The Camphill Community in Dingle put on the Christmas Shepherd’s Play for the second time this year. This is a musical play with 18 songs and I was asked to do the music. I invited some session friends, Gordon and Rose Saunders to play with me. We are used to playing Irish music in the key of “G” or “D.” These songs are mostly in “F” “Bb” and one in “Eb” which was a bit challenging but with a little practice, we got the hang of it.
A.C.Harwood who translated the plays into English gives a background in his preface. The Shepherds’ Play is one of three plays that were found sometime around 1845 by Karl Julius Schroer on the little island of Oberufer on the Danube River near Pressburg in Austria. Schroer was one of Rudolf Steiner’s teachers. Sometime in the sixteenth or early seventeenth century a group of German people moved there from Lake Constance and brought with them the cycle of religious plays which they had received from their ancestors. The peasants of Oberufer had preserved the plays, both the text and the tradition of acting, unaltered down through the generations.
Through Steiner, the plays were brought to the Waldorf Schools and it has become a tradition that the teachers put on the plays at Christmas time as a gift to their students. Camphill follows the same tradition.
Camphill
Dingle
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