WITH Strictly, ballroom dancing has never been more popular.

But now there's a new dancing trend, that goes even further back in time, which a group from Colchester are at the very heart of.

That's Historical Dancing, to be more precise, Tudor, originally made famous by Shakespeare's references to the Galliard and the Pavan but enjoying a bit of a renaissance thanks to such programmes as The Tudors.

Colchester Historical Dance has been going eight years and was started up after former Gazette journalist and now British Forces broadcaster Liz Mullen was looking for something to do to celebrate Heritage Open Weekend.

She says: "I'm a volunteer at the National Trust's Bourne Mill and one of my co-volunteers, Lynette Bloom and I were thinking about what we could do for the weekend.

"She then remembered I did historical dancing in my 20s and wondered whether we could do that. I contacted my old dancing tutor, Jackie Marshall-Ward, who has been teaching historical dance in Colchester for a long time. She had helped me choreograph a dance for when I did Pride and Prejudice at the Headgate Theatre and so when I asked to to help us with the Bourne Mill heritage weekend she was more than happy to do so."

Starting off in a small room at Essex University, the group have been quite the nomadic one, flitting from one to another, finally settling on their current home at St Andrew's Church Hall in Marks Tey.

"We've been all over," Liz smiles. "One place was so narrow we couldn't do our turns so we just practised going up and down.

"Our current home is fairly convenient for all of us, especially the people who come all the way from Brentwood every fortnight for our weekly practices."

The group now has a more than full compliment of 15 regular people so rather than recruiting new members, they can concentrate on the job in hand, which is rehearsing for the plethora of engagements they now have every year.

"We are very fortunate because rather than putting on a CD of Tudor music," Liz begins, "most weeks we have the good fortune to have live music thanks to the Colchester Waits and in particular Lizzie Gutteridge.

"She turns up with her shawm, fiddle and pipes and makes it so much more fun. In fact she knows the dances better than we do. Sometimes when she gets carried away she'll even step in and join us. We have got a really twinning going on with the Colchester Waits and it looks so much more authentic than if we just play recorded music."

And when it comes to the costumes they're pretty authentic too.

"I was lucky," Liz tells me, "because I was lucky enough to get mine made for me by another member of the group, Barbara Kingston, but they can be very expensive indeed. Hundreds of pounds.

"I remember I drew a sketch of the kind of dress I wanted and our tutor Jackie said 'No!' straight away so I went back to the drawing board and came up something more suitable.

"We actually have two costumes, our lower orders, which I suppose you could call a bit 'wench-like' with sleeveless lace, leather waistcoat and bodice, and then our courtly costumes for when we are at an event which requires a bit of poshness. Before an event we usually ask whether its 'posh or peasant' today."

Since the early music revival in the Seventies, there has been quite a trend for all things Tudor.

It was what inspired the group's tutor, Jackie Marshall-Ward to start up her own group, Danse Royale, an East Anglian-based dance company which performed and ran workshops right across the region.

Spanning the entire Tudor period from Henry VIII's reign to the Elizabethan period, most of the dances the group perform were performed at the Royal Court and linked with the social situations of the day. So there will be dances for romance but also those reflecting conflict and war.

The different types of dance include the Pavan, Galliard, Canaries and Jackie’s favourite, the Italian Balletti, which is a whole genus of dances and were for the dance masters of the time because of the complicated steps involved.

Liz adds: “The country dances were in essence what the courtiers of the day thought peasants would dance to.

“In reality, peasants were probably too busy trying to survive to do any dancing and it basically allowed courtiers to act as disgracefully as they wanted to.

"They are called Branles, but what Shakespeare would call a Brawl, and ours are usually in a circle similar to a folk dance. Branles have lots of jaunty dance steps whereas the courtly dances are performed with more significance. They try and tell a story whether it's about love or fighting."

Where you can see the Colchester Historical Dance Group this summer:

This weekend marks the start of the group's 2016 season with a special 'Dance for Shakespeare' event at St Andrew's Church in Marks Tey.

With music by the Colchester Waits, the group will be performing a programme of Dances from Shakespeare's plays to mark the 400th anniversary of the poet's death. Taking place on Sunday at 2.30pm, tickets are £8 and £6 for concessions, available on the door.

Next month they have been asked to dance at the Mayor's Ball, which takes place at the Moot Hall in Colchester Town Hall, on May 13, and then their first big public event of the year is at the Colchester Medieval Festival and Oyster Fair Market . That takes place in Colchester's Castle Park over the weekend of June 4 and 5 from 10am to 5pm.

Other events pencilled in for the year include Colchester's One Big Sunday which will once again take place in the Public Area by the Firstsite Art Gallery on June 19 and a possible trip to Witham's Medieval Fair at St Nicholas Church on June 25.

Then on July 24, it's a trip down to Ingatestone Hall, which itself dates from Tudor times built by William Petre who was assigned the task of visiting the monastic houses of Southern England to draw up a record of their possessions and to persuade them to surrender to the King during the late 1530s.

For more information on the group go on-line at www.colchesterhistoricaldance.co.uk