The Antrobus Soulcakers: A Consideration of Site, Mobility and Time as Components of Traditional Performance

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Notes

 1. Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), p. 2.

 2. <http://www.mastermummers.org/> [accessed 29 May 2011] and <http://www.folkplay.info/> [accessed 29 May 2011] provide an introduction to the scope and detail of mumming.

 3. American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Houghton Mifflin, 2000, updated 2009) <http://www.answers.com/library/Dictionary-letter-1P-first-1451> [accessed 1 February 2012].

 4. The notion of survivals in culture, exemplified by the work of James Frazer, most notably The Golden Bough (London: Macmillan, 1901) held considerable sway within folklore studies until the 1960s. These ideas continued to permeate considerations of mumming such as Christopher Cawte, Alex Helm and Norman Peacock, English Ritual Drama a Geographical Index (London: The Folk-Lore Society, 1967) and Alan Brody, The English Mummers and Their Plays: Traces of Ancient Mystery (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1969). These works stand in contrast to the performance orientation of Christmas Mumming in Newfoundland: Essays in Anthropology, Folklore and History, ed. by Herbert Halpert and George Storey (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969) and the ethnographic work of Henry Glassie, All Silver and No Brass: An Irish Christmas Mumming (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1976).

 5. Petr Bogatyrev, ‘Semiotics in the Folk Theatre’, Semiotics of Art, ed. by Ladislaw Matejka and Irwin R. Titunik (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), pp.33–51 (p. 47).

 6. Anthony Green and Susan Pattison, Soulcaking at Antrobus (Leeds: Leeds University Television Service and the Institute of Dialect and Folk Life Studies, The University of Leeds, 1975) p. 15. This pamphlet accompanies the film Soulcaking at Antrobus, Brotherton Library Special Collections, LAVC/FIL/F005 University of Leeds, 1975.

11. Ian McCormack, interview with the author, 18 March 2009.

 7. Anna Birch, ‘Repetition and Performativity: Multi Layered Fresco as Living Monument’ (unpublished paper delivered at University of Glasgow, 2 April 2011).

 8. Richard Dorson originally coined the word ‘fakelore’ in a debate with author James Stevens, later defining it as ‘a synthetic product claiming to be authentic oral tradition but actually tailored for mass edification’, Folklore and Fakelore: Essays Toward a Discipline of Folk Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 5.

 9. Theresa Buckland, ‘Dance, History, and Ethnography: Frameworks, Sources, and Identities of Past and Present’, in Dancing from Past to Present: Nation, Culture, Identities, ed. by Theresa Buckland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), pp. 3–24 (p.15).

10. Carlson, The Haunted Stage, p. 1.

12. Claire Colebrook, Understanding Deleuze (London: Allen & Unwin, 2002), p. 178.

13. Alain Badiou, On Beckett, trans. by Nina Power and Alberto Toscano (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2003), p. 77.

14. Ibid., p. 77.

15. Robert Chambers, The Book of Days: A Miscellany of Popular Antiquities in Connection with the Calendar (London: W & R Chambers, 1869), p. 519.

16. For a detailed description and discussion of the Antrobus play see Anthony Green, ‘Popular Drama and the Mummers’ Play’, in Performance and Politics in Popular Drama, ed. by David Bradby, Louis James and Bernard Sharratt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 139–66; Green and Pattison, Soulcaking at Antrobus; Peter Harrop, ‘The Performance of English Folk Plays: A Study in Dramatic Form and Social Function’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Leeds, 1980); Susan Pattison, ‘The Antrobus Soulcaking Play: An Alternative Approach to the Mummers’ Play’, Folk Life: A Journal of Ethnological Studies, 15 (1977), 5–11; The Antrobus Soulcakers, printed by Garland Films for the Antrobus Soulcakers, 2009.

17. A horse's head is buried to allow the flesh to decay naturally over a number of years and then the skull is cleaned, dried and painted. This ensures the bones remain hard and long lasting. The present head has lasted twenty-two years.

19. Ian McCormack, interview with the author, 31 October 1979.

18. The author undertook fieldwork into five mumming traditions in Antrobus, Cheshire; Bampton, Oxfordshire; Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire; Ripon, Yorkshire; and Uttoxeter, Staffordshire between 1977 and 1980. The work and findings formed the basis of Harrop, ‘The Performance of English Folk Plays’.

20. Chris Eyres, interview with the author, 2 November 1979.

21. Green and Pattison, Soulcaking at Antrobus, pp. iv–x.

23. Eyres and McCormack, interview with the author, 18 March 2009.

22. McCormack, interview with the author, 18 March 2009.

24. Ibid.

28. McCormack, 2009.

25. Ibid.

26. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 17.

27. McCormack, 2009.

29. Eyres, 2009.

31. Ibid.

30. Ibid.

32. Eyres and McCormack, 2009.

33. For a detailed discussion of documentary evidence see Harrop, ‘The Performance of English Folk Plays’, pp. 50–72.

34. Carlson, The Haunted Stage, p. 2.

35. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, p.16.

36. Buckland, ‘Dance, History, and Ethnography’, p. 20.

37. Michael Brocken, The British Folk Revival: 1944–2002 (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2003), p. 1.

38. John Emigh, Masked Performance: The Play of Self and Other in Ritual and Theatre (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), p. xix.

39. McCormack, 2009.