There are certain things that you'd think would never really go well together. Stuff like singing and sex education, or folk dancing and feminism. Occasionally something comes along to prove all your assumptions wrong and introduce you to someone you'd never heard of who did rather amazing things. Today I found out about the wonderful woman that was Mary Neal.
The English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS), which exists to support artists/performers and seeks to engage the public in folk arts activities, has announced the speaker for its annual Mary Neal Lecture. Although Jude Kelly OBE is currently Artistic Director of the Southbank Centre and just the sort of person you might expect to be giving a talk relating to performance, it's the history of the event itself that I found quite surprising. The woman the talk is named after, Mary Neal, was a radical arts practitioner, reformer and suffragette.
Yes, that's right... radical, reform and suffragette. Those are three words I really didn't expect to hear in conjunction with folk singing and dancing! However, it turns out that Mary Neal was quite a woman. A great spirit behind the early 20th century folk dance and song revival, Neal set up The Espérance Club in Somerstown teaching young working girls and children, amongst other things, folk dance.
Mary Neal was born in 1860 yet was incredibly modern in her thinking. She moved to London in her 20s to 'help the poor', and worked primarily in Somerstown. The women and girls there had rather awful lives at that time but Neal saw that the way out was through education, and the way to help keep interested was to teach more than just the 'basics'. She wanted to give them inspiration, creativity and culture, so she opened The Espérance Club:
"Open 4 nights a week in Somerstown near Kings Cross, from 1895-1914, The Espérance Club taught girls and young children acting, singing and dancing, along with lessons in politics, journalism, workers’ rights, sex education and well-being. (From 1890 on Mary and Emmeline organised trips to the countryside and sea-side for the sewing girls as well)."
She worked with Cecil Sharp, who's widely recognised as being one of the most important figures in folk/traditional music and dance, but had a rather large disagreement with him over one important point. Whereas Sharp wished to establish an exact canon for England’s traditional songs and dances, Neal believed that dancers embraced dance intuitively and handed down from parent to child, so no two dances could ever be the same.
Mary Neal was a suffragette, a journalist, a magistrate, and an adopted mother of two boys. Although her pioneering ideas are celebrated by this annual lecture, I can't help but wonder just how many other amazing women like her have been forgotten by the mainstream.
The Mary Neal Lecture takes place on Thursday 26th May at Cecil Sharp House, Regent's Park Road, London. Doors open 7pm, starts 7.30pm. Tickets: £10, available on the door or from EFDSS.