BUILDING HISTORY OUT of PLYWOOD, BURLAP & HAY BALES

The basic building blocks of any Faire

Renaissance Faires are THEATRE set in the woods. Your goal is to transport your audience back in time but often with only a small budget and the reality that most, if not all of your structures will need to be temporary. There are few Faires that have the luxury of a permanent site where they can leave their main structures up all year round. This means that every building will need to be transported in, erected, and then removed at the end of the event. One thing that you can say about the building materials in Elizabethan England was that they were anything but portable. Half-timber buildings with thatched roofs and stone foundations don’t transport well, and trying to fake these can be tricky if not done artfully. As large-scale outdoor theatre, you are basically creating an enormous stage set, but you are asking your audience to suspend their belief just enough to imagine that these structures are “real”. Your guests will arrive wanting to “play along” but their imaginations are only just so elastic and can be snapped by the sight of too many anachronistic elements and details. Your goal as the designer of the Faire is to balance these budgetary, safety, and building codes, within the period illusion you are trying to sustain. In the end, your allies will most often be plywood, burlap & hay bales. All of which can be configured to represent almost all of the environments you are trying to create.

THE ANATOMY of a LAYOUT

There is no “golden” Faire layout, so no rules to how an event must be constructed, but there are several elements that have proven to work, and depending how they are implemented, enhance your Faire experience.

Entry
The entrance to your Faire is by far the most important piece in the entire layout. The entry is where first impressions are made and where the expectations of your guest will be set. Apart from being the mechanical door that determines who will enter, it is also the place where you can greet and prepare your audience for just what lay ahead for them. The entry gate will very likely be the most important, and expensive, first investment, but a vital part of your success. Once you have established an entryway worthy of the Faire you wish to build, all your other structures, and those of your participants, will look to it as the bar in which to reach. Chain link fence covered in vinyl tarp will do you no service, and it will lower the expectations of your guests, some of whom my turn on their heels and head back to their cars without purchasing a ticket.

Serpentine

Although not a prerequisite, creating a winding path at the opening of your Faire has the duel function of slowing the progression of guests as they arrive, and giving them the impression that they are exploring the streets of an actual village. Serpentine layouts, viewed from their entry point have the visual effect of layering booths into the distance. This creates a sense of depth and complexity that suggests that there are an infinite number of things to do and see at your Faire. Serpentines slow the inclination to rush into the heart of the event, and it is the perfect place to locate crafts people who sell large or heavy items that customers might wish to wait to purchase as they are heading back to their cars. A serpentine layout sets expectations in the minds of your guests that the Faire is a place to explore, while still insuring a linear path that leaves no booth unvisited. Many craftspeople covet this location because they know they have twice the chance of grabbing the spending money of any Faire visitor.

Crossroads
Once out of the serpentine a Crossroads is the perfect place to allow for your Faire to branch out. Crossroads are the natural meeting place if members of your party get separated, and the perfect location for street theatre. Often the washing well, with loud cat calling and wet laundry flinging about, are located in crossroads like this. Crossroads are also a great way for visitors to get their bearings and help them better understand where they are within the layout. Crossroads are a perfect place to invest in some sort of monumental structure as well. Having a large Market Cross, a giant Greenman figure, or even a majestic tree with branches filled with color ribbons or lanterns will make for a memorable meeting place, and a landmark that is easy to find if you were to get lost.

Branching Off

Crossroads are the perfect place for your layout to Branch Off in different directions. It is important that the each choices be clearly marked with an archway or other iconic graphic. You need to broadcast what your audience is about to encounter if they choose one path or another. Having a Faire offer multiple places to explore makes for a more dynamic experience, but you don’t want to have too many outlets for exploration for fear that an audience will miss something, or more dangerous, will “feel” like they are missing something. Failure to thoroughly marquee the entrance to a offshoot or separate avenue risks the possibility that entire areas of your layout will be missed. This is especially disastrous for those craft and food booths that will loose business because they are either too hard to find, or they happen to live along the road least traveled.

Neighborhoods
Thematic avenues or neighborhoods are a powerful way to inform your guests about what they might experience or be able to purchase when visiting one specific area or another. Although some craftspeople might argue that they don’t want to be placed in an area that has wears that are too similar to theirs, worse yet that they be so tucked away that no one can remember where they were. Threadneedle Road, or Jeweler’s Court say a lot about what you might expect you will find within them. Witches Wood paints a different picture then Pirate’s Keep in the mind of your guests, and it will do you good service to populate these areas with the crafts, food, and entertainment that support that theme. In the end you want your audience to “own” their experience, and you do that through making it easier to know where they are and how they can relate to each environment. Make it easy for them to find crafts and entertainment that they desire, and best of all, return there if at the end of the day the have finally decided to get that Tarot Card reading, or Pirate sword. You want them to get back there quickly and intuitively.

Food Vendors
The location of Food Booths is often dictated by their proximity to running water and the ability to transport supplies and remove waste water (gray water) and trash. Your local health department will have a lot to say on this subject, so it is best to listen to them. Food vendors will also have particular requirements and desires, as will craft vendors who might not want Turkey Leg fingers handling their jewelry. It is suggested that food areas be adjacent to stage seating as it is the perfect place to gather and retain an audience. Food booths are also a great tool for moving guests through your layout since, like a stage, interest and hunger will pull them to wherever the food is located.

Stages As Anchors
As a rule, “All Roads Lead to a Stage”. Like the anchor stores in a Shopping Mall, stages are the perfect draw to pull people through your Faire’s layout. With your audience referring to your Faire’s Map and Schedule, they will be planning what shows to see and activities to participate in. Having show venues at the end of the branches of your layout ensure that they will go places they might have otherwise missed while merely exploring. The theme for each stage can reflect or dictate the theme of the area. The Gypsy Camp Stage suggests something very different then The Madrigal Stage, and those booths set around it should help support that theme. A stage can be as simple as a platform and a cart, or as grand as a multi-story structure. Variety is best and different stages will dictate the kind of entertainment that might be scheduled for it. Stages will also have to compete with ambient noise, so avoid placing loud game booths or vocal barkers near a Stage location.

CHAPTER 4 - LAYOUT

THE HOLY GRAIL of FAIRE SITES

By far the biggest challenge when laying out a Renaissance Faire is the site you build it on. In 1989 the Renaissance Pleasure Faire lost the ability to hold it’s event in Agoura California at the now preserved Paramount Ranch and was forced to look for a new place to erect their Brigadoon-like village. For months we visited and reviewed potential sites, finally landing in the Glen Helen Regional Park in Devore California, just outside of San Bernardino. By the end of this process we had tried to squeeze the contents of our Faire into every possible location, with the exception of a Walmart parking lot. The truth is, a successful Faire, both aesthetically and financially depend on several specific factors all coming together:

Trees
If you have the luxury of having lots of them then you are already half way to having a fantastic event. Building in a forest allows for shade, ambiance, and potentially a scaffold for your booths and stages to build off of, and around. The alternative is a lot of structures and shade you and your participants are going to have to build yourself. Trees come with it concerns about the conservation of the environment around you, so more care needs to be made when building around them, but the results are definitely worth it.




Parking

If your event is popular you are going to have to have a lot of flat ground adjacent to your Faire for people to park on. This will have to be a place that is easy to get in and out of, from roads convenient to nearby highways and freeways, without creating a nightly traffic nightmare when your event’s guests are stream home after a long day. Parking also needs to be on a surface that won’t immediately turn to mud if unexpected rain appears to dampen your event. Nothing says nightmare like thousands of stuck vehicles. Few forested areas have adjacent blacktop parking lots so more often then not you are parking on a farmer’s field between crops, and applying lots of water to the surface to keep the dust down during the day.





People
Your event needs to be as close as possible to lots of people. The fewer miles they have to drive the more apt they are to come visit your event. The obvious drawback is that the closer you get to populated areas, the fewer natural settings there are to host your event. Ultimately you would love to have your event adjacent to a busy freeway exit, and yet nothing says anachronism like seeing and hearing semi’s driving by your Elizabethan village.




Friendly Neighbors
Although you might not first imagine it, having neighbors that “get” what you are trying to do is key. Not everyone sees Renaissance Faires as wholesome entertainment, and there are those that take a “not in my neighborhood” stance when they hear a promoter is considering land near their homes and towns. During our search for a new Faire site in 1989 we were actually driven out of one perspective community because the local newspaper suggested that the coming Faire would bring with it, “hippies that would feed marijuana to their cows”. It is a rare rural community that easily accepts such an event, and that is exactly the people you want most on your side. Fostering a strong relationship with your surrounding communities, all year round, is vital to the continued success of your event. Ultimately, we want your neighbors to have a sense of ownership in the yearly party, and be willing to fight to keep it, if for any reason unforeseen circumstances threaten its right to be there.

CHAPTER THREE: The Basic Philosophy

PERIOD FAIRE versus CONTEMPORARY FAIR

I grew up with two street artists as my parents. Summer weekends were often spent in a park or on a street in and around the San Francisco Bay Area selling art in various street art shows. During that time individual crafts people were on their own to design and build booths to not only display their work, but easily fit into a trailer or Volkswagen van to cart it from fair to fair. With the invention of the inexpensive pop-tent awning, it has become much easier to throw an entire booth in the back of your car and easily erect it anywhere. This has had the added effect of creating fairs and festivals that have a uniformed and similar look. A sea of white tent tops against a green backdrop has become the signature look of most art shows and festivals. Although handy, it does mean that one fair looks very much like any other.

A Renaissance Faire is actually attempting to do the very opposite of this. Uniformity is a byproduct of a post-industrial world. Right angles, synthetic materials, and PVC pipe are conveniences that just were not available to craftsman of the 16th century. Imagine any movie depiction you have seen of a medieval or Elizabethan village and you will see a meditation on asymmetry and earth tones. Booths in the past were sturdy affairs, covered with materials heavy enough to keep weather off their wares, and definitely sported no vinyl banners or signs. The only concession we will make with our period booths is the introduction of a more vibrant, but not exactly non-period color palette.

WHY DO IT?

This is a good question, and one to think about before you jump into the deep end by participating in a Renaissance Faire. Traditional crafts fairs are a known entity, and they are relatively inexpensive to participate in. Apart from your entry fee and a potential percentage of sales, you arrive with your white tent and wares and are ready to go. Renaissance Faires make many more demands on your time and money. Booths are never standard, and demands on what you wear, how you speak, and how you spend your weekends before opening are many. For this expense there is no guarantee that you will necessarily break even… so why do it? Well, having been a craftsperson I can tell you that there is nothing quite like the larger community that participates in such Faires. You aren’t just appearing at a venue, but being adopted into an extended family. Your booth, apart from being the place where you sell your products, is a private living room facing the biggest party of the year. While seeing to your customers, you are also host to your own friends and acquaintances as you invite them behind your counter or into you “Hooch” (back room). Time at a Faire ebbs and flows with each hour bringing festivities, parades, and just plain silliness that are as distinct from each other as the seasons in a year. What is happening is bigger then any one participant, and the love for it gets into your blood, and once infected you find your year is in a state of anticipation of the Faire’s arrival or dread that it will soon be over. Faires change the people who take part in them, this has some participants living the life of a gypsy as they travel all over the country doing what many call “the Faire Circuit”. It is far from an easy, or necessarily financially rewarding life, but damn it if it isn’t food for the soul. If this sounds like too much work, you are right it is, but what things worth having aren’t.

A BRIEF HISTORY LESSON

As you can imagine Renaissance Faires have existed long enough now to create several generations of participants, each having defined their own eras within the genre. For older participants some believe it will “never return to anything that resembles the innocents of those early years”, while newer generations are working to redefine what a Renaissance Faire can be. I personally have my own memories, but I think that what we all hold on to are our own collection of rich intangibles. A Renaissance Faire is as much about the heat, the smell, and the tastes, as it was what we saw, wore, or whom we knew. Unique friendships arose within this mini universe, all squeezed into a few weekends a year. For some a Faire is a job, but for others it is a lifestyle, and an annual oasis in the middle of our technology filled lives. It is common to hear that the Faire allowed individuals to “find themselves” and shape the choices they would make later in their lives. The Faire didn’t start out this grand, but was born from the minds and imaginations of two people.

RON & PHYLLIS PATTERSON

It is impossible to begin any discussion of Renaissance Faires without first talking about its roots.  Renaissance Faires, as we know them today, started out humbly as a class activity created for her students by then school teacher Phyllis Patterson. In early 1963, Phyllis ran a miniature period fair in the backyard of her Laurel Canyon home in California. Later that same year a larger one weekend event was organized as a fundraiser for the radio station KPFK. Nearly 8000 people attended the event which consisted largely of reenactments of historical activities including a printing press and blacksmith. There were also crafts and food merchants, each required to demonstrate the period making of their wares. Volunteers were required to take workshops in language, history, and appropriate costuming. These groups were organized into Guilds, consisting of actors, musicians, military, peasants, clans, and others. Phyllis’ passion for teaching and Ron’s skills as art director, and self appointed “Master of Revels”, were the foundation of what would become a new form of entertainment. Modeling the event on a 16th century english country fair they created the context for hundreds of participants to joyfully improv history, making it one of the largest examples of outdoor theater. What many veterans of these early Faires will tell you, is they also succeeded in creating a giant extended family who’s year pivoted on the weekends these events were held.
During the founding years, the Faire was held as a springtime event at Paramount Ranch in Agoura in Southern California, later to include a fall harvest event held in Novato in Northern California. Christened “The Renaissance Pleasure Faire” the events have spanned a half a century and have been entertaining multiple generations consisting of millions of guests and participants. “Faire” is for many not just a festival, but a lifestyle, with some vendors and entertainers traveling year-round from one Faire to another, doing what some call “the circuit”. For those lucky enough to be there in the beginning, they can rest on the knowledge that they were witness to the birth of something quite unique.

The Patterson family no longer holds ownership of the original Faire, but they have raised a family of teachers and entertainers that are taking this unique art form into new areas. Phyllis and Ron’s eldest son Kevin and wife Leslie are the proud presenters of The Dickens Christmas Fair, an annual holiday event held in San Francisco, based on a winter event of the same name, created by Ron & Phyllis as a way to keep staff and crew employed between Renaissance events. The Dickens Fair has grown to prove that the lessons learned and the techniques used to create the yearly outdoor events work equally well for indoor venues. If you ever wish to experience the energy of one the the very first Patterson Faire’s, I highly recommend you find a way to be in San Francisco at least one weekend during the holidays.

CHAPTER TWO: ORIGINS of the FAIRE

THE ROOTS of the RENAISSANCE FAIRE

I joined the Faire much like anyone else. My wife and I started as weekend visitors, worked our way into becoming servers in one of the many food booths, started our own crafts booth, and ultimate I was hired as the resident designer of the Faire. Each step of the way I was driven by a passion to participate ever more in the workings of this unique event. Mere visitors can become infatuated by the energy of a Faire, wanting to experience more, and finding ways to more deeply connect to the larger community that grows around an event like this. I was no different, having tasted the thrill of being a part of this 360 degree theatre, extended family, and antidote to the bustle of the modern world, I set my calendar year around those rare few weekends when I could leave my life behind and live for a short time in another world.

THE ORIGINS of the FAIRE

My wife and I arrived in the middle of the Renaissance Pleasure Faire’s history. By the time we set foot on the Faire site, the event was celebrating its 20th anniversary. We were not pioneers in this form of entertainment, but a next generation picking up and running with an already established and thriving community. I was not there inventing the experience, but learning from it. The Pleasure Faire had created a framework for how a historically themed Faire might be run, and already there were other successful Faires establishing themselves all over the country. Inspired by the original, each Faire has made up their own rules, and have created for themselves their own dedicated followers.

 For each Faire there is an army of participants that love their event just as much as we loved ours, and they have every right to assume that theirs was the best. I was honored enough to be working with the creators of the very first Faire, and it is worth talking about those initial sparks of inspiration that brought this art form into the world, before discussing the physical mechanics of creating one for yourself.

CHAPTER ONE

Congratulations, you are one of the two people to read this Blog! Really, this is such an obscure subject to write a blog about that I am just so happy that it landed in your hands. As for that other person, you really ought to get in touch with each other; I bet you have a lot in common!

Writing a Blog about designing Renaissance Faires is not something anyone has attempted before. Each Faire has been responsible for creating their own internal bibles for explaining the rules and techniques for running and working within their event, but there has never been one source that collects all those small details that many Faires have in common.

I am proud to say that my roots as an artist begin as an art director for the Living History Center’s Renaissance Pleasure Faires in Northern and Southern California. My experience later expanded to include designing for the Disney theme parks as a Sr. Show Designer for Walt Disney Imagineering. Over the years I have designed attractions, video games, theatre sets, and 3D virtual worlds, all the while building on those very first lessons I learned as the designer for the Faire. I can now safely say that many, if not all of the principles I learned in those early years designing outdoor events has influenced and aided me in the design of everything I work on today. Whether it is building with concrete or polygons the basic rules of entertaining people through the creation of theatrical fantasy environments holds true to this day.

This book has been quietly simmering in the back of my mind for years and only now comes to the surface through multiple conversations with other past and present Faire folk that are seeking a source of information on the guidelines for designing and participating in a cohesive themed event. There are enough Renaissance Faires throughout the world for it to be presumptuous of me to suggest that I have all the answers for every event or audience demographic, so I offer my comments and suggestions as merely food for thought.

Renaissance Faires represent an ever growing and evolving industry, and are very often formed by the organic love and energy put into their creation. There are no set rules as to what does or does not constitute a good event, but there are some principles that do work if applied with focused intent. My goal is to layout some ideas that work, not just for Renaissance Faires, but for all variety of themed environments.  I will go over subjects that include laying out a good Faire, explore challenges that are unique to this form of entertainment, and offer tips on making choices that will help make your event not only more beautiful, but more profitable as well.

Have a look through the following chapters and see if there are tidbits that are specific to how you participate in the creation of a Faire. Whether you are the owner, promoter, or one of thousands of participants, there should be information specifically for you. A Renaissance Faire, as with any themed event, is grounded in a group agreement about the style, era, and ultimate goals of the show you are trying to produce. An event will succeed or fail based on everyone’s wiliness to focus their efforts to this shared vision. Building a truly immersive environment depends on the time, energy, and financial commitment of everyone involved, and this I guarantee will far exceed the efforts and capital investments necessary to pull off something like a more traditional crafts fair.

Lastly, this is a love letter to not only the Faires I grow up attending and participating in, but to all those friends who’s lives were equally changed by this shared experience. I have talked with enough of them over the years to realize the impact of those years spent “Playing Faire”, and hope that the notes held within this book will act as a beginning blueprint for future Faires, and help them to build their own unique events upon.