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What is Revels?REVELS is all about creating community, about forging and reinforcing bonds that tie people together, counteracting the forces of ethnic and economic diversity that tend to pull us apart. Revels nurtures communality by staging performances and promoting events that recognize and celebrate seasonal changes, since everyone everywhere experiences the various seasons and the cycles of life. From ancient times—from the Druids at Stonehenge to the Incas of Machu Picchu—peoples have solemnly marked the solstices and equinoxes, have greeted spring’s new growth with delight and have dreaded winter’s loss of light. They have noted these changes with rituals and ceremonies passed down through the ages. Revels honors and preserves these traditions. Santa Barbara Revels is the newest of ten Revels companies nation-wide; the first began in Cambridge, Massachusetts almost 40 years ago. Revels is not an easily definable performing arts entity, so it has been a challenge for each new company to find its audience and become established in its community. However, the ensuing success of Revels in those nine cities stands as a testimony to its broad appeal and inspires our own efforts to articulate the Revels essence accurately.
The primary presentation of each Revels company is The Christmas Revels: in Celebration of the Winter Solstice, a fully staged, elaborately costumed, full-length theatrical production that changes scripts, themes, and traditions from year to year. Uniquely, these performances include multiple elements—music, dance, and drama, as well as story-telling and seasonal rituals—that combine with the special Revels hallmark of audience participation: getting people out of their seats to sing and dance. The National Endowment for the Arts called Revels a new form of musical theater. Charles Donelan of the Santa Barbara Independent described our production last year as “educational, traditional and simply fun.” Ultimately, we concur with Josef Woodard of the Santa Barbara News-Press, who said “[Revels] is best experienced as an ‘experience’, live and onstage and spilling into the audience.” By design, Revels casts are intergenerational, non-denominational and multi-ethnic; it is particularly important for us that—in a community like Santa Barbara—those who are onstage reflect and represent our community at large. Our cast of more than 60 performers combines select volunteers with seasoned professionals, and the two groups inform and energize each other, to create moving drama, music of the highest caliber, and an atmosphere of magic and mystery. Santa Barbara Revels is looking forward to our fourth season of The Christmas Revels, which we will present at the Lobero Theatre for the first time this year. We are proud of our growth and accomplishments during our brief existence. In addition to our December shows, we host a Pub Sing in March to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day and spring equinox (“15 bucks for a song book and a beer, and a terrific time”); we stage a May Day happening, complete with may pole dancing and pot luck breakfast; we create Revels Salons to introduce audience members to musical tradition-bearers and provide an opportunity to meet the Artistic Director from Revels, Inc. in Cambridge. We plan to expand on these events; our town’s interest in and need for such celebratory community activities are abundantly clear to us. We invite you to become a Revels volunteer, to help give this “worthy contender” (Woodard) a permanent place on the list of our town’s annual holiday traditions. We urge you to come to one of our performances this December, to enjoy the “family-suitable revelry” (Woodard) we present. We encourage you to get in touch, to ask questions, and to check out the web sites of our Revels sister companies. Whatever you choose to do, remember what we always love to say: JOIN US AND BE JOYOUS! — Susan Keller, Founder/Producer, Santa Barbara Revels © 2010 Santa Barbara Revels · 805-565-9357 |
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