In a community centre in London, a ping pong table, a treadmill and a row of computers hug the edges of the room. It all feels familiar, apart from the towering green structure with dangling multicoloured ribbons: a maypole, and we’re here to dance around it. Our group of six circle it and get ready, but instead of traditional English folk music (“And on that tree there was a limb, And on that limb there was a branch …”), it’s dancehall, cranked up loud.
This is a session courtesy of British-Jamaican DJ, artist and educator, Linett Kamala. She made her name as one of the first female DJs at Notting Hill carnival in 1985 at just 15 years old, and is now on the event’s board; as Lin Kam Art, Kamala has dedicated much of her life to music, education, community work and art.
Maypole dancing is a springtime pagan ceremony thought to originate from medieval Europe, originally based around a big tree or bush. Traditionally on May Day people would skip around it and sing to the blossoming snowdrops and hellebores, celebrating fertility and the awakening of nature after winter. It was adopted by British schools in the 19th century, and, largely separated from its pagan roots over time, it became more of a playground game, as opposed to a strictly May Day activity. During her childhood in the 70s and 80s, “maypole was one of the different activities you had, like the girl guides,” Kamala says. “I remember the ribbons and really enjoying dancing around it.”
But she saw maypole dancing get phased out of her schools, as “efforts were made to celebrate different cultures in schools other than just English.” This was happening against a backdrop of “a lot of discrimination. On the one hand we were like every other English kid, playing marbles and all the rest of it. But people would be calling us racist names in the street, and friends’ parents wouldn’t let us in their houses to play.”
Some 40 years later, in early 2020, Kamala unexpectedly came across a maypole again, leaning against the corner of a school classroom in Jamaica. Kamala was there leading workshops with the young people, and visiting some of her family on the island. “I was just blown away – I couldn’t believe it.” The school was in the rural hamlet of Success: the site of a sugar plantation co-owned by George Philips, one of The Guardian’s early financiers. After the British colonised Jamaica in 1655, they forced English culture and customs on the enslaved Africans who’d been brought there by Spanish colonisers in the early 1500s. The maypole was introduced as part of that.
To her surprise, a teacher there told Kamala that the children still dance around the maypole most days after school, and that day Linett watched in awe as the girls bobbed and weaved in rhythm. They giggled while intricately plaiting and unplaiting the ribbons, while classic mento music pumped out of a teacher’s car stereo. “I was just elevated,” Linett says. “I felt connected. I wasn’t just reconnecting to this place geographically, because this region was where my father came from, but there was this tradition that they’d kept going and made it their own.”
The bliss that she saw among the girls, and the warm nostalgia she felt, was challenging in relation to how she felt about this colonial leftover. Kamala knew she had to somehow bring a maypole into her art practice, so she bought an old one online, and began hosting workshops at the Kilburn community centre that she volunteers at, introducing local people to the dance and its history. That’s when a grander artistic vision began to come into focus: to make her own maypole, in her own style, for her own community.
“Since school, I’ve always been into surrealism,” she says. “Even before I knew the term, I’d cover my notebooks in feathers and other found materials. Art was always about reimagining dreams.” Kamala sees sound system culture as part of the surrealist tradition, and thus, the Basstone Maypole was born.
This is Kamala’s very own fantastical, sci-fi-inspired maypole. It features programmed LED light strings instead of ribbons, school Tannoy speakers on the crown, and a thunderous bass bin on the bottom. A “light and sound system”, she calls it. After unveiling it in February at the Light Up Kilburn festival, “I was inundated,” she recalls, as “kids, parents, elders” flocked to it along with some ageing ravers. “We had birdsong playing out of the speakers during the quiet times, and the wild parakeets were singing along! It was so surreal.”
In 21st-century Britain, topics of English tradition and identity can generate discord. I ask Linett where the Basstone Maypole sits within all that. “There’s a new version of being English: this is my heritage too,” she says. “It’s OK for me to embrace it and to make a new version.”
Back at the community centre, one of the attendees, Louise, has come after a long day at her corporate job in Canary Wharf. She did maypole dancing as a child and is a fan of jungle and drum’n’bass, so “a maypole connected to the sound system, it’s like my dream come true!” Today’s session, she says, has reinvigorated her, and “re-lit the fire”. Another attendee, Paulette, says: “I’ve never seen a maypole in an urban environment like this. You see it on TV, in the countryside somewhere, so you don’t really think it’s part of you.”
Before we leave, Linett introduces us to Beverley Bogle, a Jamaican quadrille dancer and facilitator who moved to the UK in the 60s at the age of 16. The retired lecturer and NHS nurse is here to teach us about this dance that originated in 18th-century Europe and was also brought to Jamaica by the British during slavery.
“They took our names, our music, our clothes, our beliefs, our freedom. They treated us like we weren’t human,” she says of her enslaved ancestors in Jamaica. “So we took their dance and we made it our own” – just as they did with the maypole. There’s defiance and empowerment in the dance, she explains, as it originates from Africans mimicking the white colonisers, “creatively changing it into their own styles of quadrille dance, with improvised musical accompaniment”. Although it was strictly forbidden, she tells us, “they secretly danced their quadrille in their camps at night to keep their spirits high, support each other in their plight for human dignity and equality, and most importantly to communicate their shared plans for emancipation and hope for a better lifestyle”. She adds: “We dance now to celebrate our ancestors’ survival strategies and their eventual triumph over oppression.”
If you break through the acrid jingoism in modern Britain, it becomes clear that English folk traditions are more complicated, rich and cross-cultural than many realise: a history as tangled as maypole ribbons, standing somewhere between the darkness of winter and the lightness of spring.
“To me, it’s all about visibility,” Linett says. “There’s more to sound system culture, Jamaican culture and English culture than people think.”