Visions of Cornish Trad Dances

Hagmann, Lea (15 April 2023). Visions of Cornish Trad Dances (Unpublished). In: BFE Annual Conference. University of Edinburgh. 13.-16. April 2023.

Full text not available from this repository.

Growing out of the Celto-Cornish political movement in the 1980s, the Cornish Dance Revival was designed to be a Celtic rather than an English Revival. Encouraged by the organisers at the Pan-Celtic Festival in Killarney, Ireland, the Cornish revivalists started to conduct fieldwork in Cornwall and collected dance material of people who were mainly in their eighties at the time of collection. The few steps and movements the revivalists recorded were then reconstructed based on written sources, oral descriptions and contemporary social dances of other Celtic places, and a corpus of about 40 Cornish dances was established that allowed dancers to perform ‘Cornishness’ on stage.

However, around the year 2000, a couple of younger musicians felt restricted by this limited number of Cornish dances and the thereof resulting small musical repertoire. The impossibility of musical variation and improvisation during non-performative Troyls (dance-nights) was lamented. Therefore, these musicians decided to create a new form of Cornish dancing that would permit more musical freedom and modelled this new concept Nos Lowen on the Breton Fest Noz movement. This paper investigates how this second revival movement transformed the former movement material in order to create a new form of Cornish dancing, and analyses how this process changed the relationship between musicians and dancers during dance-nights.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Division/Institute:	06 Faculty of Humanities > Other Institutions > Walter Benjamin Kolleg (WBKolleg) 06 Faculty of Humanities > Other Institutions > Walter Benjamin Kolleg (WBKolleg) > Center for Global Studies (CGS) 06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Art and Cultural Studies > Institute of Musicology
UniBE Contributor:	Hagmann, Lea Salome
Subjects:	700 Arts > 780 Music 300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology 300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology > 390 Customs, etiquette & folklore
Language:	English
Submitter:	Lea Salome Hagmann
Date Deposited:	12 Jun 2023 11:45
Last Modified:	12 Jun 2023 11:45
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Cornish dance, folk dance, revival, Nos Lowen
URI:	https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/183324