Clog

Weight is kept over the balls of the feet with the knees soft, and the feet stay close to the floor so the wooden sole can strike cleanly and repeatedly. The upper body is held quiet and fairly upright with the arms relaxed at the sides, so that the audience reads the rhythm rather than the gesture. Sound is produced by toe taps, heel drops, shuffles, taps of the outside edge and rapid alternations of heel and toe, often with several distinct sounds packed into a single beat. Appalachian derivatives loosen this — flatfooting drops the whole foot and keeps it lower still, while buck dancing allows more bounce and swing through the hips.

Traditionally a solo dance, danced for an audience or for judges. American clogging is usually performed by precision teams or in couples within square and line formations, and some traditional English forms are danced in duets or by informal groups sharing a floor.

English clog dancing had a genuine professional competitive circuit in the nineteenth century, with contests for championship belts and cash, and it survives today in competitions at folk festivals in the north of England and in the Northumbrian and Durham traditions. In the United States there is a large organised clogging circuit concentrated in the Southeast, running conventions, workshops and team competitions judged on timing, clarity of sound, difficulty and unison. Related percussive competitions run in Cape Breton and in Irish and Canadian step dancing.

Lancashire clog is associated with the music-hall repertoire and highly intricate footwork; Durham and Northumbrian styles are quieter and more contained, and Northumbrian rant steps connect to rapper sword dancing. In Wales clog dancing developed its own repertoire including displays of high stepping and stunt figures. In North America the form split into Appalachian flatfooting and buck dancing, and then into modern team clogging, which absorbed steps from tap and later from country and hip-hop dance.

The frequent claim that English clog dancing descends from Dutch wooden-shoe dance does not hold up; the Dutch tradition is a separate one, more processional and figure-based than percussive, and the shared element is the footwear rather than the dance. It is also wrong to treat clogging as originally American mountain dance: the American forms are the later branch, and they are mixed with African American percussive dance rather than being purely British. Dating the tradition to the sixteenth or seventeenth century confuses the age of wooden footwear with the age of the dance, which is documented from the later eighteenth century onward.