Performance
May 1st is a key date in the Folk calendar. Halfway between the Northern Hemisphere’s spring equinox and midsummer solstice, it’s been celebrated since at least Roman times. For the last hundred years it has also been customary for morris dancers to ‘dance the sun up’ at dawn to welcome the summer months ahead. I’ve been doing this since 2023 as a ‘hedge morris dancer’—my term for morris performances outside of an established group or tradition.
This improvised dance on a scrap of wasteland near my home in West Yorkshire is this year’s contribution…
Last year I turned 40.
They teach you to fear these things.
And although I’m mostly just glad still to be here, I’m aware that my physical body is beginning to change in ways society says are unwelcome. My twenty-year-old self, in all her self-absorption, would have flinched at the lines on my face, the sagging of my skin. Each day I move further and further from the approximation of beauty.
I grew up in a small village in agricultural Lincolnshire, whose county mascot is the Lincoln Imp, after a small carving in the Angel Choir of the Cathedral.
Many stories have been written about her, her envy and mischief.
They call her a ‘grotesque’.
This year, I decided to embody the Imp in my May Day performance. I made the costume from scratch, took it out to a patch of wasteland where the fly-tippers leave their spoils.
The sun was shining and I felt intense joy as I danced with all my newly middle-aged might.
I want to embrace radical ugliness as I grow older.
They’ll call us grotesque anyway,
Camera: Tilo Reifenstein | Costume + performance: Lucy Wright | Soundtrack: Venus Aphrodite
May 2026