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The Mock Wedding: Folk Drama on the Saskatchewan Prairie
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18394 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
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9 / 1990 |
3,925 Words |
| Author
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Michael Taft
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About the same size as Texas, the province of Saskatchewan is the heartland of Canada's grain-growing region. Almost all of its population of one million lives in the southern half of the province - flat or slightly rolling country squared off into large, family-run farms and dotted with hundreds of small communities. The farmers raise wheat, barley, alfalfa, rapeseed, and other grain and seed crops, while the ranchers feed their beef cattle on the rangelands.
The small towns - some containing fewer than fifty families - are strung along the rail lines, every ten miles or so, and are the business and social centers for the outlying farmers. Grain elevators - like beacons on the prairie - announce the presence of these towns to visitors before any other building is noticeable on the horizon. It is in these small towns that people from the countryside gather, whether to conduct business, attend church, watch the local hockey team, or celebrate an important social occasion.
Among these occasions is the twenty-fifth wedding anniversary of a respected and well-liked couple from the community. To honor them, someone from the area - probably a close friend of the couple - gives a speech that manages to be warmhearted and sentimental while at the same time taunting and flippantly humorous. The couple, sitting among their friends, neighbors, and relatives, graciously accept both the compliments and barbs tossed out by the speaker. They know that being the center of attention at a community celebration is a responsibility as well as an honor, and they act according to the unwritten rules of sociability that everyone in their community understands.
When the speaker finishes, the local poet may recite a celebratory poem for the occasion or singers may croon the couple's favorite songs. After the appropriate tributes and gifts, the gathered throng tucks into a dinner prepared by women from the community. Then the chairs and tables are moved to the side of the hall, and a local band signals to start of the dance: Polkas, waltzes, and free-form dances alternate as the band runs through its eclectic repertoire of old-time tunes, country and western songs, and rock music.
Interrupting the festivities, a strange entourage then enters the hall. People move aside with shouts of surprise and derision, as laughter follows in the wake of this bizarre troupe of outrageously dressed actors. Expected and unexpected at the same time, this disruption is both a parody of the celebration and an essential part of it - a mock wedding is about to take place.
The actors present themselves
The mock wedding is a form of folk drama, and as such, it is an event that has generally escaped the attention of folklorists and others interested in traditional expressiveness and creativity in North America. Like the Christmas mumming play - a folk drama that has been extensively studied, especially as part of the folklore of Newfoundland - the mock wedding has a long cultural pedigree and is an elaborate, meaningful social occasion. But unlike the rather moribund mumming tradition, the mock wedding remains a vital folk dramatic form, still widely performed throughout the Prairie provinces of Canada and in the northern Plains states of the United States.
The drama is
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