Residing as it does on the far side of the Renaissance, the Medieval age seems very distant from us. Language, customs and especially the system of governance are all things that, even in the Revels depiction seem foreign to us. Yet we Americans do invest in our leaders, un-kingly though they may be, great reserves of hope and faith and we trust in them to carry us through dark times. Although we draw them from the ranks of the people, we infer in them levels of greatness and responsibility to which few of us in the common citizenry could aspire. For medieval peoples, the challenge was rather the opposite: to imagine the King as sharing the experience of the commoners. Customs such as the Feast of Fools helped them to express the oneness of majesty and foolishness. Although rendered remote by their Middle English settings, dualities such as the King and the Fool, life and death, the light and the dark, the real and the imaginary abound in Medieval songs and stories.

While, as is usually the case, Revels ventures pretty far afield in some of the material we perform, still we are anchored in the very old concept of “Yule.” This word, from the Norse languages, means literally “wheel,” and it describes time as it rolls through the ages with the turning, and returning of each year. Like a wheel, the year passes through the cyclical seasons of plowing, planting, growth, and harvest, from light through dark and back to light again. Like a wheel, the repeated turns, while seemingly the same, bring us to places far distant and very different from where we started. The Yuletide is an eloquent benchmark, not only in Medieval thought, but in our own as well.

When I was a child, an exciting part of our seasonal ritual was to venture, flashlight in hand, into the darkness of my grandparents’ attic. That is where all the decorations were stored, and with each glance of the flashlight’s beam, another box was revealed, brimming with candles, ornaments, and figurines, and overflowing with memories of holidays past and with expectations of the one about to come. Down the boxes would come, up the lights would go, and our young hearts glowed with the joy and mystery of a celebration at once both old and new.

Each year at this time, as Revels views the Solstice from a different cultural or temporal perspective, we do a similar thing. We shine a light on the customs, songs and rituals of another time, very remote and yet somehow, mysteriously connected to our own.

David Parr, Artistic Director