A history of dancing colour slide collection

A couple of weeks ago I posted about some really interesting pictures of the RAF base in Singapore that I found in a set of colour slides I bought. Well, when you buy old slides the one thing you can guarantee is that there will be variety, and I got more proof of that this week when I received a set of slides of what appears to be many different forms of dancing.

I acquired them because I bought an old slide viewer for £0.99 with a view to replacing the bulb with an LED and using it to preview slides. Along with the viewer was a large wooden slide box with about 200 35mm and instamatic slides which the seller said were no use to him, so they were included for free. The slides are mostly indexed with writing on each individual slide, so whoever took and kept them was obviously well organised, although some of the writing has become a bit difficult to read since it was written – in some cases 40 years ago.

On my initial look through the slides I thought they were all images of Morris Men, because the first few I pulled out and held to the light were of that subject, but once I started scanning them I found they cover a huge variety of different dance styles. There are people Morris dancing, people May pole dancing and also some oriental dance varieties.

The dancers featured seem to have performed in a variety of different locations from village fates and fairs to some large garden parties in private houses. It seems the person who took the photos knew what they were doing because virtually all the pictures are good quality, well exposed and well focused – I don’t know it he/she was one of the dancers or a photographer who was interested in dance and performance.

In this post I’ve included ten pictures, but over the course of the next few weeks I’ll scan more pictures and add them to a series so they can be easily found by anyone interested.