Here you'll find articles about how we put a Revels performance together, interesting personal insights, and bits of stuff that just don't seem to belong anywhere else. Feel free to rummage.

“Folk art is, indeed, the oldest of the aristocracies of thought, and because it refuses what is passing and trivial, the merely clever and pretty, as certainly as the vulgar and insincere, and because it has gathered into itself the simplest and most unforgettable thoughts of the generations, it is the soil where all great art is rooted.” - W.B. Yeats By The Roadside, 1901

A long time reveller once asked me to explain the unlikely scenarios and odd anachronisms that frequently appear on the Revels stage. Here's my response.

CalRevels Board member Sandy Gess passed around this lovely video. I find it a touching reminder of the ephemeral quality of life and a call to live fully in every moment we are given.

Reveler Cliff Stevens contributes this video compilation of English folk rituals. Many of them will be familiar to those who attend various CalRevels events, but don't look for us to enact the “flaming barrels of pitch” ceremony any time soon.

This is a video of an a capella choral group,Perpetuum Jazzile, performing the Toto song “Africa” with a really inventive beginning. To get maximum amazement effect, click the start icon and then turn away from your screen for fifty seconds or so before you are overcome with curiosity about what you are hearing. The rains down in Africa.

There is apparently a worldwide movement where people achieve community by itemizing in choral form the petty irritations they share in daily life . This is a (longish) clip of a "complaint choir" performing in Helsinki, Finland. I find it oddly moving as well as quite funny. Probably my favorite line: “Why is the cord of the vacuum cleaner too short - just like Summer?

I don't know quite how to describe these sounds except to say that they use traditional Alpine Instruments and musical forms (Alphorn, bells, yodelling) and combine them in very exciting ways. If you have adventurous tastes in music, Listen to this.

This is a very touching article written by Revels chorister and Solstice singer Lynn Ungar. In it she describes the role that Revels participation plays in her family life.Read it here.

In 2003, Artistic Associate and clown extraordinaire Geoff Hoyle created the character of Will Kemp for our Elizabethan Christmas show. Here some observations on the working process.