Friday, January 31 & Saturday, February 1 from 3:00-6:00pm at 1101 S. Wright Street (lower level of Canterbury House, the Episcopal Church Foundation at UIUC): producer & director Carol Symes will hold auditions for UIUC's medieval acting troupe: members of our campus community (students, faculty, staff, and C-U residents) who will rehearse and perform two of the 48 pageants that make up the Corpus Christi Cycle 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.
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, and the strategic doubling of some parts, 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.
Those chosen to perform will rehearse over the course of the Spring semester and will receive an all-expenses-paid trip to Toronto from June 5-9, 2025. Rehearsals will be held weekly on Friday and/or Saturday afternoons throughout the semester. All performers will need a valid passport and must be eligible for travel to Canada.
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.
To audition, please dress comfortably and come prepared to move, vocalize, and read a short text in Middle English. It's recommended that you sign up for an audition slot in advance, using this link, but drop-ins are also welcome. NO PRIOR ACTING EXPERIENCE IS REQUIRED. We are looking for an energetic ensemble that can work together and support one another while developing a dynamic, immersive, and collaborative experience.
ABOUT THE PRODUCTION TEAM
Carol Symes (producer, director) is a theatre historian and practitioner, Professor of History and Theater, and Director of the Program in Medieval Studies. Trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School in the U.K., she is a member of Actors’ Equity Association in the U.S. and has published widely on medieval performance cultures and communication media, among other topics. To date, she has also produced three English verse translations of twelfth-century plays: the Latin comedy Babio the monumental Ludus de Antichristo, and the Old French and Latin Ordo representacionis Ade (“Play of Adam”), which received its world premiere at The Met Cloisters in 2016. It was restaged and filmed at Illinois in 2017, where a short documentary about the production's creative process was also filmed.
Rob Barrett (producer, dramaturg) is an Associate Professor of English, Medieval Studies, and Theater. Author of Against All England: Regional Identity and Cheshire Writing, 1195-1656 (2009), he has also written essays on the Chester Pentecost and Shepherds’ plays as well as on the teaching of medieval English drama in conjunction with Chinese zaju and Japanese nohgaku. He is currently working with Frank Napolitano (Radford University) on an edition of The Chester Whitsun Plays for the TEAMS Middle English Texts Series and with Jesse Njus (Virginia Commonwealth University) on a volume about global drama for the Cambridge Elements Global Middle Ages series. He has worked with Kimberly Fonzo (University of Texas at San Antonio) and Ann Hubert (St. Lawrence University) to bring bible plays to Toronto in 2010 (the Chester Shepherds) and 2015 (the N-Town Trial of Mary and Joseph and Nativity) respectively.
