Mummers Festival Inc.

The Mummers Festival is a participant-focused, community-based festival that encourages the celebration of mummering traditions. Each year, the Mummers Festival hosts events over the last week of November, and the first two weeks of December leading up to its crowning event, the Mummers Parade. Workshops, public forums with mummer experts, lectures and school programming act as educational and momentum-building events for the big Parade Day. Participants can build a jaw-snapping hobby horse or learn how to play their own homemade ugly stick. Audiences meet mummer experts (those long-term, experienced locals who have been mummering for decades) and receive first-hand knowledge about the many intricacies of this tradition.

Conserving culture
The Mummers Festival was guided by principles of cultural conservation and intangible cultural heritage and influenced by folklife festival models, known for their ethnographic approach to planning. The goal is to see traditions live. Each year, the Festival creates new opportunities to pass along traditional skills and knowledge. A folklife festival model attempts to achieve the goals of cultural understanding and cultural transmission as encouraged by UNESCO’s policies on intangible cultural heritage. At the heart of the Mummers Festival is the aspiration to represent, celebrate, and inspire the transmission of collective cultural knowledge in a grassroots way.

Categories: All, Community / Regional History, Intangible Cultural Heritage, St. John's, Theatre