Folk Week part 2

Folk week was a new experience for us, as Whitby, or anywhere- it was almost as though the whole town became a folk festival, but you could still be in Whitby and not be involved...what was good was that there were displays of all styles of regional dances, just dotted about the town at various times of day- the one I felt particularlymoved by was at the whalebones on the first day...dances I had never seen before, performed on a cliff edge, backed by the sea. There were some teenage Irish dancers accompanied by a boy on a guitar, and mollydancers. There was also a troupe of rather sinister dancers with their faces covered in dark material-they had a very odd name that I can't quite remember, maybe the Clack or something; they were stern and powerful...different parts of the British Isles had a different style of the same type of dance, as with morris dancing, and there seemed to be male and female morris dancers...I quite got into the idea of Morris dancing as rooted in a kind of ancient ritual rather than something to laugh at on a hot cider soaked day on a village green...
Something that really impressed me was the behaviour of teenagers involved in the festival...and I must say teenagers generally in Whitby don't seem to create the same problems as some of them do in London...maybe it's just the scale of everything is so much smaller..., or maybe it's because I'm not at work when I'm there, so don't think so much about the problems caused and faced by teenagers...
At the dances and the sessions, teenagers seemed to enter the spirit of things...joining at social events in big friendly groups, and they all looked like your average trendy teenagers...not like the stereotype of quiet thoughtful types I had in my mind of young people obsessed with folk music, however, I know there has been a resurgence of interest in folk music in the past two or three years, with some acts bringing it bang up to date and creating new music, rather than just doing 'cover versions' of old tunes. Phil and I were also very grateful to a few teens who helped us out of a spot in a dance at a ceilidh when we had gone hopelessly wrong, and seemed to have a more relaxed attitude to slip ups than some of their elders!