What are we?
Fool's Maze is a morris side that exists to perform folk plays and self-choreographed dances for one, two and three people. All members are also members of other morris sides and have performed on and off as 'Fool’s Maze' since early 2000. As well as a small regular repertoire of jigs and two-person dances, our new projects include a few historical pastiches and a folk play based on Cantiga XV of the Cantigas de Santa Maria.
Errm, Why?
I must say that right at the beginning the name was coined as a mechanism for handling a few events that our other sides had declined and where, for whatever reason, the squires of those sides preferred that we not perform under their name. We couldn't very well ask the organisers to put 'a few random morris dancers' on a programme, so Fool's Maze came into existence, the name being picked in the course of a mobile call from the upstairs room of the Princess Louise in Holborn.
(It would have saved confusion on the part of several sides who at two consecutive events expected to be dancing with Red Stags at the first and Jackstraws at the second, only to find the same dancer and musician in two different costumes. But on that occasion, both sides allowed us to dance under their names.)
By 2002, however, we were actually receiving the occasional invitation under the name Fool's Maze. I think that it was May Littleton who started this, at the event pictured in the header.
In 2007, we've actually joined the Morris Federation. About half the sides in the MF belong chiefly for the insurance, and that's a factor since we intend doing a few gigs this year that aren’t invitations from other sides. However, that's not really the main point, since I've used alternate liability insurance to cover events in the past: I am also developing some material (the historical pasticehs) that doesn't really fit with the rest of the repertoire for the other sides, and I'd also like, with Andy Maliphant, to have creative control over the Cantiga XV play that he wrote for me.