Midsummer
Midsummer, also known as St John's Day, is the period of time centred upon the summer solstice, and more specifically the celebrations that accompany the actual solstice or take place on a day between June 19 and June 25 and the preceding evening. The exact dates vary between different cultures. The Christian Church designated June 24 as the feast day of the early Christian martyr St John the Baptist, and the observance of St John's Day begins the evening before, known as St John's Eve.
Midsummer festivals are celebrated throughout Scotland, notably in the Scottish Borders where Peebles holds its Beltane Week. The Eve of St. John has special magical significance and was used by Sir Walter Scott as the title, and theme, for a pseudo-ballad poem. He invented a legend in which the lady of Smailholm Tower, near Kelso, keeps vigil by the midnight fires three nights in a row and is visited by her lover; but when her husband returns from battle, she learns he slew that lover on the first night, and she has been entertained by a very physical ghost.
Selected Dances
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Midsummer's Eve
Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" takes place on the magical eve before traditional Midsummer and portrays the events surrounding the marriage of Theseus, the Duke of Athens, to Hippolyta, former Queen of the Amazons, and intertwines the adventures of four young Athenian lovers and a group of six amateur actors who are controlled and manipulated by the fairy King Oberon and his Queen Titania, who inhabit the forest in which most of the play is set. A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of those special plays which contains another play within it, the unintentionally comic performance rendered by the traveling players called: "The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe."🧚 🎭
Midsummer Madness
Summer Solstice & Midnight Sun Day
Traditionally celebrated with bonfires and dancing, the summer solstice has long been associated with magical and unusual occurrences -a liminal time during which mortals may be able to glimpse and interact with the fairy or spirit world, but almost always at a price. Shakespeare associated Midsummer with witchcraft or fairies in at least three of his plays! A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, and The Tempest all contain references to magic on the night of the summer solstice! Take suitable precautions as despite their modern reputation, fairies traditionally are almost always are bent on mischief, or worse! Many different plants and flowers have been used as protection against fairy magic and mischief. Even oatmeal was said to be a fairy repellent, if you carried it in your pocket or sprinkled it on your clothes. 🥀 🌞 🧚 🧚♂️ 🧚♀️