No, not that one, and not "Little Whitby" either!

But unless something significant is done immediately, the WHITBY COMPETITIVE FOLK DANCE FESTIVAL will not run next year. Some of you will know about this competition, and many won't. It has been in existence since 1922! This year's will have been its last unless it gets an immediate injection of interest.

The festival runs in Whitby, North Yorkshire, UK, on the weekend a fortnight before Easter. It is organised by the local EFDSS branch - but don't let that put you off! For years the prime movers have been May Beeforth and (the late) Peter Glover - both well known to Folk Weekers. The festival has been in a slow, if fitful, decline over the last 10 years or so, with attendances and entries falling off year by year. Now the committee members have decided they're all too old to continue.

BUT!! There are a number of us, both local and further afield, who have been regular attenders at the festival and don't want to see it die, at least not without a fight. We are exploring several options at the moment, but the two most important factors are 1) attendance and 2) costs. Of course if attendance is sorted out, the costs problem can be much more easily resolved.

This is where you come in! The first thing that needs to happen is for people throughout the Folk scene to become aware of the existence of the festival; the second is for them to commit to attending it. The local group has never had the resources for blanket advertisement coverage, so most people in the Folk scene have no knowledge of the festival. Please tell everyone you know in a dance team or who sings that this competition could still run in 2002 if we get enough support.

A lot of people, understandably, are opposed on principle to competitive Folk activities, but of course there is a strong history of competition in several of the dance traditions. You can view it very much in the way the International Eisteddfod at Llangollen is seen. Whitby CFD Festival was once clearly important to dancers up and down the country, and a lot of "names" in the dance world have been involved over the years. Ivor Allsop devotes a whole page of his book to the importance of WCFDF.

What does the festival entail? Competitions in a whole range of categories: playground games (still supported by the local primaries in this day and age), Country Dancing (which seems mostly to mean Playford), Kentucky Running Set, Cotswold and Border Morris, Longsword, Rapper, North West and Garland, and Folk Singing. There are entry classes for all ages, and recently I was able to persuade them to allow (!!) both female sword dancing and a demonstration of step clog. This is not to say that any future festival would follow exactly the same format - I believe further changes are long overdue. The festival traditionally concludes with a "Barn Dance" - we should turn that into a ceilidh.

This is one of the last two remaining competitive festivals in England. So help, eh? Catters who're in town for Folk Week will find me round & about, tho' I don't have a t-shirt! You can't miss me, anyway, & I'll probably be Scratching at some point. Otherwise post to this thread or e-mail me. If you're involved in EFDSS, you could help giving them a kick up the jacksie for some help from them. Ta for reading this diatribe! Ian