Celebrating the solstice

Tonight I went to the Christmas Revels in Lisner Auditorium on the George Washington University campus. The Revels this year is called "Journey to the Northlands" (the cultures rotate annually) and is a celebration of Yuletide in the Scandanavian countries with traditions and customs dating back to pre-Christian Druidism and sun worship surrounding the winter solstice. A surprising number of our Christmas customs, including Yule logs, egg nog, evergreens in the house, candles, and decorating trees, come from pagan traditions of Druidism and northwestern European mythology.

It was a long show, running from 7:30 until 10:15, and the mixture of song, dance, and theatrics helped the time fly, even in view of the extremely uncomfortable seating in Lisner Auditorium. I was also kind of annoyed by their management policy to seat latecomers, with some people coming in as much as forty minutes after curtain time, and then they had the ushers show the truants to their actual seats, which, if in the middle of a section, necessitated whole lines of people standing up to allow passage through the extremely narrow rows, all the while obscuring the view and other distracting the people behind. The auditorium also seems to be lacking in adequate restroom facilities: restrooms were in the basement under the lobby, and the mens' room had only three toilet stalls and three urinals, and I would predict the women's room was of similar size, given the locations, which is just not enough to handle a crowd of 1500.

It was interesting listening to some of the creation stories from Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland and hearing others of the many traditional mythological tales from the area, many of which were told with heroic sized puppets. While there was a little bit of overt "Christmas content" in the show, most of it was more folk-traditional, so we saw not only mythology but a lot of the solstice traditions. They imported some excellent acrobatic dancers and several traditional folk musicians from Europe to round out the cast of over a hundred people. Several times they had cast members dancing in the aisles out in the house, and they were big on audience participation, asking them to waive their arms, clap their hands, or sing traditional songs.

It was a fun show. I wish my Finnish friend Henri had been here—he could have told me what was going on! If anyone is in D.C. this weekend, they are doing two shows tomorrow and one Sunday.