Wise also recites two poems, Ilan Shamir’s “Advice from a Tree” (which includes the line “Drink plenty of water”) and Revels stage director Patrick Swanson’s “The Tree of Life,” and indeed the tree, with and without its Christian associations, is the centerpiece of this Christmas Revels, a metaphor for the organic life of humankind. In the half-light accorded the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance — which with its Fool and Hobby Horse and Boy Archer and umbrella-bearing Man-Woman seems spookier and more appropriate than ever in a Balkan context — the snow-covered branches hint at Susan Cooper’s Silver on the Tree. (Cooper wrote “The Shortest Day” for Revels in 1977, and that poem has been recited at every Christmas Revels since.) And the Tree of Life (a slinky Rowan Swanson) anchors Revels’ Balkan mummers’ play, where Perun the Thunder God (Woody Nussdorfer, in a silver outfit that would make Flash Gordon blush) dukes it out with Veles the Dragon (Debra Wise) and actually triumphs — in this version of St. George and the Dragon, it’s the dragon who dies and has to be revived so the cycle of seasons can continue. You could think of Revels as Boston’s Tree of Life: it’s put down deep roots, it drinks plenty of water, and it continues to grow.
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