Saturday, October 4th at noon and 1pm -- don't miss our repeat performances of plays from the Toronto York Cycle 2025!
Our medieval acting troupe of Illinois students, faculty, staff, and alumni participated in an epic production of the Corpus Christi Cycle at the University of Toronto on June 7th. Performing annually in the English city of York from the 13th to the 16th centuries, local guilds staged Christian history from Creation to the Last Judgment over the course of one long summer day, beginning at dawn and ending at midnight. In Toronto, we joined 17 other groups from all over North America to stage all 50 Middle English plays, performed on wagons pulled through the campus and staged at three different sites. Our troupe was entrusted with two of the most elaborate, *The Entry into Jerusalem* and *The Road to Calvary*. Both of these processional pageants fully integrated dramatic action with audience involvement and emphasized the immediacy of medieval theater as an always-contemporary performance practice. Although not clustered together in the production, the two plays are mirror images and provided opportunities for linking the festive entry of Jesus to its inverse, the journey toward crucifixion. An imaginative reconstruction of *Calvary*'s missing manuscript folio was devised by the cast in rehearsal, featuring the 15th-century "Coventry Carol" as well as a new hymn, "Open My Eyes," written by Miriam Endersby (b. 1999), with music composed by Kristina Arakelyan (b. 1994), commissioned to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2022. MEET THE CAST & CREATIVE TEAM