Making Hobby Horses

Making Hobby Horses: Prepping for the 2011 Mummers Festival

This week, I taught two train-the-trainer Hobby Horse workshops here in St. John's. One was for the Arts Work conference, for teachers from across the province. The second was for MacMorran Community Centre, who plan on running hobby horse workshops for interested people in the neighbourhood.

Both sessions went extremely well, with a lot of laughter, and some gorgeous hobby horses.  I'll be adding some more hobby horse instructions to the Memorial University ICH page soon, but in the meantime, here are a few shots of our new hobby horse builders in action.

    
 

http://www.museumwales.ac.uk/279

Mummers Plays (also known as mummering) are seasonal folk plays performed by troupes of actors known as mummers or guisers (or by local names such as rhymers, pace-eggers, soulers, tipteerers, galoshins, guysers, and so on), originally from the British Isles (see wrenboys), but later in other parts of the world. They are sometimes performed in the street but more usually as house-to-house visits and in public houses. Although the term mummers has been used since medieval times, no play scripts or performance details survive from that era, and the term may have been used loosely to describe performers of several different kinds. Mumming may have precedents in German and French carnival customs, with rare but close parallels also in late medieval England

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummers_play