Day of Dance - an annual tradition

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On 8th May 2004, we will hold our annual Day of Dance. We have invited teams from far and wide to join us for the day.

During the day, we will dance at various locations. To help us spread the magic of the Morris to the masses, we will split into three tours. This means that there will be Dancing going on simultaneously in threelocations at various times (although an ancient Morris rule forbids any man to dance in more than one place at any one time).

At last count, we expect around ten teams of men to join us on the day.

Details were more or less correct when this page was written (07:55 am - 7th May 2004) but bitter experience tells us that things change.

Now, there's a lot of information below here to process and for the uninitiated, it can cause the head to spin a little. I will attempt to explain what's going on and if you get lost or confused, don't be ashamed to put your hand up and ask.

We will have 11 teams of Morris Dancers with us and we want them to dance with us all over Westminster. Trying to get that many men to move from one place to another all at the same time without any of them getting lost or squabbling is nigh on impossible. Anyone who has accompanied a primary school day outing will understand this.

The solution is to split the 11 teams into 3 tours, appoint a couple of sensible grown-ups as tour leaders and send each tour on a different route. However, this presents another problem. Matematicians will have spotted this already...

11 teams divided by 3 tours = 3.66 teams per tour

That's no good either then. Terrible trouble was had in deciding which teams to divide. Add to that the possibility that the team to be divided has an odd number of men in it (as opposed to a number of odd men). Which man do we divide? vertically, horizontally or diagonally? and anyway, if we divide a man in two, we run the risk of breaking the rule about no man being allowed to dance in more than one place at a time. Too difficult, too risky, so we had another re-think.

Thankfully, we have a real live mathematician on our team and we set him to work. He studied hard, pondered, wrote two academic papers and was awarded the no-bell prize.

• He proposed that we have two tours with four teams each and another tour with three teams.
  • We didn't understand.
• He drew a picture
  • We still didn't understand, (mostly because he'd drawn a picture of a Rabbit.)
• He drew a diagram
  • That was clearer, we now all felt able to fit brake shoes to a Mk II Cortina.but the tour thing was still lost on us
• He punched a few of us
  • That made no difference
• Then he gave us 3 pints of Wadworths 6X (each!)
  • We understood at last!

So, we have three tours, named Tour 1, Tour 2 and Tour 3....

Still with me? Good! Now, see below for where they will all be going......

Any questions?