Activities
As well as being a popular recreational space for both residents and visitors, the gardens are the venue for special events such as open-air theatre and music performances. In 1970, bands including Roxy Music, Hawkwind and Pink Fairies staged concerts, and in 2007 The Lord Chamberlain's Men presented a production of Romeo & Juliet. During the 20th-century revival of the York Mystery Plays, performances were held on a fixed stage in the gardens among the ruins of St. Mary's Abbey. In the 1950s, York actress Dame Judi Dench acted in the plays performed in the gardens, and played the Virgin Mary in 1957. 2012 sees the York Mystery Plays return to the gardens between 2-27 August and will involve over one thousand local volunteers. Several of York's festivals use the gardens as a venue for events; in 2006, between 800 and 1,000 people celebrated the Chinese New Year with displays that included lion dancers, and in 2007 during the Jorvik Viking festival there were demonstrations of Viking craft skills and battle training. The gardens are the location of York’s Saluting Station, one of only 12 in the United Kingdom, with 21-gun salutes being fired at noon to celebrate occasions related to the British Royal Family throughout the year. At these times a military band marches to the gardens before the salute is fired.
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Famous quotes containing the word activities:
“No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning her such major productive activities as weaving, farming, gathering, temple maintenance, and tent-building. The reason is that full-time, one-on-one child-raising is not good for women or children.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“As life developed, I faced each problem as it came along. As my activities and work broadened and reached out, I never tried to shirk. I tried never to evade an issue. When I found I had something to do—I just did it.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.”
—Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)