We are a Long Sword dance team. You can occasionally see us dancing in Downtown Santa Barbara. We have performed as part of “First Thursday” Arts festivities on State Street and at the Granada Theater. Each December we dance as part of the Mummers Play in the Santa Barbara Revels.

About Long Sword: Long Sword is a form of “hilt and point” dance recorded mainly in Yorkshire, England. It uses rigid metal or wooden swords. Although Long Sword dances are found scattered all over Yorkshire, there are particular concentrations of dances in the northern part of the North York Moors and around Sheffield.

Long Sword dances vary in the way they are performed, with some being slow and militaristic, such as the Grenoside or performed with pace and speed like Handsworth dances from near Sheffield, others have different features including variations of numbers of dancers and distinctive movements. The Pacific Sword Co. features a dance from Kirkby Malzeard – a small village on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales – but we add a few flourishes of our own to the dance.

The earliest records of sword dancing from continental Europe indicate that the performers were often members of trade guilds or other such groups, and the dancing itself frequently occurred as part of a grander pageant. However, there is a paucity of references to sword dancing in Britain, especially England, before the 1760s; and while “non-evidence of performance is not necessarily evidence of non-performance,” it does suggest that prior to this period sword dancing was indeed quite rare in England (compare the number of references to Cotswold-style Morris Dancing from this period). Nevertheless, sword dancing was a common activity in the villages of Northern England until the early part of the 20th century – and it is still kept up by a few village teams even today.

We hope you enjoy this simple entertainment from an earlier, less complicated and slower paced era!

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