To be a Bashaldo Gypsy is to remember fallen civilizations. It is to carry language, music, stories, technology and dance that have witnessed the ruin of empires across continents, oceans and ages. It is to carry a repertoire that continues life amidst settled people whose memories can easily be turned hostile overnight through the influence of volatile state archives of borders, labels and laws. It is to know that loving a country won’t save you from being kicked out of it, but when they do you travel in the steps of those who walked this before. You move in the steps of dances like the jig. Dear Traveler, there is much that has been forgotten. There are entire worlds few recall, and in Gypsy Fires I’d like to help you remember them as we dive further into history, tradition and what it means for us today. I don’t offer my memory because you need to be like me and do what I do, or because the past was a better place. I open my dance because I have found among many other Roma and Sinti, we tend to remember who did what, where they did it, how and why they started moving that way. This certainly covers dance, but also how people comport themselves in their communities. What do they value and how does their language, business and pleasure reflect that? We remember what used to matter, and that’s helpful when chachepen goes into hiding and xoxanipen stalks the land: when lying becomes culture, the nation and the self. I am biased, but I think Romani and Sinti dance is very good at getting through disaster, especially that which is caused by greed and deceit. Growing up, calamity was already assumed to have arrived, and our eyes were always open. So there wasn’t even a sense that “oh, crisis is here we need to act” or a sense that anyone was going to care about our struggles, although I am stubborn and keep believing that people will. Whether times were good or bad we were always working through what my mother called, “Plan A, B, C and D.” This is also the shape of many jig, hornpipe and reel dances. As the borders of the world as we have known it shift to reveal what was always there and more people fall through the system’s cracks they thought they were safe from, dance was made especially for those who don’t have anything to hold onto. It’s not made when we steal another’s dance or covet things that aren’t good for us. It is made in remembering who you really are as life itself. L'Ancien Régime of Louis XIV and his high gilded court has been revealed to us all on social media. Just like it was three-hundred years ago, we are witnessing the contemporary version of masses of French proletariat shoved at gunpoint into poverty, factory brutality and sabot—wooden shoes—while genocide and war continue to ravage and loot the worlds of Black and Brown people. A few billionaires stand in their Hall of Mirrors, and we are all reminded that they were never referring to our “freedom” or making our lives “great” again. Regardless of how you have landed in the fall, if all that you have left right now is the cage they put you in, tap, slap and bang upon the system itself and make that your dance. You do not let them defeat you, erase you or, worse, make you one of them. You look at the consequences of the road you and your ancestors walked, learn your lessons and you continue. But first, we have to understand how capitalism, nationalism and middle-class values tried to change our memory of the jig. A Game of Cut & Paste As I wrote in my last letter, What Dance Really Is, up until about the 1930s our world once looked very different. At any given time, large portions of the global population were at sea and on rivers, lakes and canals, and many lived there full-time. Cities we would consider small or remote were busy trading ports with direct connections to the world through migrants, sailors and travellers. Indigenous roads of the world weren’t just on land, they carried culture, trade and lives through water. Piroska is the best Romni and Sintitza archivist and researcher I know, and many years ago she shared with me a video documentary of Gwyneth Thomas’s preservation of Welsh clogging—dancing percussively with wooden-soled shoes. In the beginning of the video we see a teenage boy clogging in the square of the small fishing village of Porthmadog while the narrator gives us three important pieces of information: * The village was once a port within a booming North Atlantic economy stretching between Newfoundland to Russia. * As a young girl she watched from the windows as sailors or “Gypsies from the nearby encampment [danced] their jigs” and “the jig over a broom were a great favorite both at sea and in the Gypsy encampments.” * As this economy died so did clogging as it had been done then, and you would never know it had existed as there were only a few fishing boats around. The documentary then goes on to talk about how Gwyneth revived the clog dancing of “olden days” from being lost by teaching it to schoolchildren. It’s really a lovely documentary, and who doesn’t want schoolchildren to learn and preserve folk dancing? The documentary of course leaves out that under Methodist control of Wales in the 18th and 19th centuries, clog dancing and harping were banned, with almost all ancient harps of Wales destroyed. It was the Welsh Kale exclusively who kept these traditions alive, and Frances Roberts Reilly is from one of these families who has faithfully preserved both traditions. Also, w e are not told that sailors were often Black or Brown, and that they shaped dance, culture and identity in the Atlantic world. As we see Gwyneth in her beautiful, fine home telling stories to her grandchildren of bygone days, we do not see the lives of those affected—Gypsy and gadjo alike—by the collapse of an entire economy, way of life and the culture that went with it. We do not know what has happened to those people by 1959 after two World Wars and a world made over multiple times by industrialization—an act that is never as naturally occurring as we are made to believe. All we know is what the film tells us and shows us, and it was broadcasted around the country during the “folk revival”. In the case of Welsh clogging, its creation and history were summarized as the “old traditional dances of Wales, and they added to them many of the steps they had learned in their travels to foreign parts.” But this is a memory whose boundaries were re-written to suit middle class conformity, belonging and aspiration at the cost of those who actually created the practices who were facing increased discrimination, hardship and aggression. Further North in Scotland, we have records that help understand the other end of the history—a beginning in the 1700s: Dance and music probably played a larger part in the social life of the Scottish people in the eighteenth century than ever before….the Highlanders of the parish of Moulin, Perthsire […] abandon their customary racing, wrestling and putting the stone for what their minister called the “more elegant, though less manly, amusement of dancing, which has become very common.” George S. Emmerson, 1971 How did the dance come to be in many parts of Britain as well as Ireland? Primarily through itinerant dancing masters—people who carried dance upon the road. People who changed their names to sound French. People who relied heavily upon Gypsies and sailors to get their moves and show their new steps off on stages and in town squares. It is a memory erased entirely from contemporary Scottish, Irish, Welsh and English folk dancing history and practice. But the dance is patient, and it goes on regardless of who says they own it. I have no doubt people will continue to nationalize, commercialize or grant-ify dance that created and carried by people who were on the move. But they give themselves away when call it just “freedom and fun” and part of their national identity, while those of us whose parents gave us our steps and taught us what they’re really for carry on. Throughout white communities in Europe and the Americas I find stories of dances that arrive and depart. Meanwhile in Roma, Sinti, Indigenous and African communities, we remember dances that continue. In Gypsy Fires we’ll be recovering more of these histories on every continent, and they tell a story for us today that no dance manual, gym-class folk dance or social media influencer is ever going to tell you. And we need to hear this now. Many today are perplexed to see what is called Artificial Intelligence destroy the world as we know it—putting millions out of work, re-making the landscape and re-writing civilization before our eyes in order to benefit the few, but clogging, jigging and other “low” or “vernacular” dances remember this has happened many times before. The People on the River Are Happy To Give When John Fogerty wrote the hit song, “Proud Mary”, he had never even seen the Mississippi River. The song’s inspiration began in the summer of love in ‘67, and the paddlewheel boat came later in inspiration from television and Mark Twain-Americana. Just eight years after Gwyneth’s appearance in the documentary, John capitalized on an old memory of river-life and people who were indeed, “happy to give.” Roma, Sinti and Traveler culture were ripe for the taking as we had just endured the Holocaust and Jim Crow laws in the USA kept dark-skinned families like mine on the margins alongside Black and African Americans who were the real target of those laws. When Tina Turner took Proud Mary, she did more than make the song a timeless hit. She breathed life into a culture that modern capitalism tried to erase. A highly mobile people with access to resources on land, trade on water and people from around the world possess far too much independence and abundance for an economy built on enclosure, extraction and expulsion. They’v
