April
26, 2002
May
Pageant to Celebrate Spring
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Photo:
Ian Kaiser
Girls
Inc. girls rehearse for MHC's May Pageant.
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With the blooming
of the daffodils, the emergence of green leaves on the trees,
and the return of songbirds from their winter's migration comes
the rebirth of a tradition at Mount Holyoke: the May Pageant.
This year's pageant, the first in more than three decades, will
honor tradition with a dance by costumed revelers around a Maypole
to celebrate the reawakening of the earth. It's tradition, too,
that places the May Pageant in April, as the 26th day of this
month is the nearest full moon to May 1. But there will be some
new twists, linking the ritual to the past, present, and future,
when the festivities begin Friday, April 26, at 3:30 pm.
In the past, the dance
around the Maypole was led by the May queen, elected by her fellow
students to the largely ceremonial post, said Julia Thompson,
visiting professor of sociology and anthropology, who helped revitalize
the event. This year, "we decided that everybody gets to
be the May queen," Thompson said. "We should all participate
in this as members of the community." Those with no prior
experience need not worry, she said—a number of experienced
Maypole dancers will be on hand to teach everyone the steps.
It is expected that
among the dancers will be a number of alumnae who took part in
the ritual before its decline in the mid-1960s. Thompson said
more than one hundred alumnae, identified from photographs in
the College archives, have been invited back to campus to participate.
The twenty-foot Maypole, complete with enough ribbons for up to
one hundred dancers, will be provided by MHC art professor Joseph
Smith and his students. In a break with the past, the Maypole
will be placed not on Pageant Green, but on Skinner Green, a more
central and visible location.
Taking a central role
in the celebration will be Terre Parker '02 and student dancers
from Girls Incorporated, an after-school education and recreation
organization for girls in Holyoke. Since February, Parker has
been meeting every week with eleven six- to ten-year-olds from
the organization, creating an improvisational dance performance
she calls "Dance for Spring." The dance is her senior
thesis, which is titled "A Country Dance Ritual for the Earth."
"The May Pageant
is a perfect time to do this," Parker said. "May is
all about growth and new life, and these girls symbolize that."
The girls will wear flowing, pastel-colored garments that Parker
and her mother, Grace, sewed. Parker took her lead from the students'
ideas, explaining that "the reason the dance is the way it
is is because of them." The dance "means peace to me,"
said ten-year-old Angelica Ramirez, one of the dancers. "When
I do the dance I think about fun, and I think about love because
you're waking up the earth, and you love the earth."
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