Hi Mark, thanks for the response. Sorry it's taken me a few days to respond in turn, been working away from home and away from computers...

Long Barrow were based in Medway, same as W&V are now (though we seem to have expanded our orbit to Maidstone and even to the outer reaches of Croydon).

Plagiarism - I still hear that kind of thing chucked around. But my attitude is that, at least so far as folk arts like the Morris are concerned, there's really no such thing. Traditions, living ones anyway, evolve by "borrowing" and adapting from a general pool of ideas and inspiration. I'm a storyteller, so I'm very aware of the way stories travel and change, and if dances do the same thing that's surely only natural? Sorry if that's not too clear, but it is late at night!

The initial dance repertoire for W&V was pretty much derived from the Long Barrow dances (and we're still dancing most of them), and Long Barrow in turn was first formed by people who had broken away from Motley, so there's obviously a "line of descent", as it were. Not the same as plagiarism. I'm sure it's the same in the way a lot of sides develop. We've noticed the proliferation of black kit with added colour variations, since we started the tendency towards black among Border sides. Not a problem, that's just the way traditions work. On a slightly amusing related theme, at last year's Sweeps' Festival I heard a member of another side introducing our 'Cuckoo's Nest' dance (which I co-wrote about thirteen years ago) as "a traditional dance" - and he was being entirely serious!

I remember seeing Wild Hunt very early on, and on seeing the masks thinking, "Bugger, I wish I' d done that first...!" A good idea, and very effective. The pagan ritual thing does work. With us - I'll be honest here - I was always working on a basic concept derived from Paganism, magical practice, and my own background in the arts. I was out of the side for some years (hence I wasn't at the ale in Arnhem - I'll have to ask about that at next practise!), during which time other people seem to have lost that sense of direction, but now they've left and I'm back so who knows what might happen...<cue sinister laugh at this point> Thanks for your comment re the "stage presence", that's one of the things that I very deliberately set out to create. No conscious influence from Seven Champions, I hadn't even seen them dance until a couple of years after we started W&V, but I don't doubt someone else introduced that even if as an unconscious element in what we were doing.

Philip