turn Right

• The other line Cross and Turn Right

• Triangles Chorus

• Tops dance down

• Bottoms charge across, then charge down the set

• Silent triangle

• Circular zig zag and Oh!

The story is as follows: