Maypole dance returns with Provo Farmers Market

PROVO — In Provo's early days, schoolchildren celebrated spring and the coming of summer with the Maypole dance, traditionally on May 1.

A dance with European origins, participants would weave colorful ribbons as they danced around a center pole."The Maypole dance is performed to encourage the re-blossoming of spring, and the pole itself symbolizes a tree," Provo dance teacher Barbara Luke said.

Luke said she learned the Maypole dance as a child at Joaquin Elementary. She went on to live in the East and teach dance at Greenwich Academy in Greenwich, Conn., where she became known as the Maypole Queen of the East Coast.

Luke's enthusiasm for the dance since returning to Provo has led to her being dubbed Miss Maypole, said the Provo event's co-organizer Oliver Smith-Callis.

Smith-Callis has invited Luke to teach the dance Saturday at Pioneer Park during the opening of the Provo Farmers Market.

In "Tales of Utah Valley," D. Robert Carter writes about a major Maypole dance in May 1925, when all the schoolchildren in town came together at Pioneer Park to dance and weave ribbons around the pole. After that, the dance was held annually on school grounds or at the intersection of University Avenue and Center Street until the early 1960s, when it began to fade.

This year, Luke is bringing back the traditional dance, 84 years after that colorful park event.

"Visitors to Provo's Farmers Market will find it quite easy to join in the steps with the experienced dancers and the lively music to braid the pole in spider-web, basket weave and herringbone patterns," said Raquel Smith-Callis, Farmers Market co-organizer.

Local dancers are also expected to perform the Native American hoop dance, which teaches and celebrates the cycles of life and the changing seasons, Oliver Smith-Callis said.

"Songs, drums and storytelling accompany the dancers who, using 2-foot-diameter hoops, transform themselves into various shapes and animals to illustrate the circle of life. Dancers will be performing and telling the story of the hoop dance several times throughout the market," Raquel Smith-Callis said.

Although it's still early in the season, farmers-market visitors can expect to find "eggs from small-scale chicken farms, a variety of gourmet greens from organic farmers, seedlings to transplant in their own gardens and honey," she said, "(along with) tamales, gourmet steak tacos and fruit smoothies, as well as homemade soaps, salves and other goods."

Provo's Farmers Market runs every Saturday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. in May and from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. June through October at Pioneer Park, 500 W. Center Street. An open-air Christmas Market is on the docket for Dec. 5.

Free parking is available behind the Covey Center for the Arts.

E-MAIL: rodger@desnews.com