December 5-13, 2015 GW Lisner Auditorium • Washington, DC Roberta Gasbarre, Artistic & Stage Director Elizabeth Anne Fulford, Music Director Colin K
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Washington Revels Presents December 5-13, 2015 GW Lisner Auditorium • Washington, DC Roberta Gasbarre, artistic & stage director Elizabeth Anne Fulford, music director Colin K. Bills, production manager The Potomac School congratulates the cast and crew of The Christmas Revels and wishes you a joyful holiday season! www.potomacschool.org presents WASHINGTON REVELS COMPANY Solstice Singers Yuletide Teens Holly & Ivy Children Royal Brass WITH GUEST ARTISTS Piffaro, the Renaissance Band Shane Odom, The King Gwen Grastorf, The Woodland Queen Mark Jaster, The King’s Fool Sabrina Mandell, The Queen’s Fool Roberta Gasbarre Artistic and Stage Director Elizabeth Anne Fulford Music Director Colin K. Bills Production Manager December 2015 About Washington Revels What is Washington Revels? A nonprofit cultural institution in the Greater Washington area for over 30 years, Washington Revels creates community celebrations and other events based on traditional music, dance, and drama, and from different times and cultures. Revels programs involve adults and children, professionals and nonprofessionals, and opportunities for audience participation. By engaging audiences as participants in traditional material, Revels seeks to provide a sense of the comfort and the joy that people can obtain from community celebrations that reflect universal themes. Our organization. We are one of ten independent Revels organizations in the U.S., each with its own board, office and artistic staff, and finances. An umbrella organization, Revels, Inc., in Watertown, Massachusetts, maintains artistic standards and provides or approves scripts and music for Christmas Revels productions. Our activities. The Christmas Revels is by far our biggest production, but we now have many other activities throughout the year, including informal celebrations, concerts, and other events. We have five performing ensembles, as well as a growing education program. Over the past year, Washington Revels presented 55 separate programs. Those 55 programs consisted of 125 discrete performances and workshops. What is Revels-really? At one level, Revels is a vehicle for events that are fun and that also provide a sense of community and shared tradition. At a deeper level, Revels is about the importance of community celebration for all people. This deeper level is most evident in our seasonal celebrations, and in particular our celebrations of the Winter Solstice, which address the circle of the seasons and the cycle of life. Winter is followed by spring; dark is followed by light; individuals die, but others are born. Throughout, in times of sorrow and times of joy, humankind finds support in coming together in music and song. Exploring these themes through the prisms of different cultures, Revels performances not only illustrate specific customs that address universal human hopes and fears, but create “real-time” celebrations in which cast, crew, and audience members experience our common humanity. The essential message, and we hope the experience, is that all of us—adults, children, people from all walks of life—are part of a community that stretches across national and cultural boundaries and down through the ages. 531 Dale Drive, Silver Spring, MD 20910 ◆ 301.587.3835 ◆ revelsdc.org For more information on Revels events and activities or to sign up for our monthly e-newsletter, visit our website. It is expressly forbidden to use photographic or sound equipment in the auditorium. Unauthorized persons found using such equipment in the theater will be asked to leave. Revels® and The Christmas Revels® are registered service marks of Revels, Inc. of Watertown, Massachusetts, and are used by permission. Artistic Director’s Note Our Christmas Revels in Washington are never the same. Some shows are wholly new, featuring a culture we have never celebrated. Others re-visit cultures we have previously explored, but the storyline and music are changed. This show differs in yet another way: it doesn’t center around any particular culture at all. Its theme is medieval; so it was in our very first Christmas Revels in 1983 and in several productions since. But the setting was always indoors—in the great halls of an English castle or a treasure room in 10th-century Andalusia, in Spain. This year finds us outdoors in nature because the focus of the show is the natural world itself, and humanity’s relationship to it. I’ve wanted for a long time to do a Revels which speaks to humanity’s relationship with nature. The elemental forces of earth and nature impact our lives every day, though our direct connections to them seem frailer and more distant in our modern world. For millennia, people lived in close contact with nature and experienced directly, on a daily basis, both its beneficence and its destructiveness. As civilization has become more complex, we have often forgot this primary connection to nature. And yet, echoes of the familial relationship between man and nature still rise in us during this season of shorter days and colder weather. This year’s Revels returns us to this relationship. We begin with a medieval King, bound to his court and his kingdom. As his castle and his village anticipate the Winter Solstice, he gathers them to a sheltered place abutting castle, forest, and woods. He calls both his courtiers and villagers to a celebration, a Revels, in this space. This year, he also extends an invitation to an unfamiliar court, that of a woodland queen, enigmatic and lovely. As she arrives, along with all manner of forest inhabitants, an uninvited guest follows close behind. Who is the rider, on a ghostly steed, bringing winds and snow in his wake? What can we learn from the turning of the year? With the help of two fools—foolish and yet wise in the classic manner of Revels fools—who show the way through the death of the old year and the beginning of the new, a King and his people rediscover their relationship to nature and the seasons. — Roberta Gasbarre Washington Revels thanks world-renowned fantasy illustrator Charles Vess for the painting he created for our 2015 Christmas Revels, which graces all of our promotional material. Just a few highlights from Charles’ storied career: his award-winning work has appeared in Marvel and DC comic books; he has provided illustrations for fantasy writers from around the world, including major collaborations with Neil Gaiman, Charles de Lint, Terry Windling and Ellen Datlow; he is currently working on a project with Ursula Le Guin. Washington Revels gratefully acknowledges the beautiful image Charles made on our behalf! 5 The Middle Ages, Music, and Magic “Th ere is music of Heaven in all things, and we have forgotten how to hear it until we sing.” — Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179) Despite an oft en brutal reality, the Middle Ages are oft en imagined in art and literature as a time of innocence, awe, and wonder. For this reason, perhaps, the medieval period is the setting for so many fantasies, with winged faeries, princesses in fl owing gowns, kings, and fools. Th e sublime beauty of the Renaissance is oft en confl ated with these medieval motifs in our popular imagination, creating a fantastical world of beauty, joy, hope, and wonder. As exemplifi ed in this show, much of the music from the Middle Ages and Renaissance reinforces these perceptions. But developments in these periods also laid the foundation for Western music. Because the Church dominated medieval life, most of the surviving musical repertoire from the period is sacred. Around 800 CE, the earliest form of musical notation was born in monasteries, used to record chant melodies to be sung during worship. During the early 12th century, visionary composers like the abbess Hildegard von Bingen recorded their liturgical music using an early form of musical notation called Hufnagelscrift (a precursor to standard plainchant notation). “Stella splendens in monte” and “O virgo splendens” both come from a text dating from the late 14th century—the Llibre Vermell de Montserrat (the “Red Book of Montserrat”)—a manuscript that would not have existed without those monumental precursors. Most of this music is monodic, consisting of a single melody line. While there are countless references to strong secular musical traditions throughout Europe since the beginning of recorded history, much of this repertoire has been lost because it was never written down. As the practice of musical notation developed and spread throughout Europe, however, secular musicians began to notate their music for posterity. Th e incredibly prolifi c troubadours of southern France were quite diligent in notating their art. “Fortz chausa es” is but one example of the many troubadour songs that have survived. Goliards, another class of itinerant secular musicians roaming Europe in the Middle Ages, seldom wrote down their music; however, collections such as the Carmina Burana give us a good idea of what their oft en profane Latin songs sounded like. Drinking songs like “Bache, bene venies” come from this important medieval manuscript. Th e instrumental music you will hear, while sometimes medieval in origin, actually comes from the Renaissance, when much of the earlier instrumental music was fi nally notated. Th e Renaissance period also saw huge developments in polyphonic vocal music, in which there are two or more simultaneous lines of independent melody. Th is style is illustrated beautifully in William Byrd’s jubilant motet “Haec Dies.” Byrd creates musical 6 conversations between the voices as a melodic theme is presented and then repeated throughout the six vocal parts, building excitement and pushing the idea of polyphony further forward. But historical signifi cance is not our sole or even principal criterion for selecting music for Christmas Revels productions. More important than any historical narrative is how this music connects us to the past, the present, and each other. Music speaks to our shared love of community and connection, of joy and revelry with friends new and old.