Is Morris dancing on its last legs?

Why do they think it's dying?

There are still some 14,000 Morris dancers in the UK performing in about 800 troupes or "sides" but the Morris Ring, which represents more than 200 British troupes, says numbers are dwindling while the age of the dancers is increasing. The Ring's message board carries the obituaries of men who have been at the heart of England's Morris scene since the early 20th century. For instance, Thomas Townsend, who died last year, first danced at Whitsun in 1925 at the age of 11, and continued dancing into his late eighties. So unless younger blood is recruited, Morris dancing could be extinct in 20 years.

Why aren't the young participating?

For various reasons – a loss of interest in tradition; competition with television, the internet and the iPod. But undoubtedly the main reason is that today's fashion-conscious young are "too embarrassed" to take part in all the prancing and handkerchief waving. Morris dancers, as Paul Kendall observes in the Daily Telegraph, are "not assiduous followers of fashion". The majority are "grey, many are balding and almost all… are at least a couple of stone overweight – men, in short, who don't care what they look like, or, even worse, get a thrill out of looking slightly eccentric". The original purpose of Morris dancing was as a ritual to demonstrate a man's virility, a ritual most Morris dancers take seriously. But the result is that most troupes are all male, and, in general, wives and girlfriends are expected to keep in the background and wash and iron the white shirts, trousers, hankies, etc.

But how traditional is Morris dancing in reality?

Many of the dances now performed are largely 20th century inventions, based on patchy information about how they were danced traditionally. Indeed, Morris dancing might well have died out altogether had it not been for Cecil Sharp, founding father of the folklore revival in England in the early 20th century. In 1899 he and his family were staying in Headington, Oxfordshire, for Christmas, when they saw the Headington Quarry Morris troupe performing, with William Kimber on the concertina. Sharp asked Kimber to write down the Morris tunes and, in 1911, founded the English Folk Dance Society in the hope of preserving the tradition. Several new troupes formed as a result, although the big explosion in dance teams came in the 1960s and 1970s.

How did it originate?

Some claim, without much evidence, that it's a remnant of pre-Christian Celtic, or Druidic, fertility rituals, the bells, fluttering handkerchiefs and clashing sticks serving to scare away malevolent spirits. Others claim that it originated in Africa – Morris being a corruption of the word "Moorish" – and that it was brought back to England by Moorish captives from the Holy Land during the