TUESDAY 8 April in AlOl, 12:00 Noon: Film - The Old and the New
Refreshments at Intermission served
by Svetlana Wilminck and the Russian
Department.

� �pring fflaping
ffestibal

One of Sergei Eisenstein's last films, this is a lyrical v1s1on of
Russian peasant Maying celebrations combined with the expropriation
of their landlords. It depicts fertility rituals and a tractor ballet.
WEDNESDAY 9 April

at

12:15 in the Cafetheatre - A live performance of Renaissance
Madrigals and Partsongs by Cap College
Madrigal Choir.
12:15 in the Music Building - A performance of Songs, Dances
and Narrative from Robyn and Marion, A
13th Century musical comedy of peasant
origin about the King and Queen of the
May, performed with authentic costumes
and instruments by the Cap College Collegium
Musicum/

rapilano
to I leg r

THURSDAY 10 April: 12:00 Noon in the Cafetheatre - A repeat showing of The Old and the New.
12:30 P.M. in the Music Building- Repeat performance of Robyn and Marion.
2:00 P.M.

SPECIAL EVENT.•.. in the Courtyard
Bringing in the May
Maypole Dances
Music of Troubadours and Minstrels
Festive Food and Drink (including Wine Punch)

The Maypole

Come as you are or wear costumes with the accent on yellow and green.
Bring children, musical instruments, decorations, flowers.

CAPILANO COLLEGE
SPRING MAYING FESTIVAL
"The May Game" from Shakespeare's Festive Comedy by C.L.Barber
During the Middle Ages and Renaissance a great variety of sports and pastimes were
popular with all classes...There was a special group of entertainers representing
the talent of the community. Some of these prepared a group dance like the
morris, or a mummers' play, or perhaps even a dramatic performance of some sort
drawn from a more sophisticated source. Much of the entertainment, however,
seems to have been of a simpler type, consisting of comic speeches or of special
dances and songs by one or two characters. At least one disard in the role of
fool or daemon commonly took a conspicuous part in the procedure, at times as
leader.
When the parish went abroad 11to gather for Robin Hood" they did not need to put
into words what they were gathering, since they had it in their hands in hawthorn
branches: one name for hawthorn is 11may.11 The bringing home of May acted out an
experience of the relationship between vitality in people and nature ..... Here is
Spenser's 16th century account in the Shepherd's Calendar:
Palinode� Is not thilke the mery moneth of May,
When loue lads masken in fresh aray?
How falles it then, we no merrier bene,
Ylike as others, girt in gawdy greene?
Our bloncket liueryes bene all to sadde,
For thi1ke same season, whe1 a11 is ye ladd
With pleasaunce: the grownd with grasse, the Woods
With greene leaues, the bushes with bloosming Buds.
Youghthes folke now flocken in euery where,
To gather may buskets and smelling brere:
_And home they hasten the pastes to dight,
And all the Kirke pillours eare day light,
With Hawthorne buds, and swete Eglantine,
And girlonds of roses and Sopps in wine....
Sicker this morrowe, ne lenger agoe,
I sawe a shale of shepeheardes outgoe,
With singing, and shouting, and lolly chere:
Before them yode a lusty Tabrere,
That to the many a Horne pype playd,
Whereto they dauncen eche one with his mayd.
To see those folkes make such iouysaunce,
Made my heart after the pype to daunce.
Tho to the greene Wood they speeden hem all,
To fetchen home May with their musical!:
And home they bringen in a royal! throne,
Crowned as king: and his Queene attone
Was Lady Flora, on whom did attend
A fayre flocke of Faeries, and a fresh bend
0 louely Nymphs. (0 that I were there,
To helpen the Ladyes their Maybush beare
Th.e feeling for the spring stemming from actual holiday celebration appears in
the earliest surviving English love poems:
Lenten is come with love to toune
With blosmen and with bridd{s roune,
That all this blissebryngeth...
In the manner of 1 1Sumer is icumen in 11 , this fourteenth-century lyric goes on to
describe how all living things are stirring together. The leaves "waxen al with
wille,11 wild creatures make merry,
Wormes woweth under cloude,
Wymmen waxeth wounder proud.
The worms below and the women above are connected by the holiday institution.
And here is the account of the Puritain, Phillip Stubbes:
Against May, Whitsunday, or other time,all the young men and maids,
old men and wives, run gadding over night to the woods, groves, hills
and mountains, where they spend all the night in pleasant pastimes...
But the chiefest jewel they bring from thence is their Maypole, which they bring
home with great veneration, as thus: They ahve twenty or forty yoke of oxen,every
oxe having a sweet nose-gay of flowers placed on the tip of his horns, and these
oxen draw home this Maypole (this stinking idol, rather) which is covered all over
with flowers and herbs, bound round about with strings, from the top to the bottom,
and sometime painted with variable colours, with two or three hundred men, women
and children following it with great devotion. And thus being reared up with
handkerchiefs and flags hovering on the top, they strew the ground round about,
it, set up summer halls, bowers and arbors hard by it. And then fall they to
dance about it, like as the heathen people did at the dedication of the Idols,
whereof this is a perfect pattern, or rather the thing itself.