The Wheel of the Year turns now toward Yule. The days grow shorter and the light more precious.
Bringing back the light is at the heart of every Revels celebration, a yearly pageant of song, dance, and stories, replete with splendid costumery, enchanting puppetry, hilarious mummers, a children’s chorus, and moments of solemn or silly ritual. Every Revels show makes common cause between the rebirth of the Sun of Mother Earth and the birth of the Son of Father God. The narrative might feature the moon and stars or a birth in Bethlehem, for Revels offers a friendly blend of nature-based Paganism with the traditions of the Christian Nativity and other sacred traditions that have grown up around the winter solstice.
The Lord of the Dance was my first Revels-themed card, pictured above in a detail. It could be called the Revels’ signature melody, sung and danced without fail every year, no matter the theme or the cultural tradition that is being honored. At the end of the first act the audience joins with the cast and chorus and everyone dances through the theater and out into the lobby in an intertwining line, hand in hand, singing.
I created this card in 1994, thirty years ago this year. I had seen the 1993 California Appalachian Revels in Oakland the year before and was moved by the words of Simple Gifts, an old Shaker hymn, that sings to us of turning, turning, till we come round right. Celtic knot work in the border of a page in the medieval Book of Durrow gave me an image of the turning, and printers’ dingbats simulated a pieced quilt border around my scanned calligraphy. I printed it in black on my desktop printer and hand-colored the different strands with pastel markers, now faded.
I sent the design off to the founding Revels company in Cambridge and was asked in reply, Can you substitute the lyrics of The Lord of the Dance instead? It was a little twist of serendipity, for I had not quite realized that the two songs use the same tune. I re-lettered the lyrics and made color separations to have it offset printed. My greeting card business was born.
For the next twenty years I made many Yule cards and prints inspired by Revels, a rich resource of music and poetry. These days my creative homage to Revels has changed. I no longer make as much art as I did in the past, but began expanding on the brief mentions in my Journal to write rhapsodic reviews of that year’s Revels.
This year I am changing it up. California Revels has returned after a dark year with a new show in a new, more intimate venue in Hayward. I write my Revels rhapsody early in the hope that some of you might join in and share the festivities with us. Standing stones are promised, and the show poster makes generous use of the magical carvings from my beloved Newgrange in Ireland. A Celtic celebration it is then!
During the lean years of lockdown, we participated in Revels by way of video. Reluctant at first, I finally recalled that it was a recording of music that led me to Revels in the first place, an audiocassette back in the early 1990s. To their credit California Revels produced two extraordinary shows under the artistic direction of Rene Collins, both written by Jeff Ray and set in the mid-nineteenth century. The first in 2021 highlighted Afro-Caribbean and Gullah traditions, and in 2022 the show combined the experiences of Chinese immigrants during the California Gold Rush with the sacred sites of the indigenous Ohlone people. Both of these full-length shows took Revels into exciting new cross-cultural directions and were recorded for those who couldn’t attend the live shows.
For my readers who are not near one of the nine cities across the country who offer a Revels experience, the oldest Revels company is offering a video experience again this year at this link. Titled the Selkie Girl and the Seal Woman, it promises to be wonderful. California Revels will also have a video to share later in December. Kudos to these shows who now must work even harder to offer their performances to audiences. We have come to expect the choice of going to a live performance or watching the video. I have loved each and been nourished by the music whatever way it comes.
More videos:
The longtime artistic director of Revels, Patrick Swanson, merited a lovely tribute upon his retirement, a really fun collection of clips from Revels shows stretching back fifty years. You can watch it here on Vimeo. And I like this montage of clips from last year’s Feast of Fools Revels in Cambridge.
In all the years I have been Reveling, it has only slowly occurred to me that this participation in a pageant of song and dance is in fact a kind of ancestor veneration.
Last year on my trip to England when I visited the tiny town of Shutford I took this photo of The George and Dragon Inn, sadly closed since the pandemic. But some months later I was perusing the CD offerings on the Revels website, and was delighted to find this image which so closely matched my own ancestral town in the Cotswolds. I know this is a very common name for a pub in England, but still! At least in the Revels image there is smoke from the chimney. Thus it is that Revels keeps alive the old traditions and songs.
Somehow revisiting the old ways gives us a way forward. It’s a strange alchemy that we enact every year in a darkened theater when we dust off the old songs and honor the old ways. Our ancestors thrill to hear the old songs sung, to see the old ways revived. In the absence of great grandparents to tell us how things were back in the old days, Revels seeks it out and serves it up.
