Sunday, June 1st: Two Plays from the York Cycle on the Quad

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Our medieval acting troupe of Illinois students, faculty, staff, and alumni will be participate in an epic production of the Corpus Christi Cycle at the University of Toronto on June 7th. Performed annually in the English city of York from the 13th to the 16th centuries -- staging Christian history from Creation to the Last Judgment over the course of one long summer day, beginning at dawn and ending at midnight.

Join us on Sunday, June 1st as we prepare for this historic experience by presenting full dress rehearsals of both plays at 3:00 and 5:00 pm on the walkway between the English Building and Henry Administration Building. Bring a lawn chair! 

Medieval theater was street theater, open-air theater without walls -- requiring performers to corral their audiences, engage them directly, and to occupy space with bold physical and vocal choices.  Our troupe is entrusted with two of the most elaborate of these short Middle English plays, The Entry into Jerusalem (originally performed by the guild of skinners, who supplied the donkey's hide) and The Road to Calvary (assigned to the guild of sheep-shearers).  Each pageant must be tightly performed in less than 25 minutes at three different stations on the grounds of Victoria College at the University of Toronto. Both of these processional pageants will be played as street scenes, fully integrating the dramatic action with audience involvement and emphasizing the immediacy of medieval theater as an always-contemporary performance practice. Although not clustered together in the production, these two plays are mirror images of one another and provide opportunities for linking the festive entry of Jesus to its liturgical inverse, the journey toward crucifixion. Creative casting choices will keep their messages fresh while preserving the integrity of the original texts. A reconstruction of the action from Calvary's missing manuscript folio will be devised by the cast in rehearsal.