20th Century Dances

As the 19th century turned into the 20th century, Cecil Sharp collected a number of dances from 'country folk' as he travelled around. Frank Kidson was still collecting occasional country dances in rural Yorkshire and Clive Carey in Sussex. Mary Neal and other folk dance researchers still looked back to John Playford for the definitive body of English dance.

The next hundred years was to change the face of English Social Folk dance with a large revival in the 1950s, spearheaded by the EFDSS, followed in the 1980s by an new English dance movement which was spawned in the musical seed bed of the folk clubs and flourished with some measure of opposition to the EFDSS stylistic approach.

There is a complex story to be developed on this page by those who were part of the process, but between the two movements many hundreds of dances were revived, written and re-written to become part of England's folk dance culture which has entered the 3rd millenium with energy, showing signs of a healthy future.

Here we can catalogue these dances and make them available for everybody to use.

Here is an Alphabetical list of 20th Century Dances in development. Some of the dances will be older ones recycled, some will be composed by leading dance activists (and as such will be copyright but most composers will be more than willing to have their work quoted as the point of composing a folk dance is to have folk dance it!!). If there's a dance in the list that started its life in the previous century, it doesn't matter - we're cataloguing what was danced in the 20th Century. Information as to the dances earlier origin can be included.

If you are going to add to the list of dances and annotate the moves, please refer to the dance annotation guide