DISS 2015: Elizabethan Dramatic Jigs

Lucie Skeaping and Jon Banks: violin, rebec, cittern, mandora, guitar
Students on the Elizabethan Jigs Course

5.15pm
£8 / Under 16s £4

Lucie Skeaping – singer, multi-instrumentalist, writer and presenter of Radio 3’s The Early Music Sho – explores the rumbustious, witty world of the dramatic jig, with students from the Dramatic Jigs course.

A popular crowd-pleaser in the late 16th and mid-17th century, the dramatic jig was a short, comic, bawdy musical-drama which included elements of dance, slapstick and disguise. With a cast of ageing cuckolds and young head-strong wives, knavish clowns, roaring soldiers and country bumpkins, jigs often followed as afterpieces at London’s playhouses, and were performed at fairs, in villages and in private houses. Troublesome to the authorities, they drew the crowds by offering a lively antidote to more sober theatrical fare.

Lucie Skeaping was a founder member of the early music group City Waites and the pioneering klezmer band The Burning Bush. She and the students are joined by Jon Banks, a regular performer and musical director at the Globe Theatre, and as well as a collaborator with Maddy Prior, the Dufay Collective and the Palestinian group Al-Ashekeen.

For more information visit http://www.dartington.org/whats-on/event/?id=83403