Performers of English Longsword and Rapper 

Welcome to our Web pages.

East Saxon Sword have been dancing the English sword dance traditions for over 30 years. We are more or less based in East London.

East Saxon Sword

• A brief history of ESS (written when we were 25 in 1997)
• Reports and comments on recent performances
• ESS Photo Album
• Where to see ESS
• Contact ESS
• Rapper Notation (A sample of the notation for our versions of the rapper dance.)
  Parts of this are broken - I am working on fixing it!

Rapper Dancing

• What is it? This is a brief description of The Rapper
• Links to other rapper related sites:
  • John Asher's rapper pages
    Last updated: 8 February 2003
  • The Nut on the net
    some of this is now fairly out of date
  • Also see the DIgital Video Research Archive below
    

Longsword Dancing

At present I know of no www pages devoted to English Longsword Dancing!
However some can be found in the Digital Video Research Archive and various team sites.



Traditional English Dance and General Sword Dancing References

• The Sword Dance Union is the organisation representing performers of traditional English and European linked sword dances, including the longsword dance from Yorkshire, the rapper sword dance of Northumberland and County Durham.
  
• The Sword Dance Union Discussion List is an e-mail list devoted to all types of sword dance
• The Morris Dance Discussion List is an e-mail list which has a page on the web with good links to other morris related sites.
• John Maher's Mainly Morris Dancing Web Page contains information about UK organisations and teams (and a vastwealth of other information).
• The Digital Video Research Archive of Morris, Sword, and Clog Dancing at Boston University is based on the work of Tony Barrand and Francisco Ricardo and contains a large collection of video recordings available online.  There are examples of both longsword and rapper.  Our team is seen in the following two clips:
• Kirkby Malzeard danced on May 24th, 1998 - The dance 'Kirkby Malzeard (for 6)'. Performed by East Saxon Sword (men) (Dave Law, Doug Kingston, Paul Draper, Peter Kemp, Mike Teahan, Alan Green) on 05/24/1998 at Dock End, Whitby, North Yorkshire, England. (Source: Kirkby Malzeard). On the occasion of 2nd Sword Spectacular. The tune was "Lass o' Dallowgill" (Musicians: Robert Totman, button accordion; Elaine Bradtke, fiddle).
• Rapper Dance on May 24th, 1998 - The dance ' (rapper for 5 plus Tommy)'. Performed by East Saxon Sword (men) on 05/24/1998 at Dock End, Whitby, North Yorkshire, England. On the occasion of 2nd Sword Spectacular. Character was Alan Green as Tommy. (Musician: Elaine Bradtke, fiddle).
  (Note: 19 Aug 2006 - these videos appear offline temporarily - the error has been reported to BU.  Check back later or look at some of the other material on the website.)