Guise dancing (sometimes known as goose or geese dancing) is a folk practice celebrated between Christmas Day and Twelfth Night (traditionally also Plough Monday, and some parish feasts) in Cornwall, UK. The principal activities associated with guise dancing are the performance of 'traditional' Christmas plays such as Duffy and the Bucca or St George and the Turkish Knight and traditional Cornish dance, music and song. The performers were dressed in a disguise to hide their identity allowing them to perform in an outlandish or mischievous manner in the hope of receiving payment of food or money.
Read more about Guise Dancing: Historical Description, Modern Guise Dancing, BBC Recording
Famous quotes containing the words guise and/or dancing:
“Shut out that stealing moon,
She wears too much the guise she wore
Before our lutes were strewn
With years-deep dust, and names we read
On a white stone were hewn.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
“We have dancing ... from soon after sundown until a few minutes after nine o’clock.... Occasionally the boys who play the female partners in the dances exercise their ingenuity in dressing to look as girlish as possible. In the absence of lady duds they use leaves, and the leaf-clad beauties often look very pretty and always odd enough.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)