The trumpet fanfare rings through the air; warm, clear, commanding. I am six years old, seated in the sprawling Spaulding Theater at Hopkins Center. Then, bells ring. Dancers move. Music swells. Suddenly, I’m standing; we’re all standing. Onstage, the performers are singing directly to us, and the song is asking something of us: ‘dance then, wherever you may be’. It’s not a command; it’s an invitation, and in that moment I understand something about what it means to be part of something larger than myself.
That was Christmas Revels in the early 1980s as performed by Revels North, one of nine Revels companies nationwide originated by Jack Langstaff. Growing up in Woodstock, Revels was as essential to our December as snow. Each year our family made the trek to Hanover, and the invitation to dance came again. I did not know then that Carol Langstaff had been the creative impetus behind Revels North, or that her father began the tradition decades earlier, weaving centuries of medieval carols and Morris dances into a participatory winter solstice celebration of light and life. I only knew that something rare was happening; strangers becoming community, the boundary between stage and audience dissolving into shared participation.
What makes Revels unusual, even radical, is its refusal to let audiences remain passive. This isn’t theater one watches; it is ritual one joins. Children and adults, trained performers and nervous first-timers all share the same stage. The professional musicians teach in real-time. The dancers pull you into the dance. When the cast sings the final song of the show, the Sussex Mummers Carol—”God bless your house, your children too, your cattle and your store”—they sing it directly to the audience, and the audience sings the blessing back to them. The reciprocity is not metaphorical.
When I moved back to the Upper Valley with my young family in 2018, attending Revels that December made it feel like coming home. My children learned the dances I’d learned, sang the carols I’d sung. We became part of that same invitation I had answered as a child. But December 2025, sadly, marks the end. After fifty years, Revels North, which produced not just the annual winter celebration, but Summer Revels, Pub Sings, and countless other gatherings, will close its doors permanently.
Jack Langstaff understood something essential: traditions come to life only when communities claim ownership of them. This is the paradox of successful participatory art: the more fully it succeeds, the less it belongs to its creators. Revels thrived not because Langstaff controlled it, but because he created space for communities to make it their own. The songs become ours, not theirs.
But formative institutions—the kind that, as David Brooks observes, engage not just our attention but our hands, hearts, and sense of identity—are fragile in ways that passive entertainment venues are not. After more than 40 years at Hopkins Center, Revels North faced years of venue instability—moves, COVID closures, theater renovations—and ticket sales declined substantially. Unlike a touring production or a streaming service, it became clear that one cannot simply take Revels somewhere else and expect the same community to follow. The people, the place, and the ritual had grown together. Separate them, and roots cannot find purchase in new soil. This is not simply an operational challenge; it reveals something essential about what we’ve been losing more broadly.
Revels North’s story is not unique. Across the country, institutions that once anchored communities—the organizations that required us to show up in person and participate with neighbors we might not choose but came to know—have been vanishing for decades. Robert Putnam documented this collapse of social capital in Bowling Alone, showing participation in community organizations declining for half a century. By 2023, the Surgeon General was calling loneliness a national epidemic. Over this identical time period, Revels North existed as a living counter-argument, insisting that gathering strangers into ritual wasn’t nostalgic—it was necessary.
I understand the impulse to replace what’s been lost with what’s most readily available. I can find algorithmically curated playlists of medieval carols, and watch videos of Morris dancing. But these substitutions cannot replicate what happens when you stand in a room full of strangers and sing together through the darkest night of the year. They offer connection without vulnerability, belonging without the difficult work of actually showing up, tradition without community ownership that makes it come alive. The carols are not just notes on a page or a recording you stream—they are a gift you give directly to someone else, and receive back from them in return.
But traditions persist not in buildings or organizations; they live in people. Susan Cooper understood this when she wrote “The Shortest Day,” a poem performed at every Revels show: “Through all the frosty ages you can hear them, echoing behind us—listen!” The institution may end, but the echoes remain in those of us who learned these songs, embodied these rituals, and understand what it means to gather when darkness is deepest.
The Lord of the Dance makes a promise and an invitation: “I’ll live in you if you live in me.” This is the covenant at the heart of all living traditions; they persist only through reciprocity. Revels North kept these songs and rituals alive for fifty years, and now they ask something of us in return. We may not be able to recreate what’s ending, but we can understand what made it matter: gathering when it’s easier to stay home, singing together when AI could curate our playlists, creating meaning with neighbors rather than consuming content alone. The form this takes will be different for each of us, shaped by what our communities need. But the invitation remains, the same as when I first heard it at six years old: Dance then, wherever you may be.
And so do we, here, now, this year and every year. Welcome Yule!
Tickets to Revels North’s final production are available at the Lebanon Opera House.
Dylan Mroszczyk-McDonald grew up in Woodstock and began attending Revels North performances in the 1980s. After moving away for college and career, he returned to the Upper Valley in 2018 and lives in Norwich.
