crosscurrents

Street theatre exploring traditional folk plays as improvisational performance. If you love the spoken word, swordplay, close harmonies, seasonal customs, and making a fool of yourself on stage, come to a PBM event, grab a bag, and you'll be a Paper Bag Mummer! We welcome both men and women, and invite kids to join with a parent or friend. British folk drama has a rich heritage beyond St. George and the Dragon. The vast majority of ritual folk plays collected are rarely performed, while modern audiences often find traditional texts obscure, if not boring (so that today's mummers write their own topical and political scripts). Yet ritual relies on dynamic repetition. The Paper Bag Mummers explore and present traditional texts in performance, combining ritual and improvisational drama. We make a virtue of necessity: we never rehearse, we only perform. Our texts include the early Robin Hood plays, wooing plays and plough texts from the Victorian Guisers and Plough Jacks, ritual animals like the Mari Llwyd, and North American mumming from Newfoundland to the West Coast. When you show up at a PBM event, you receive a paper bag containing your script, kit (costume), and props. You take it from there! In the tradition of house-visiting, we take our plays soul-caking for Halloween, pace-egging for Easter and Mayday, and first-footing for Hogmanay on First Night. A neighborhood walking tour allows five to seven performances in an evening, developing camaraderie, trust and often hilarious energy as actors gain confidence in the script and in each other. What begins as dramatic reading becomes group improv street theatre, reviving the ancient freedom of foolery. Carrying on (in) the Greater Cambridge/Somerville tradition of wedding mummers' plays, we fabricate foolery for weddings, fairs, festivals, and events (as we did recently for the wedding of Saint Jeremy and Fair Angela of Rhino Tower in June). Someday, we hope to form a ritual drama team (that actually rehearses) for morris tours, to polish the tight pacing, physical comedy, and improv timing of the traditional mummers' play into a repertoire of short showpieces (2-5 minutes each) that will bring ritual drama into the ring with ritual dance and song. You too can be a Paper Bag Mummer! Sign up and show up for our next event, and we guarantee you'll be left holding the bag.