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BBC Learning English
People and Places
Molly dancers
William: Hello and welcome to People and Places –
the programme where you meet
someone remarkable1 every week.
My name’s William Kremer. Now the name of this programme,
People and Places, is particularly apt for today’s
programme, because the person we’re about to hear from has
a special relationship to a particular part of England.
His name is Tony Forster and he’s the boss of The Pig Dyke2
Molly Dancers. Molly dancing is a traditional form of
English folk dancing – but it’s not something you see
everywhere in England. Where is Molly dancing from? Listen
to Tony Forster and see if you can hear the answer:
Tony: Molly dancing is a form of dancing that used to be
done in the Fens4 erm… about a hundred years ago, two
hundred years ago – and the Fens at that time was lots of
very isolated5 villages and droves – just one or two houses
at the end of a long road.
William: Did you hear the answer? Tony Forster said
Molly dancing used to be done in the Fens about two hundred
years ago. At that time, villages in the Fens were very
isolated – they were very far away from other villages and
towns.
Tony: Molly dancing is a form of dancing that used to be
done in the Fens erm… about a hundred years ago, two
hundred years ago – and the Fens at that time was lots of
very isolated villages and droves – just one or two houses
at the end
of a long road.
William: A fen3 is a piece of very flat, wet ground.
What we call ‘the Fens’ is a large area in the East of
England, covering parts of Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire and
Norfolk. In the past, a great part of this area would flood
every year, and the villages and towns would become like
little islands. This explains the isolation6 of the Fens.
Today, the Fens are no longer very isolated, but because of
their history, they have kept a very strong sense of
identity and tradition.
But although molly dancing is a tradition in the Fens, the
Pig Dyke Molly Dancers aren’t content to simply carry on
doing things they way they’ve always been done. They have
modernised molly dancing – they’ve changed it slightly so
that it’s more appealing to modern audiences. But how have
they modernised it? Listen to Tony Forster again:
Tony: We decided8 we needed to modernise7 it and the dances
that were written down are really very simple dances, so we
decided if it was going to work for the 21st century then
it needed to be more interesting dances, more interesting
appearance and an emphasis on entertainment and making
people go away thinking, ‘Wow! We enjoyed that!’
William: Tony wants molly dancing to ‘work for the
21st century’. He said that his dancers decided that if
molly dancing was going to work for the 21st century, then
… then what? Listen again:
Tony: We decided we needed to modernise it and the dances
that were written down are really very simple dances, so we
decided if it was going to work for the 21st century then
it needed to be more interesting dances, more interesting
appearance and an emphasis on entertainment and making
people go away thinking, ‘Wow! We enjoyed that!’
William: Tony said that if molly dancing was going
to work for the 21st century, it
needed to consist of more interesting dances, more
interesting appearance and an emphasis on entertainment so
that people go away from the dance, thinking
‘Wow! We enjoyed that!’
Well, you’ll know from the picture of the Pig Dyke Molly
Dancers on the
People and Places webpage that that their appearance is
certainly very
‘interesting’. With their thick make up, big wigs9 and
striking black and white clothes, they look more like heavy
metal rock stars than folk dancers! Why did they decide to
start wearing black and white? Well, Tony Forster has an
answer to that:
Tony: I will tell you the story that I tell about why we
wear black and white and you can believe it or not – which
is that when we started we were, we did lots of research
and we looked at the photographs of the old molly dancers a
hundred years ago and we could only find one thing in
common which was that they were all in black and white. So
we thought ‘Well that’s obviously the way to go’ so that
’s why we wear black and white.
William: Tony said that when they were researching
molly dancing, they looked at photographs of old molly
dancers a hundred years ago. They could only find one thing
that all the old dancers had in common – there was only
one characteristic that they all shared. Yes, you guessed
it – they were all black and white! But… I have a feeling
Tony’s pulling my leg!
Now if you’d like to download the script from this
programme, and find out more about today’s language, then
check out the People and Places webpage on BBC Learning
English dot com. You’ll also see that there’s some links
to see more of the Pig Dyke Molly Dancers. Goodbye.
1 remarkable | |
adj.显著的,异常的,非凡的,值得注意的 | |
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2 dyke | |
n.堤,水坝,排水沟 | |
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3 fen | |
n.沼泽,沼池 | |
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4 fens | |
n.(尤指英格兰东部的)沼泽地带( fen的名词复数 ) | |
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5 isolated | |
adj.与世隔绝的 | |
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6 isolation | |
n.隔离,孤立,分解,分离 | |
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7 modernise | |
vt.使现代化 | |
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8 decided | |
adj.决定了的,坚决的;明显的,明确的 | |
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9 wigs | |
n.假发,法官帽( wig的名词复数 ) | |
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