Doors 4:30 | Show 5:30
All ages are welcome.
Free parking is available in the lot across the street until full.
Midwinter Revels: Emerald Odyssey
Written and Directed by Bruce Akpan Hostetler
Music Director: Daniel Buchanan
Music Director Emeritus: Robert Lockwood
Children’s Director: Lynn Mendoza-Khan
It’s a stormy evening in Kinvarra when an out-of-town stranger walks into the middle of the Móirín’s pub and interrupts the community’s celebration of the Winter Solstice. Móirín decides that with enough Irish singing, dancing, story-telling, and perhaps a Mummers Play, they can make their new friend Irish by the time the sun rises on the shortest day. But the stranger has a story of her own to tell.
What is the Midwinter Revels?
The Midwinter Revels is steeped in traditions of song, dance, poetry and performance. Here are a few traditions you’ll see almost every year.
A Midwinter Revels performance usually includes a mummer’s play. This comic and usually anachronistic enactment of death and rebirth finds its roots in celebrations held throughout Europe to mark important stages in the agricultural year. In the Midwinter Revels, the mummer’s play is another demonstration of the Midwinter Revels central theme: the descent into darkness and the return of the light. In a mummer’s play a hero usually fights a villain (traditionally a dragon), is killed, and then resurrected by magic. A Revels mummers play will often include a sword dance.