The Artistic Staff
Revels founder John Langstaff studied voice
at the Curtis Institute of Music and at The Juilliard School. As a concert baritone,
he had a successful concert career in the U.S. and abroad. In addition to his
classical training and performances, he developed a deep fondness and appreciation
for traditional music through his friendship with Douglas Kennedy (director
of the English Folk Dance and Song Society), and with composer Ralph Vaughan
Williams.
As head of the Music Department at the Potomac School in Virginia for thirteen
years, and the Shady Hill School in Cambridge, MA for six years, he enriched
the lives of thousands of children. During that time he continued to record
in Europe on HMV with producer George Martin. For five years, he hosted the
popular Making Music program on BBC TV in London and was the moderator
of an NBC TV Saturday morning children’s program, Children Explore Books.Mr.
Langstaff is also an award-winning children’s author whose twenty-four books
include his version of the traditional children’s tale, Frog Went a-Courtin’,
winner of the Caldecott Medal, St. George and the Dragon, and most
recently I Have a Song to Sing-O, a Gilbert and Sullivan primer for children.
In 1956, Langstaff presented the first theatrical production of The Christmas
Revels in New York’s Town Hall. Ten years later, in 1966, Langstaff wrote
and hosted an NBC TV Christmas Eve special called A Christmas Masque.Both
productions had the beginning elements of what was to become The Christmas Revels,
which he began in Cambridge, MA in 1971.
Mr. Langstaff recently produced an award-winning series of educational singing
videos for teachers and children which are sold throughout the U.S. and Canada.
California Revels Artistic Director Elizabeth Lloyd
Mayer’s interest in Revels dates from childhood when she attended a performances
of Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde by Revels founder John Langstaff,
an experience that she still vividly recalls. An accomplished contralto with
a long-standing interest in traditional music, Mayer received her musical education
at the Mannes College of Music and Harvard University. In 1985 Mayer and Langstaff
decided to collaborate in bringing Revels to the San Francisco Bay Area. Less
than a year later, the partnership had resulted in the first series of Revels
performances on the West Coast. Mayer acted as producer and president of the
board of directors during that first year and took over from Langstaff as artistic
director in 1988. She also performs on stage as a member of the Revels chorus.
Outside her Revels responsibilities, Mayer is in private practice as a psychologist
and psychoanalyst. She holds appointments as associate professor in the psychology
department at UC Berkeley and in the UC San Francisco department of psychiatry.
She is currently a visiting scholar at Harvard University, where she is coteaching
a seminar on human connectedness with bestselling author and fellow Revels enthusiast,
Carol Gilligan. Mayer’s particular interest is the psychology of myth and the
healing role of ritual celebration in our culture.
David Parr (Director) has been acting and directing
with many theatres in the San Francisco Bay Area for the past twenty four years.
Trained at the University of Illinois (M.A. in Theatre) he has also worked as
a professional photographer, danced with the Minnesota Ballet Company, represented
Actors’ Equity Association for ten years, and owns a video production company.
He is resident director for the California Revels and former Artistic Director
of the Eureka Theatre Company. Recent productions include stagings of Caryl
Churchill’s Fen; Kismet; A Midsummer Night’s Dream for
the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival; and Cavalleria Rusticana, The
Emperor Norton, and Gounod’s Faust at West Bay Opera. He also directs
for the Theatre Arts Department of San Francisco City College, where he is a
fulltime instructor, and for City Summer Opera, which he founded. He won an
East Bay Media Festival award with his own script, Tarbrush, a contemporary
video adaptation of Moliere’s Tartuffe, and he has shot documentaries
in Tanzania and Nepal. David has now directed nine Revels in Oakland, as well
as the Revels in Tacoma and Noye’s Fludde, featuring Revels founder Jack
Langstaff.
Frederick Goff (Music Director) has degrees in
music theory and liturgy from the University of the Pacific and Pacific School
of Religion. He has performed on choir tours of the Soviet Union and Great Britain,
in the Los Angeles Master Chorale and in madrigal quartets. His teaching duties
have included public and private schools in Alameda, San Francisco, and Conta
Costa counties, San Francisco State University, San Francisco City College,
and Laney College. He is the resident music director for the California Revels
and music director of St. James Episcopal Church.
The Performers
Patrick Ball
(2001 Revels) was born and raised in California and gave little thought to such things
as where his ancestors came from. He went to school and supposed, when he thought
about it at all, that he would one day be a lawyer, like his father. But he
studied music from time to time and over the years developed a nodding acquaintance
with the piano and the guitar. At university he continued his flirtatious relationship
with music by playing the tin whistle, principally to annoy his roommate. But
at this time he found that he was irresistibly drawn to words, to the music
of words, to writers who made words sing, to writers from Ireland. Then, when
he began to study history to fulfill his academic requirements, he was not surprised
to find that it was the lyrical, turbulent history of Ireland that engaged him.
So much so, in fact, that when his father died all his thoughts of law school
died with him. He enrolled in graduate school and soon made his way to Ireland.
There he fell in love with the eloquence and fire of the Irish oral tradition.
There he fell in love with the Celtic harp. And there a few pieces of his life
fell into place. For he came to know that marvelous unity of Irish words, music
and history that would become his passion and, eventually, his livelihood.
Patrick Ball returned to California, was awarded a Master’s Degree in History
by Dominican College, and soon discovered that jobs in the field of Irish scholarship
were not to be had for love nor money. So after laboring in various unrewarding
lines of work he set off hitchhiking around the country and finally fetched
up at Penland School of Crafts in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina,
where he lived for two years and worked as a groundsman. There he encountered
a branch of that living oral tradition that had captivated him in Ireland. And
there for him, among the Appalachian storytellers, his love of the spoken word
was rekindled. He returned to Ireland and listened, then made his way back to
California, determined to put his scholarship, his love of words and his neglected
musicianship to some use, to carve out for himself an occupation from the things
that he loved. He sought out a maker of the rare wire-strung Celtic harp and
taught himself to play. He then gathered the stories he had heard and the history
he had learned and blended them with the music that had so often been their
companion.
Patrick Ball now tours extensively throughout the United States and Canada,
is considered one of the premier Celtic harpers and storytellers in the world
today, and has recorded six instrumental and two spoken word albums which have
sold over one-half million copies collectively and earned national awards in
both the music and spoken word categories. He has also written and currently
performs a solo theater piece, O’Carolan’s Farewell to Music, based on
the life, times, and music of the most beloved and celebrated musician in the
history of Ireland, 17th-18th century harper/composer Turlough O’Carolan. He
has been awarded grants for his work by the Zellerbach Family Fund and the California
Arts Council.
Shay Black
(2001 Revels) is part of Ireland’s undisputed “first family of song,” which
also includes brothers Michael and Martin and sisters Mary and Frances Black.
Best known for their strong singing voices, the Black Brothers draw on a large
and varied repertoire, a wide spectrum of Irish songs, from contemporary singer-songwriters
to traditional sea chanteys. Shay, a Bay Area resident since 1994, specializes
in the sea shantys as well as more contemporary songs of Northwest England and
Scotland. Shay is active in the Irish community in the East Bay area and runs
an Irish music and song session at the Starry Plough pub in Berkeley every Sunday
night. He is a member of Nauticus, a four piece musical group that performs
maritime music in and around the Bay Area. Shay works at Parental Stress Service,
a child abuse prevention agency in Oakland and has two daughters, Seosaimhin
and Anna. He can be heard on the Black Family albums What a Time (1995),
Time for Touching Home (1990), and The Black Family (1986).
Cheryl Ann Fulton (Numerous Christmas
Revels) is America’s premier
performer of historical harps, and one of the few harpists in the world to have
mastered the art of the triple harp as well as medieval and contemporary lever
harps. Her harp recital performed at the John F. Kennedy Center featured five
historical harps on one program, of which the Washington Post said, “Fulton
drew from all of them a serene and delicate sound... remarkable instruments
which Fulton played with total skill and reverent affection.”An internationally
recognized recording artist, she can be heard on over twenty-five albums on
Dorian, Koch International Classics, Nonesuch, Erato, and other labels. Her
first album, The Airs of Wales, Welsh airs performed on an original Welsh
triple harp, brought her international recognition and acclaim as a “genuine
virtuosa of her instrument.” Starting this year, she will be recording
a series of solo harp albums on the Dorian label.
She is a founding member of Ensemble Alcatraz, American Baroque, Medieval Strings,
Camerata Mediterranean and Quaternaria, and has performed and recorded with
many of today’s leading early music ensembles in the US and abroad including
The San Francisco Bay Revels, Sequentia, Project Ars Nova, The Boston Camerata,
Boston Baroque, Chanticleer and others. She is founder and director of the newly-formed
harp ensemble Angelorum, a medieval harp choir devoted to bringing the music
of the spheres down to earth.
Dr. Fulton holds a BA degree in pedal harp and MM and DM degrees in Early Music
Performance from Indiana University, where she studied with and assisted Thomas
Binkley in the founding and establishment of The Early Music Institute. She
is one of the leading experts in the field of medieval and baroque harp research,
and has written the article on Renaissance and Baroque harp for the next edition
of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
Cheryl Ann currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and has a busy performing,
recording and teaching career. She balances the demands of her music career
with riding her Arabian horse, Fazon, and enjoying life with her husband, vintner
Robert Boggs, and their dogs.
Geoff Hoyle (The Black Madonna Revels and The Elizabethan Revels among others)
Geoff Hoyle clowned
with Cirque du Soleil, The Pickle Family Circus, and Circus Flora. He performed
his solos "Feast of Fools" and "The Convict's Return" (commissioned by Berkeley
Repertory Theatre) in New York, San Francisco, Paris, London, and the former
Soviet Union, and at various regional theatres in the U.S. and England. He has
appeared in comic roles at the Berkeley Rep, ACT, Eureka Theatre, American
Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Arena Stage, and La Jolla Playhouse. He received
five NEA grants and an ArtsLink grant to visit circuses in Latvia and Russia. He
created the role of Zazu (Drama Desk nomination: Best Featured Actor in a
Musical) in the original Broadway cast of "The Lion King," and this year wrote
and performed "The First Hundred Years" for the Berkeley Rep and the Arizona
Theatre Company, performed the role of Vladimir in "Waiting for Godot" for
Stanford Summer Theatre, and appeared in "The Green Bird" with Theatre de La
Jeune Lune at Berkeley Rep.
Shira
Kammen (Numerous Christmas Revels) has spent over half her life performing and teaching music. She
received a degree in music from UC Berkeley and studied early strings with Margriet
Tindemans. A member of ensemble Alcatraz, Ensemble Project Ars Nova and Medieval
Strings, she has also worked with many other ensembles including Sequentia,
Hesperion XX, The Boston Camerata, the King’s Noyse, Khadra international folk
ballet, Magnificat Baroque Orchestra, and is a founder of Class V music, a group
created to perform on rafting trips. Shira has performed and taught music in
the United States, Europe, Canada and Marocco, as well as on the Colorado and
Rogue rivers. She has served on the faculties of the Longy School of Music in
Boston, the Amherst Early Music Institute, and the San Francisco Early Music
Society medieval workshop. Shira happily collaborated with singer/storyteller
John Fleagle for fifteen years, and performs now with several new groups: a
medieval ensemble, Fortune’s Wheel; a new music group, Ephemeros; an eclectic
ethnic band, Panacea; and Trouz Bras, a band devoted to the dance music of Celtic
Brittany. Her diverse interests include early, contemporary, classical and traditional
music styles. She has recorded for Nonesuch, New Albion, Erato, Gourd, and Harmonia
Mundi.
Wendell H. Brooks (Numerous Christmas Revels) (baritone soloist), has performed extensively throughout Europe and the United States. He studied voice at the Conservatorie der Stadt Wien and sociology at Uppsala University in Sweden. Locally, he has appeared as a much-beloved soloist with the Lamplighters, Oakland Opera, Berkeley Community Chorus and Orchestra, Contra Costa Chorale, San Francisco Swedish Choir, Sonos Handbell Ensemble, Oakland Symphony Chorus, and the California Revels. Among his musical projects, Mr. Brooks has recorded excerpts from Solomon Northrup’s slave narrative, Twelve Years a Slave. He has lectured extensively on the importance of studying slave documents as a way of understanding the essence of African American culture. Mr. Brooks also teaches vocal music and history at Berkeley High, and Ethnic Studies at California State University, Hayward.
Eileen M. Mize (2001 Revels) born and raised in Marin County, CA and currently living in San Francisco, is an accomplished Irish Dancer of over 20 years. Her accomplishments as a member of the Oakland-based McBride School of Irish Dancing include local and regional championship titles and two-times World Championship Qualifier. For Eileen, dance is an important part of sharing her Irish heritage with others and she enjoys teaching, performing and competition. Her dance credits include, lead dancer in Fiddler's Fancy's production of Shanachie: Challenge of the Sidhe as performed at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire from 1997-2000 and the Mammoth Lakes Celtic Festival 1998-1999; dance percussionist for Irish fiddler Ellery Klein's Salt & Pepper CD recording; dance soloist appearing with various Irish musicians including The Black Brothers and Avalon Rising; lecturer of Irish Dance at the University of Limerick, Ireland; step dance instructor at the University of Limerick, Ireland; dance workshop instructor for Lark in the Morning Music Celebration. U.C. Berkeley International House, and UC Davis P.E. Department; and Co-Founder/Publicist/Principle Dancer of Celtic Chaos Dance Troupe.