Clogging

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Northern Broadsides are, as their name suggest, a company based in the North of England, in Halifax, Yorkshire, and they have a strong and proud regional identity. Many of the actors live in the North and have not lost their distinctive regional voice. Part of the identity of the company comes from an acknowledgement of their debt to the culture of the industrial North. Their current headquarters and theatre is based in Halifax, at Dean Clough, a former mill, and the labours of the men and women that once toiled in what William Blake called “dark satanic mills” are literally echoed in the work of Northern Broadsides. In these productions the actors dance, wearing the same wooden clogs as the mill workers who long ago made a familiar noise like horse hooves as they passed over the cobbled streets of the mill towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire.

A pair of wooden steel-tipped rehearsal clogs.

In 1990 Barrie Rutter had performed in The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, a play at the National Theatre by the Yorkshire poet and playwright Tony Harrison . In that production choreographed clog dances had a mesmerising effect on the audience, an effect not lost on Rutter. In a previous production by Northern Broadsides of Richard III, in which Rutter played Richard, the battle of Bosworth which finally sees the end of Richard’s bloody career, was staged as a thundering clog dance between two rival groups representing Richard and his conqueror, Richmond. Although at the start of rehearsals for The Wars of the Rosesit had not yet been determined how and when clog dancing would be used, it would feature at some stage and the actors began practising for it from day one.