Who are we?

Lynne Spicer – Chairman

My love of historical dance started when I attended some workshops run by Lucy Graham over 25 years ago. I now run Grantham Danserye with my husband and am a member of two other local historical dance groups. My background is in libraries and education and I am keen to pass on my love and enjoyment of historical dance to other people. My particular interest is in the dances, music and costume of the 15th and 16th centuries.

Richard Smithies – Secretary

For all general enquiries, subscriptions, etc.
Email: secretary@historicaldance.org.uk

Chris Southon – Treasurer

Anne Daye – Director of Education and Research

Anne Daye is a founding member of HDS, having been the first Secretary of the Dolmetsch Historical Dance Society, then its Chairman. As a trustee, her role as Director of Education and Research involves planning courses, encouraging good teaching and stimulating excellence in dance research.

Anne’s primary research and teaching interests are in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and she is also a leading expert in the Elizabethan and Stuart masques, the ballet de cour of England, having completed a doctoral thesis on the Jacobean masque from a dance perspective. Another speciality is in the country dance in Britain across the centuries, alongside the cotillons of the Regency period.

Several publications in leading journals and edited dance books, alongside the production of dance instruction books and music recordings for HDS, keep Anne busy, as well as teaching and coaching dancers for HDS, Bedford Early Dance and Music and Herts Early Dance.

Helen Young – Summer School Administrator

Helen Young was first introduced to historical dance in 2002 at an initial course run by HDS and Anne Daye. Immediately hooked, she (with husband Stephen) took advantage of every opportunity to build her skills and understanding, particularly in dance of the 15th and 16th centuries.

With a background in adult education and staff development it was a fairly natural progression that she would be drawn to teaching opportunities in historical dance. Having joined Herts Early Dance in 2004, she now shares in teaching and leading dances at the club on a regular basis, organises the dance programme, and in recent years helped to keep dance going for the club over Zoom.

Helen is also a member of Stratford Renaissance Dance and is enthusiastic about bringing historical dance to a wider audience through HDS activities, or whenever events present themselves.
Helen’s retirement in 2020 afforded her even more time to devote to HDS in an organising capacity and she is an active member of the Teachers’ Subcommittee. She assists in preparing publicity and overseeing bookings for events and as trustee and summer school director, she is responsible for organising the annual summer schools.

Debra Brown – Trustee

Hillary Burlock – Trustee

Dr Hillary Burlock is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Liverpool, working on the histories of British assembly rooms in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She was awarded her PhD in History at Queen Mary University of London in 2022 where her thesis explored intersections between Georgian political culture and social dance from 1760 to 1832. Hillary Burlock has held fellowships at the Lewis Walpole Library, Huntington Library, and Royal Archives, and has recently published edited collections on the cultural influence of Bath’s Assembly Rooms with Routledge and on dance and sociability in the long eighteenth century with Bloomsbury.

Stephen Collins – Trustee