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 shape, 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.

And 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. We will rehearse outdoors where possible; when we can’t, we’ll try to recreate outdoor sounds in our rehearsal spaces.

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’ll try to find a way of featuring their skills, even if the text doesn’t call for them directly). And 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.

It’s not enough to complain that modern productions of medieval plays are anachronistically naturalistic or driven by realism: those modern modes are obviously a bad fit for medieval plays, but present-day players habituated into those modes need an alternative approach to replace what we’ve rejected! So we’re encouraging each of our groups, as part of its rehearsal process, to play around with a present-day non-naturalistic performance style of some kind (camp, mime, clown, kabuki, vaudeville, bollywood, commedia, pro wrestling, street theatre, agit prop, via negativa, whatever works best for each group!) in order to break televisual habits and discover a BIG AND LOUD style that feels true to us.

Our rehearsals, devising, and performances will make use of the porous timeliness of medieval play texts — that is, how the craft of these play texts is in shaping open spaces 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 only the RIGHT here and RIGHT now: not the constructed, delocalized "now" of global news, social media feeds, and news cycle headlines — all of which are distinctly modern constructions of time that would have baffled and distracted medieval players.

So: no gimmicks or cheap shots, no political or pop references that try to manufacture “relevance” and “significance”! No pre-determined historical thematics! (We’ll leave the “let’s keep this production interesting by setting it in the 1960s” approach to Shakespeare companies trying to justify yet another Midsummer). If new logics and stories drift into the pores of our plays, they will be our logics and stories, today, this moment; rather than creating a dominant thematic, they will appear (and then disappear) based on genuine impulse in rehearsal and performance. Our “here and now” never comes from headlines centred on people we don’t know personally; it will come from the lived and situated experiences of the real people who are doing the rehearsing and performing, in planned and ad libbed ways.

A good rule of thumb, though, is to keep verbal ad libs quite light, using them only from a place of presence and connection, not from nerves or flippant hamming (which, we’ve found in rehearsal, can quickly spin out of control — “why was your Noah dropping so many f-bombs?” — because nervous performers jumped too repeatedly to bits that got audience reactions). Follow real impulse, then let it go.

in terms of where and when our design elements set the imagined action, our teams might draw their inspiration from the biblical era, from the late medieval period, from the present day, or from a hybrid of those. We’ll avoid historical references outside of those three. 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 torchlight after dark), not in realistically depicting any historical period.

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 result would look powerful and gorgeous.

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.

Those of us involved in Clusters 29-34 should also start planning now for what we’ll do, in terms of visibility and safety, when the sun sets. Since the timing of the full day of performance will be wildly unpredictable, there’s no way of knowing for sure which showings will happen after nightfall. We’ll light those showings playfully with portable LED torches, and there will be some further lampposts built into the Burwash Quad, but lights will still be relatively uneven and dim for our final few hours, so staging of those plays should avoid wild movement and should use bright (or reflective!) design elements where possible.

We will also use duplicates of a few shared hand props or costume pieces to create some visual throughlines across performances. We’re currently figuring out what those shared objects will be — more soon!

Medieval players were not aiming for the perfect repeatability that present-day commercial theater now takes for granted. Neither are we. We expect every performance to be different, maybe very 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 set scripts, after all!), only that the repeatability will have flexibility built in so that we can more presently respond to the ever-changing actualities of outdoor mobile plays.

e’ll rehearse 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). Some possible examples:

• “After this line, go find somewhere comfortable to sit, anywhere in full view of where the audience has gathered. If there’s a platform available, you can dangle your legs off of it, if that feels right; you might also try finding a raised place to sit on the nearby architecture (but nothing that poses a safety risk). Follow the impulse of the moment to feel out what feels right at the time; if it end up being uncomfortable, move! Deliver your remaining lines from that position.”

• “When you call out to the Heavens, focus on a specific element of the currently visible architecture — something far away but that most of us can see — this will change every time. Make a choice that will activate the full visible space. Really connect with that focal point; see how different choices spark different reactions in you. Let’s try this out in a few different public rehearsal spaces to see how it feels.”

• “When you refer to the gathered masses, be sure to gesture to wherever the spectators actually happen to be thickest.”

• “In this camp combat scene, no one will make actual physical contact with you, so it’s all in your reaction. Discover a new, more grandiose way to react each time, without moving from your spot — discover how your reaction might shift your attacker’s delivery of her next line.”

Key to outdoor dynamic staging (and supportive of a medieval iconic style) is to locate physical, active improvisation primarily in the upper body, while usually keeping feet planted (walk, don’t run, and only walk when you truly have somewhere to go) — starting by positioning yourself in relation to the actual space you’re in. That said, there is sometimes good reason to run, jump, etc: we’ll set any acrobatics, athletic feats, and vigorous movement at ground level (and we encourage teams to test out any such stunts on the grounds the evening before the show).

Where we can, we’ll rehearse in varied locations (outdoors and in public ideally), to practice letting in real, inhabited playing spaces — as equal playing partners. We’ll prepare from the start for play spaces that are unsilent, unpredictable, and multidirectional. Rather than shutting out unplanned stimuli, we'll practice heightening our sensitivity to them and embracing unpredictables as a key element of play. And we’ll hone our improv skills to help make that happen.

Though we’ll all be working from set scripts, our teams should prepare, in rehearsal, in the way they might prepare for a touring improv comedy piece (one that will use multiple non-traditional spaces) or even a sporting event. Each play station will offer unpredictables that rehearsal cannot possibly foresee, so rehearsals should seek to heighten performers’ perceptual and reactive skills, so that they’ll be able to discover new, physically engaged and safe solutions in the moment to any problems that may (and will) arise.

Indeed, developing flexible staging and honing performer awareness of unpredictables is crucial to the health and safety of our performers. The usual safety practice of taping out the rehearsal room to resemble the playing space will, for our shows, likely create more danger — because they may lull actors into expecting that spatial relationships will be exactly the same at each station (and since spectators will move freely, and platforms are variable, they cannot be reliably so). The usual safety practice of holding fight calls is even more dangerous here: our outdoor staging will involve so many variables and distractions that performers who rely on repeatability for safety may get seriously hurt! We will, instead, make staging choices in rehearsal that do not require repeatability or reliability in the first place, especially where actors’ safety is concerned. Combat should not be realistic enough (there is no medieval precedent for such realism!) to put bodies in physical danger in the first place. Blocking should not be so rigid, nor characterization so real-feeling or transportative, that taking the wrong number of steps would send someone flying off the edge of a platform.

Speaking of which, we’re hoping to use reconstructed, medieval-style mobile wagon stages for York 2025, but aren’t currently sure whether we’ll be able to get them built (more news here soon). If we do, our medieval staging will make ample use of the platea — the flexible street-level area where audiences have gathered — as well as the stage; each playing station will be situated among very different local architecture and audience arrangements, spurring performers — who will not shut out the world around them — to find new ways of relating to their surroundings each time. 

So: wagons or not — or if pouring rain or wildfire smoke or the next catastrophe drives us into an unexpected performance venue, we will jump into that new environment fully ready, and have no less fun as a result. Item description

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: 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, 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.

And 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 “emoting” as actors, and rather than aiming for a pre-determined set of emotional marks to hit, we will practice ways to keep 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’!  

Our production designs will involve tactile and experiential elements — 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 90 seconds of set-up, which we’ll do during the transition between stations.

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 profit-driven, de-localized, over-polished model of the professional actor in the first place). So do not expect any elementary school Christmas pageant style here: we will access that primordial place from before “talent” and “love” were separated — 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 hadn’t yet forgotten the whole point of doing plays).

We’ll organize social gatherings in the months leading up to the production: sometimes Zoom parties, sometimes gatherings in Toronto — 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 significantly weaker and looser 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 are.

The fourth wall, for instance, is an artifact 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 -- habits of modern theater-going under the strong hand of commercialism.

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 need to think through and talk 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. Rather, 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, rather than just 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 a wheezing apology for a misunderstood past, not a present-day pastiche of cheap parody and pop memes — but a really good and enjoyable and powerful playing through of play texts that are good and enjoyable and powerful, from dawn till midnight, for ourselves, our audiences, and each other.