Sword dancing

There are many surviving traditions of linked sword dances from across Europe.

In England, longsword dancing is mostly traditional to the county of Yorkshire, and rapper sword dancing comes from Northumberland and Durham.

Longsword

The longword dance is a linked hilt-and-point sword dance performed with rigid metal or wooden swords.

Records of longsword dancing go back to the 18^th century but it is almost certainly older than this.

As well as having a number of revival teams, there is still a number of village teams, performing their own local tradition, including the sides in Flamborough, Goathland, Grenoside and Handsworth.

Boxing Day and Plough Monday are traditional dates when you can often see sword dances.

The Rapper Dance

The dance takes its name from the ‘sword’ or rapper, a 2 foot long flexible steel blade with two handles.

As in longsword, the dancers link together holding these swords to weave intricate patterns before raising the star-shaped 'lock'.

The flexible rapper is unique to the north-east of England and the rapper dance was traditionally performed by miners in the Northumberland and Durham coalfield. The dance involves five people, often accompanied by two characters, Tommy and Betty. The dance is a fairly rapid one, performed at up to 160 beats per minute and can include a number of acrobatic figures such as somersaults over the swords.

The dance is now almost always performed to jigs (6/8 time). The jigs used include local tunes, although most rapper jigs used for at least the last hundred years are Irish tunes, probably imported by Irish immigrants to Tyneside in the nineteenth century.

Many instruments can and have been used to accompany rapper dances, the most popular being fiddles, tin whistles and melodeons. The music is usually performed solo, although can be performed as a duet; however, rapper is not usually performed to a band.