The History of Faultline Morris

Kate Bendick

Hey for Naught, 2003.

Faultline Morris is based in Hayward, California. The Foreman is Jay Stirm and the Squire is Kate Bendick. We are a mixed team, with a current membership of 9 dancers and 2 musicians.

Please contact us at: squire@faultlinemorris.org

Faultline Morris is a mixed side founded in 2000. We got our name from the fact that our fore's house sat right on the Hayward Fault in beautiful, seismically-active Northern California. Our kit consists of basic white shirt, black pants and orange sash. We wear orange in tribute to Cal Trans, the public agency responsible for maintaining the roadways and cleaning up after any disaster (natural or otherwise) that may occur. In keeping with this theme, our fool wears a bright orange safety vest, a hard hat and carries a shovel. We have also been known to use orange road cones to mark off places to dance. Faultline grew out of the desire of our original fore, Bill Batty, to start a Morris team that danced Sherbourne. We are currently the only team in the Bay Area that regularly dances this tradition. In recent years we have added various Border traditions to our repertoire, which allows us to perform in traditional "winter" venues such as the Great Dickens Christmas Faire and the Annual Winter Traditions Day of Dance, both held in San Francisco. Our spring season usually begins with us dancing up the sun on May Day morning at the Palo Alto Baylands on San Francisco Bay.

This past year, we hosted the 2005 California Ale, A Wabbit's T'Ale, and recently attended our very first (way) out-of-state Ale, the Toronto Ale in Toronto, Canada. We continue to dance throughout the year in locations across the Bay Area, whenever and wherever we can put down our road cones without anyone running us off.

-- Kate Bendick Squire, Faultline Morris

AMN, Vol. 25, No. 4, December 2005

ISSN: 1074-2689