Here is the list of potential team names that we came up with at Saturday’s organizational meeting (plus one kick-ass one I came up with out of the blue this morning):
- Panther Hollow Morris
- Iron City Morris
- Three Rivers Morris
- Squirrel Hill Morris
- Monongahela Morris
and my addition:
- Ironwood Morris (surprisingly, not taken!)
Obviously, some of these names will be familiar to those Pittsburgh morris veterans among us! 
Hey, they’re good names, so why not reuse them!
Anyway, here’s what we are going to do:
You have until Thursday, January 11th to add new candidates for a team name, either by leaving it as a comment here, or by emailing it to Karin.
On Friday Karin will create a Survey Monkey survey that will allow people to rank the various suggestions on a 5 pt. Likert scale. Hopefully, the results of that survey will then make it clear what our new name should be! If not … we’ll come up with some other mechanism.
After our first practice we retired to Tom and Karin’s house for beer, pizza, and another organizational meeting.
Topics up for discussion: recap of the first organizational meeting for those who weren’t there, possible May Day sites, whether the practice time/space is good, scheduling a Bucknell workshop, who should be bag, names for the team, kit ideas.
Decisions that were made:
- We decided to practice every Saturday from now on, provided we have critical mass (at least 4 dancers). If people are going to be unable to make it, they should email Karin as soon as they know.
- The practice time and space were declared to be good, at least for the time being. We may revisit the issue in the spring/summer.
- We decided to try and schedule the Bucknell workshop for Saturday, January 24th, if we can get people down from Ann Arbor on such short notice. We’ll keep people updated as soon as we know one way or the other. If the workshop doesn’t happen that day we will practice as usual.
Decisions that were not made:
- Who will be bag. It was observed that Jim Logan was looking like a bag (or at least a hat) and he didn’t run screaming, but no official dragooning appointment of bag was made.
- What to name the team. Various suggestions (some more serious than others) were made, but no decision has been reached.
- Kit. It was decided to table the question of kit until we decide on a name, since that might have an impact/influence on the kit.
- May Day sites. Some various suggestions were made, which will need to be researched. The Point has been researched, and has been rejected (at least for May Day morn) for various reasons, the most pressing of which is the fact that the sun will be behind the buildings at sunrise (doh!). Flagstaff Hill in Schenley Park was proposed with much favor, pending research.
Things that people volunteered to do:
- Tory volunteered to contact the Ann Arbor folks to try and get a Bucknell workshop scheduled for Jan. 24th.
- Tory volunteered to contact the Wilkins School and tell them we want the room again next week.
- Karin volunteered to write up minutes and send them out. (Consider this the minutes kthx)
- Karin volunteered to send out an email listing the proposed choices for a team name, and soliciting additional suggestions.
- Karin volunteered to set up a Survey Monkey survey so that we could rank the proposed names, once people have had a chance to respond.
Things that someone needs to do:
- Contact the Wilkins School about getting a room for all day on the 24th for the workshop (provided we can get the Ann Arbor folks to come then). Possibly Tory was going to do this? - I’m not sure.
- Research whether or not Flagstaff Hill would be a good May Day site or not. I’ll probably do this, at least in a preliminary fashion, sometime this week. If someone wanted to join me, that would be cool, anyone who is in the CMU/Pitt area and has a spare hour or so during the day to go for a walk in the park.
See you all next week at practice! 2-4 PM on Saturday, at the Wilkins School. Be there! 
The newly formed Pittsburgh morris team started off the new year right by holding their first practice on Saturday, January 3rd, at the Wilkins School Community Center in Regent Square.
We had NINE dancers at our first practice!!! 
Our musician Allison was unable to come, so Tom stepped in as backup musician. That left us with a set of eight dancers at practice. We were given a pleasant surprise by the arrival of two morris “newbies,” recruited from the Scottish dancers. Welcome, Joyce and Arthur!
We were able to learn two dances pretty much all the way through - Dawley (for eight) and Ockington (2 sets of 4), which I thought was GREAT for our first practice! There are obviously some rough edges to smooth off, but we got through them and nobody died. W00t!
We plan to practice again next week, and hope to have as good a turn-out again. I plan to go over those two dances again, and hopefully start working on a third Border dance.
If this sounds like fun to you, we’ll be at the Wilkins School Community Center off of Braddock Ave. in Regent Square on Saturday from 2-4 PM. Beginners are welcome, as are experienced dancers. There is no official “charge” for practice, but we do pass the hat to help defray the costs of our practice space.
We had our first organizational meeting Saturday, November 15th. We met at Karin and Tom’s house in Regent Square for a pancake and ice cream brunch (yum!). In attendance were: Barbara, Tory, Karin, Tom, and Jim Morgan.
Items up for discussion: when to practice, where to practice, what traditions to do, names for the team, kit, who should be fore(s), squire, bag, etc., possible May Day dance sites.
Decisions that were made:
- After a discussion of what traditions people who were at the meeting had done, a decision was made to dance: Border (in the style of the Bassett Street Hounds) and Bucknell
- Fore(s) are: Karin (Border) and Tory (Bucknell)
- Squire is: Karin (how did this happen?? :P)
Actions that were volunteered to be undertaken by various members:
- Karin, Jim and Tory volunteered to look into various practice spaces — Karin was going to look into CMU and possibly Mifflin Church, Tory was going to look into the Wilkins School, and Jim was going to look into the Friends meetinghouse.
- Karin volunteered to email all the people who weren’t able to be at the meeting and let them know what happened at the meeting (This didn’t happen, sorry. This blog post shall suffice to bring everyone up to speed.)
- Karin volunteered to make a “When is Good” page to find out the best times for people to meet for practices. (Saturday afternoons turned out to be good for just about everyone, and one of the only times that was good for certain people, so we decided to go with that.)
- Tory volunteered to look into when we could schedule a Bucknell workshop to help us get started with that tradition.
Other things on the agenda were discussed in a somewhat random and haphazard fashion, but no decisions were made.
Following the success of the “other” morris danceout in Frick Park on Halloween Eve, Jim, Tory, Karin and Tom were looking for ways to keep the momentum going, and really get their morris on. To that end, they arranged to dance a jig at the English Country dance on November 11th (Jim and Karin dancing, Tory playing - Tom was out of town). Before the dance they also planned to meet up for dinner with some of the former Pittsburgh morris dancers.
A good time was had by all at the dinner and the dance, and Karin and Jim’s jig was very well received. By the time the evening was over we had 8 dancers and a musician (all former morris dancers) signed up as interested in joining a morris team in Pittsburgh!! We were on our way!
The Morris dance is common to all inhabited worlds in the multiverse.
It is danced under blue skies to celebrate the quickening of the soil and under bare stars because it’s springtime and with any luck the carbon dioxide will unfreeze again. The imperative is felt by deep-sea beings who have never seen the sun and urban humans whose only connection with the cycles of nature is that their Volvo once ran over a sheep.
It is danced innocently by raggedy-bearded young mathematicians to an inexpert accordion rendering of “Mrs Widgery’s Lodger” and ruthlessly by such as the Ninja Morris Men of New Ankh, who can do strange and terrible things with a simple handkerchief and a bell.
And it is never danced properly.
Except on the Discworld, which is flat and supported on the backs of four elephants which travel through space on the shell of Great A’Tuin, the world turtle.
And even there, only in one place have they got it right. It’s a small village high in the Ramtop Mountains, where the big and simple secret is handed down across the generations.
There, the men dance on the first day of spring, backwards and forwards, bells tied under their knees, white shirts flapping. People come and watch. There’s an ox roast afterwards, and it’s generally considered a nice day out for the all the family.
But that isn’t the secret.
The secret is the other dance.
In the village in the Ramtops where they understand what the Morris dance is all about, they dance it just once, at dawn, on the first day of spring. They don’t dance it after that, all through the summer. After all, what would be the point? What use would it be?
But on a certain day when the nights are drawing in, the dancers leave work early and take, from attics and cupboards, the other costume, the black one, and the other bells. And they go by separate ways to a valley among the leafless trees. They don’t speak. There is no music. It’s very hard to imagine what kind there could be.
The bells don’t ring. They’re made of octiron, a magic metal. But they’re not, precisely, silent bells. Silence is merely the absence of noise. They make the opposite of noise, a sort of heavily textured silence.
And in the cold afternoon, as the light drains from the sky, among the frosty leaves and in the damp air, they dance the other Morris. Because of the balance of things.
You’ve got to dance both, they say. Otherwise you can’t dance either.
–Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1991)
This Halloween, Sirrom Morris made its Pittsburgh debut by dancing down the sun in Frick Park, near the corner of Braddock and Forbes. Tory and Karin did “The Nutting Girl;” Tory in the style of the village of Bampton, and Karin in the Fieldtown style. The audience consisted of a man and his son on the way to the playground. They did not linger.
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Tory and Karin dance the Nutting Girl
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