Mid-Winter's Play

That's yours truly as Old Dame Jane, my wife as the Horse Doctor, daughter as Billy Pud, second daughter as Bold Slasher, making our salutes after our mummers play has ended at a recent holiday party. We sneaked down to the basement mostly unnoticed, donned costumes, then exited the side door to ring our own doorbell. We knew it was working when our dog, Romeo, didn't recognize us and set to barking at us (that's him in lower right).

Wikipedia says these death and resurrection folk plays, dating from medieval Europe are not to be confused with earlier mystery plays, but there seems to be some mystery in them.

What we know about this has come from maybe 25 years of participation, mostly as the visited, but also as players, with the Lowry Hill Players and the Ritual Drama Team, led by Rudd Rayfield. As in Europe a long time ago, mummers in strange costume traipse the streets during the Christmas holiday season, looking for good parties to crash. They start singing when the owner answers their knock on the door, and, in sung verse, they ask to be let in to perform their short play. Afterward, to song and dance, the players pass their purse for replenishment and gladly accept any offers to join the holiday party and table. It is a way to turn social norms up-side-down at least for one evening a year.

As a player, it is a nervy thing to knock on a stranger's door and ask to be admitted, especially in times of fear-mongering. Some homeowners blanch, scowl and shut their doors. Others are caught in the wonder, and slowly trust and come to joy and revelry with the strangers in their midst. Sometimes, guests at the party have the most difficulty, as they see their social status suddenly change right in the moment and they are suddenly made peers with a strange rabble that has been admitted by their host.

After the party one year, a friend who attended and who saw the mummers for the first time, confided in me that he was ready to grab them and haul them back outside. I know my first impulse can be to scream, run or want to fight when I encounter something strange and wild.

Here there is the thrill that comes after having taken such risks, both as players and as the admitting host, and having engaged the play-making that frames both life and that essential part of life – death – and then we recognize ourselves as still being alive and in the presence of good friends, and the smells and tastes of good food and drink. Ahhh!

Permission

The woman in the mink coat slumped down in her wheelchair in front of me is 101 years old. “Louise” has come with other elders from area nursing homes this December afternoon to watch the dress rehearsal of Kairos Dance Theatre’s recent show at Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis, Take Me Back to Hip Harlem. She is someone I’ve come to know through participating in my wife Maria and Kairos’ Dancing Heart™ program for elders.

When I first met Louise in a Dancing Heart session, I heard that she is a former violinist who had played in the orchestra that preceded and became the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. She seemed slight, birdlike and old. At the end of our session, I went to her and asked if she wanted to hold my violin. She said, “No.” I asked again, and she again demurred. Then I handed it to her. With a look of horror, she accepted it, held it for as long as she thought she had to, then quickly gave it back to me, as if I had just done something terribly clumsy and stupid.

I became embarrassed, suddenly seeing my – until then – unconscious condescension and patronizing attitude toward her.

In subsequent sessions, I took more time to approach her, ask permission and wait until permission was granted. I came to experience her as very sensitive, precise, nuanced and heartfelt. She told me how she loved music and played it all her life. She could only listen now, she said, and her son sometimes brought her violin to her so she could hold it and smell it. She liked my playing in the group. I told her how I had come back to music about six years ago, loved playing the folk music, and was just feeling my way back into the music world. At the end of the sessions, I asked again if she wanted to hold my violin. She would say yes and I would hand it to her. She held it to herself expertly, cradling it, then drew it to her nose, and inhaled slowly and deeply the wood, varnish and rosin smells. Then, she would kiss my violin, hand it back to me and say, “Keep playing…”

Now, at the rehearsal, she is right at the edge of the apron of the stage in this intimate theater, twenty feet away from these powerful jazz cats – Peter Schimke, Kevin Washington, Douglas White and Fred Steele to be joined by Irv Williams. The musicians are feeling their way into working with each other, getting their groove on, and laying out elegant and impassioned tunes and songs for the inter-generational dancers, ages 4-100, who also are right here – in solos, duets and ensemble work of humor, sorrow, dignity and moments of redemption.

During a pause in the rehearsal, I had gone down and greeted Louise, kneeling down beside her. Once she recognized me, she asked if I had my violin with me. No, I said. I wasn’t in the show. “You should have it,” she replied.

Now, at the end of the rehearsal, in the ring-out of the richness of the show and after the applause, with the musicians packing up and the dancers getting their parting instructions, I kneel down again in front of her, extending my hand and thanking her for coming. She holds my hand and takes that tone with me that she sometimes has. Her eyes are molten, coal black and fierce, she holds her jaw and mouth in resolve, and from her is coming this fire, framed by elegantly teased red hair and the mink of her coat over her smart understated dress. No need to thank her, she is telling me. “This is me…I love this!” she says.

It’s as if I’ve put myself between the lover and what she loves, and I see her as a young woman in love with music, and imagine how a young man, seeing her like this, would fall for her. Flaring her lip and drawing out the word “love,” she says, again, as if I need to be tutored, “I love this…”

© 2010 Cristopher Anderson

All Rights Reserved