You may recall, those of you with long memories, that four years ago I did a Morris Federation Age Analysis survey, which had responses from 164 teams. The information suggested that the average age of a Morris dancer in the Morris Federation was 39.5, that there was a reasonable spread across the ages, with most numbers in the 35-44 age group, that there were on average 19 people in each team, of whom two on average danced with another team. By extrapolating these figures to all the known Morris teams, we hypothesised that there were about 11,200 dancing in Morris teams in the UK, about 5,200 were women and 6,000 were men.
I now propose to do another survey, with the same questions to see if there is any difference in the profile- are we getting older, are we getting younger, are we staying the same age, are the numbers going up or down, and what is the gender split. These are all questions that we have asked over the past few years, and now we can check it out against the benchmark we took four years ago in the Morris Federation. It is important that we do this so that we can be realistic about planning for the future both within the Federation and in individual teams. I would ask you to make sure that you fill it in and send it back, as the more people that respond the better picture we will get.
If no one has asked you your age recently, then it hasn't been filled in!
The other questionnaire is to find out how many "things" people have associated with the dance- animals, beasts, fools, mascots (alive or stuffed), as this will help with the planning of some events next year. Many thanks for all your help. Results of both surveys will be published in the Summer newsletter.
JANET DOWLING
From The Morris Federation Newsletter, Winter 1999