HOW WE PLAY MEDIEVAL PLAYs

We will move our bodies in these plays! We will break a sweat!

We will be the opposite of “talking heads” -- in our plays, every body will constantly be engaged in evocative, living shapes, in pose, gesture, action, or movement (no standing in “neutral”), in order to draw, hold, and direct spectator focus strategically at all times.

(That includes bodies that don’t or can’t move in normative ways: every body in every play will be engaged in physical actions that challenge, and reveal the beauty, evocativeness, and playfulness of that body.)

Our body shapes and movements need not be narratively justified -- bodies can and should also express in abstract, impressionistic, or impulsive ways! -- but they will stay engaged, even when in still tableau.

The York Plays include quite a few long speeches. We do not believe those speeches were delivered in plain stillness in the medieval period. In our productions, long speeches will be enlivened with physical action — whether it’s the speaker making heightened, expressionistic physical shapes to magnify their words, or fellow performers moving around the speaker, or some other creative way of continually embodying text in physical movement.

We consider costumes and props, here, to be extensions of our bodies — our physical shaping and movement will also bring life to the inanimate objects on us or in our hands. Props and costumes can also move!

We will practice and strengthen our voices to be loud and big in order to carry across open, unpredictable outdoor spaces. Where we can, we will rehearse outdoors.

We might opt to sing or chant some lines of dialogue, even if the source text doesn’t instruct us to. (If we have any strong singers or instrument-players in our casts, we may opt to feature their skills even where the text doesn’t call for them directly).  We'll yell if and when we have to -- better to be campy than inaudible.

Some scholars have suggested that only the “bad guys” in medieval plays get loud, unruffled, intense; we see in our texts no indication that the emotional energy of the “good guys” should be any less loud and intense. Jesus has some powerful silences, but he inhabits them with intense presence and physical clarity, not just meek quiet.

We will abandon demands for subtlety and nuance in speech, expression, and characterization: we aren't on TV or in an indoor, miked theatre.

Naturalism and realism are a bad fit as overall styles for medieval plays (though realistic moments may poke through in compelling ways). Present-day players are often habituated into those modes, though, so we’re encouraging our teams to explore still-performed, non-naturalistic performance styles (camp, mime, clown, kabuki, vaudeville, Bollywood, commedia, pro wrestling, street theatre, agit prop, via negativa, or any other!) in order to break televisual habits and discover a BIG AND LOUD style that feels true to each team.

Our rehearsals, devising, and performances will make use of the porous timeliness of medieval play texts — that is, how the genius of these plays is often in how they leave openings through which the “here and now” might be seen anew, rather than transporting us somewhere else.  We’ll let the “here and now” flow into the medieval/biblical past, and vice versa, when it feels right to do so.

But we will keep verbal ad libs quite light, finding them from presence and connection, not from nerves or hamming (which, we’ve found in rehearsal, can quickly spin out of control when performers jumped too repeatedly to bits that got audience reactions).  We'll follow the real moment, then let it go, based on genuine impulse in rehearsal and performance.

And we will stick to the right here and right now, inviting into the plays’ pores the lived and situated experiences of the real people who are doing the rehearsing and performing — not headlines involving people we don’t know personally (the constructed, delocalized "now" of global news, social media feeds, and news cycles are distinctly modern constructions of time). We’ll avoid gimmicks, pre-determined historical themes (i.e. “set in the ‘60s”), political or pop references, or any cheap shots that try to manufacture “relevance” and “significance.”  Each team will stick to its own here and now, today, this moment.   

Design-wise, each of our teams might draw inspiration from the biblical era, from the late medieval period, from the present day, or from a hybrid of those. Most of us will rely on historical material only for inspiration, touches, hints: we’re more concerned about creating a look, however abstract, that will be striking, vibrant, and coherent outdoors in natural light (or by LED lampposts and torchlight after dark).

We will create vibrant production designs that are visible from all angles. We will make sure that any passer-by will be able to recognize visually what we’re doing at every point of performance, even from too far away to hear our words (even though our words will be loud!). While we’re not playing for any imagined photographic/televisual media, if anyone should snap a photo at any point in our plays, from any angle, the powerful shapes, images, and spatial composition of that still shot would communicate sharp, vibrantly clear emotions — in other words, for all the energy of our movement, if someone were to yell “freeze” at any moment, the resulting image would still tell a compelling story.

We will discover and renew living, captivating shapes and movements with our bodies and performance materials that communicate their own spatial, visual, emotional, and kinetic messages. Our plays will generate a stream of moving, evocative visual tableaux that at times may be legible or iconographic, at times non-literal or abstract — direct, transparent correspondence between visual display and narrative content need not be (and should not be) the only logic at work.

We’ll continue past when the sun sets, but the Burwash Quad has powerful built-in lampposts, which we’ll supplement with portable LED torches — while encouraging teams working on later plays to avoid wild movement and to use bright (or reflective!) design elements where possible.

We also might use duplicates of a few shared hand props or costume pieces to create some visual throughlines across performances. See if you can spot them!

Medieval players were not aiming for the perfect repeatability that most present-day commercial theatre now takes for granted. Neither are we.

We expect every performance to be different at each performance station; in fact, we’ll strive to discover something new with every repetition. This is not to say we won’t be repeating most of our material from showing to showing — we’re working from scripts, after all — only that the repetitions will have responsive flexibility built in.  

We’ll prepare from the start for play spaces that are unsilent, unpredictable, and multidirectional. Each playing station will be situated among different architecture and audience arrangements, spurring performers to find new ways of relating to their surroundings each time.  Where we can, we’ll rehearse in varied locations (outdoors and in public ideally), to practice letting in real, inhabited playing spaces — as partners in the play.

Rather than shutting out unplanned stimuli, we'll practice heightening our sensitivity to, and embracing, unpredictables.  We’ll hone performers’ perceptual and reactive skills, so that they’ll be able to discover new, physically engaged, and safe reactions in the moment to any unpredictables that may (and will) arise at any given showing.

We’ll aim for staging choices in rehearsal that do not require exact repeatability or reliability. We’ll try rehearsing with dynamic staging/scoring rather than static blocking (for instance, cuing actors to try and accomplish tasks by making use of whatever happens to be available, rather than to hit precise marks).  We’ll encourage actors to position themselves in relation to the actual space they’re in; from there, we’ll primarily locate physical, reactive improvisation in the upper body, reserving movement across the space, or short athletic feats, for key moments (short bits that each group will have the chance to rehearse on Burwash Quad the evening before the show).

Our stage construction plan is still developing. Ontario weather (including wildfires) is unpredictable and may even drive us indoors; we'll be ready to jump into new environments as they appear, and to have no less fun as a result.

We will show up to each other’s performances, all of them, throughout the day, whenever we’re not ourselves performing. There will be hundreds of us directly involved with the various productions, as there were in the medieval period — we will be a large portion of the crowds within which the York plays were meant to unfold.

And when we do, we will practice and foster unmannerly styles of medieval spectatorship. When we're spectating, we'll move around at will, we’ll retain our exuberant openness to play, and we'll make whatever supportive noises and gestures we feel a genuine impulse to make, so long as it contributes energy and attention to the play currently running (i.e. not pulling focus): cheering on (or jeering?) our friends, booing the bad guys, oohing and aahing at impressive effects or feats, dancing or singing along with music we know, speaking our thoughts and reactions freely to fellow spectators. This is not a matter of providing canned sitcom-style responses; we will attend each other's plays as we might attend sporting events. If we see something onstage that reminds us of an experience we once shared with a fellow spectator, we will feel free to nudge that friend and say, at full voice, "JUST LIKE THAT TIME IN JERSEY, RIGHT?" As long as our attention stays substantially on the play being done, spectators' audibility and visibility will lend energy and authenticity to that performance.

That way, we’ll model medieval-style spectating for new audiences. Whether they’ve come to see a friend perform or have just wandered in off the street, our own behavior will show them it’s healthy, necessary, and historically accurate, for them to wander in and out, become distracted, talk over us, miss key moments, fail to react as planned, and generally get in the way. We need to encourage and help our audiences to break out of the docile theater-going habits they’re accustomed to and then join us as visible, present, active playing partners.

So we’ll build our rehearsals with those medieval-style spectators in mind, not counting on our audience to react as planned, but counting on them to surprise us.

If a moment in one of our plays calls for awed quiet, we need to figure out how to legitimately earn that awe – and figure out what to do in the moment if it doesn't go as we'd hoped, rather than blame the audience for not getting it. Moments of stillness and silence can be extremely powerful in these plays: we’ll develop staging that seeks to earn that power in the moment but that doesn’t require it to be achieved every time.

Rather than aiming for a pre-determined set of emotional marks to hit, we will practice ways to keep our own senses, enjoyments, real feelings, and real spiritualities alive and available for audiences to encounter as we perform. That includes any players involved in York 2025 who are believers, who currently and actively do hold the content of these plays sacred.

We will create a community where performers and spectators feel welcomed and warm enough to genuinely feel and openly enjoy, rather than simulating feeling or enjoyment: medieval performance is for the performers’ feeling and enjoyment as much as it is for the spectators’!  

Yes, an actor's mood that day may significantly affect a performance: all the more reason to do what we can to create real feelings of fellowship, fun, and welcome throughout.

We'll encourage each team to include tactile and experiential elements in their production designs — elements that are there for the performers themselves to enjoy and inhabit. And we won't mime anything -- every object involved in our plays will be an actual object (though it may not be an realistically representative one). Using dynamic staging, we’ll build spatial cues by inviting actors to interact with and refer to the architecture of the real space surrounding them (which will change from station to station).

Nothing in our plays will require more than 5 minutes of initial set-up, followed by a maximum of 60 seconds to reset in the transition between stations. (This isn't medieval, because each guild had its own wagon stage to decorate; it's just a necessity of our present performance venues).

If something goes wrong or awry with any technical aspects of our plays, or other plans, good! Now that awry-ness is part of the play.

Every actor will need to be extra hardcore about line memorization so that all of the unpredictables don’t throw us off — but if an unpredictable still causes one of us to lose track of our lines, our teammates will give a friendly midstream reminder. There’s no suspension of disbelief we have to worry about breaking here; our aim is to keep the energy, pace, and camaraderie alive.

We won't make use of large constructed setpieces (except where crosses, arks, ascensions, etc are truly necessary, which we'll pre-arrange with PLS). We might do some great things with lightweight sets (cloth backdrops, for instance, as long as we’ve field-tested them to make sure they don’t create wind-traps or transition delays). We will construct vibrant, rich, gorgeous stage pictures using primarily what the actors can wear and carry (costumes and hand props), rather than straining, substituting, or shoehorning in design elements that our present circumstances can’t afford or sustain.

Medieval players were not professional actors (for the most part, there was no such thing yet), but they were not amateurs either (“amateurism” is only imaginable in opposition to the invention of the professional actor in the first place). So do not expect elementary school Christmas pageant style here: we will access that primordial place from before “talent” and “love” were articulable separately. Unprecious and unpolished don’t mean sloppy or underrehearsed: they mean practicing hard and coming with full presence, artistry, commitment, stakes, and virtuosity.

We’ll continue to engage fellow groups in ongoing discussion, sharing, and socialization, not only to keep thinking through the contours of upcoming productions, but also to form real bonds of friendship and networks of mutual support with each other: that is about the most historically accurate thing we can do in re-creating medieval guild drama. Many of us are already actual friends with each other; we’re going to spread the friendship and emerge from this a genuinely fraternal group, if only because that is precisely how our medieval predecessors did it (because they were less inclined to forget the whole point of doing plays).

We’ll organize social gatherings in the months leading up to the production: sometimes Zoom parties, sometimes live gatherings where teams are close enough to do it — more on this soon.

We'll also push to represent a wide range of ages in our casting, as our medieval forbears certainly did (those plays produced by campus groups will not only involve undergrad actors!) -- and we'll encourage directors (especially those who are, in other lives, professors) to cast themselves, or otherwise involve their own bodies, and their own families where willing and available, in the mix.

Contrary to what modern TV/movie interpretations keep trying to convince us was true (click here for some examples!), medieval culture was not uniformly repressive or conforming or simplistic. In comparison to the present day, social and political power was wielded less effectively and tightly in the Middle Ages, which arguably afforded medieval people greater liberty than we have today. What was in law books or official policies did not correspond with what was enforced or experienced as closely as it now does. Medieval plays, too, afforded people liberties that may be harder to recognize now. In fact, staged faithfully, medieval plays can reveal just how constricting and repressive modern theater and its conventions can sometimes be.

The fourth wall, for instance, is a remnant of the Renaissance proscenium stage that separates players from audiences, dramatic world from everyday world, fiction from reality. The York plays don’t need to “break the fourth wall” because they have no walls in the first place. There's no pretending we don't see each other, no sitting still for two hours in a cramped seat, no angry shushing over a cough or a candy wrapper.

The separation of serious drama from comedy as distinct genres or registers with their own etiquettes is another modern restriction we don’t need. Camp is our watchword: complete and total energetic commitment to the game, including to the fact that it is a game, that spills naturally into raw humor or raw vulnerability.

The challenge here is big: even though we might recognize all the conventions, standards, habits, and assumptions of modern theater-making, we can’t just reject them by force of will or vague intention -- they are simply baked too deep into us. That’s why we are thinking through and talking through all these performance ideas ahead of time: to keep each other on our toes and prevent us from falling into the very habits that will deaden these plays.

Our plays are not historical relics in need of the intervention of a supposedly more free-thinking present day. They are time capsules ready to unleash a radically free and expressive mode of sacred play that can offer present-day playmakers and audience-goers, secular or religious, new ideas about freedom and expression. We will restore liberties, instead of taking them.

And that’s why our productions will be GOOD. Not a nostalgic exercise in what was once good, not an academic experiment that simulates enjoyment, not a curated museum display case, not an apologetic remix of a misunderstood past — but a really good and enjoyable and powerful playing through of play texts that are good and enjoyable and powerful, from dawn until past midnight, for ourselves, our audiences, and each other.