Entries tagged with sca: events

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sca: events

[SCA] event-planning: planting a seed

Hey, SCA people...

SCA events are customarily on Saturdays (or weekends centered on Saturdays). This is, as I understand it, to allow Sunday for the people who traveled from out of town to pack up and go home and be ready for work/school the next day.

There haven't been any in-person events for a few months, and in the US there won't be any before February. There are, however, events happening online on a fairly regular basis. The SCA is fundamentally a social organization; of course the events will move online rather than shut down entirely.

Online events on Saturdays are inaccessible to those of us who keep Shabbat.

However, nobody needs Sunday to drive home from them, either.

Do you suppose we could have some of these online events on Sundays instead?

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a day of song and story (SCA)

Yesterday Earl Sir Byron and Countess Sir Ariella hosted an SCA event at their castle. The day was focused on song and story, with classes interspersed with performances. It was a fun, intimate event with about a hundred people, including visitors from outside our group.

I attended a class on commedia dell' arte -- practicum, not history, meaning it focused on techniques for getting on stage and doing improv. There were some "improv games" as part of the class. I am not a comfortable actor, which is why I took the class. I had fun and learned things. Our local commedia troupe also demonstrates that there are strong female roles available besides lover, love interest, and servant-girl; in the alternate reality where I have time and skill to consider auditioning for commedia, I'd be looking for something that fits me less badly -- at my age (and, frankly, body type), I'm not going to be convincing as a young lover.

I also attended a class on trumpets, which included "make sound 101" with mouthpieces and plenty of sanitizer. I had wondered where pitch comes from; is it like a kazoo, where you're responsible for producing the pitch and the instrument then shapes it, or what? No, nothing like that -- the vibration speed coming off your lips is what regulates pitch. Huh. I did manage to make sound come out of a trumpet by the end of the class, though I think I was the slowest learner in the room. (Yes I can get sound out of a shofar, though not reliably!)

The Debatable Choir concert went reasonably well, I thought, though the effect of some sick members was noticeable to us (don't know how noticeable it was to the audience). We had some "sunlight through the windows into the eyes" moments, a challenge when we haven't memorized everything. One nice thing about an event like this is that you get an appreciative audience and can do a longer concert, which was nice!

The food was excellent, and the cooks for both lunch and dinner took extra care to provide ingredient lists, avoid cross-contamination of ingredients, and account for all the dietary restrictions they knew about. I had a full meal despite not eating the meat and without having to bulk up on bread.

The baron and baroness held a short court and I got a pleasant surprise: a baronial award for arts, specifically music. My last baronial award was in 1990 (!) and my last award at all was sometime in the 1990s, so I figured I had transitioned into "crusty old fart who's part of the furniture but not otherwise noteworthy". (I've been part of groups that got group awards a couple times since then, but I mean individual recognition.) I had forgotten how good this kind of recognition feels -- and it doesn't have to be big stuff like high-ranking kingdom stuff; acknowledgement and thanks from people who know you is hugely positive, at least to me. For anybody who's inclined to dismiss or ignore things as "just a local award", think again -- and remember to make award recommendations at that level. (I need to get better about that.)

The scroll was made by two choir members, wordsmithed by the scribal guild as a whole based on a medieval inheritance edict for a woman. Cool!

( pictures )

Pro tip for scribes: there are two important things in that last picture. For the herald who's going to be reading the scroll in unknown-in-advance lighting conditions: a clear transcription in a large, clean font. And for the recipient, the names of those involved, so we know whom to thank! In this case, thank you Reinhart von Regenbogen, Ceindrech verch Elidir, and Debatable Lands scribal guild!

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fun with ceremony (Coronation)

This past weekend I had the chance to participate in something really spiffy -- a recreation of a historic coronation ceremony. Most SCA ceremony is fundamentally modern, dressed up in renaissance trappings; the chance to do more-serious recreation is pretty special.

Of course, there are some special considerations -- historically, ceremonies like this would have been Christian religious services (part of a mass, I think), which in addition to being problematic for some participants (ahem) also would be a violation of SCA rules. So some work needed to be done on that, but I'm impressed by how real it felt nonetheless.

baron_steffan wrote/adapted the ceremony based on the Coronation service of Maximilian I (1486). Music was a central part (rather than being incidental as is sometimes the case), and we had about 20 singers from across the kingdom (about half from the Debatable Choir), organized and led by

ariannawyn. We sang four songs: "Te Regem Laudamus" (adapted from a "Te Deum"), Non Nobis Domine, the roll of kings and queens (more on that below), and "Da Pacem Domine", which we'll be using throughout the reign as processional music.

By ancient custom, the coronation ceremony includes the reading of the roll of all the past kings and queens. Usually this is read by a herald; we chanted it (adapting the Te Regem). One thing that was fun about this was that, to make it not clash, we sang Latinized versions of all the names (thanks Steffan!), and "collapsed" different rulers with the same names. So if you listen to the chant you'll hear Christophers 1 through 6, but that's really two different people each ruling three times. Some names underwent more transformation than others; I think the biggest change was "Rurik" to "Rodericus". I wonder how many of them were startled by hearing their names this time. :-)

dagonell has collected the ceremony, its documentation, the sheet music, and recordings (and other stuff from the event). Check it out! (The recordings here are of the music parts; I do hope somebody was recording the rest of the ceremony and that it'll make its way to that page.)

I don't go to a lot of SCA events any more, and almost never ones not in my local group, but this was totally worth the effort.

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[SCA] music & dance event

Yesterday's music & dance event was a lot of fun. We knew we wouldn't get the usual contingent from the East Kingdom because of a dance event there (that we didn't know about in time), but a bunch of people from the Cleftlands came from Ohio and that allowed us to have some good cross-fertilization. It's nice when you don't know all the people in your classes, after all.

I taught "Reconstruction 201: Balli". 201 because it's more complex than Arbeau and Playford, but only 201 because it's not ultra-advanced either. Ordinary people can do this, and I was pleased to see people who had never tried to work out a ballo from the sources do so in the class.

There were seven students, including alaricmacconnal who I had specifically asked to come with a recorder. (The class was advertised for dancers and musicians, and I wanted to make sure there would be at least one non-me musician there prepared to play from the original manuscript.) There are some ambiguities in the notation for the dance I chose (Marchesana), which is one of the reasons I chose it, and Alaric picked up on one I hadn't seen and made it work. Cool! I don't know if his interpretation is right, but it works well with the dance steps so I'd say it's a keeper. (And because the students were mostly dancers and not musicians, we just breezed past some of the music-specific ambiguities like use of accidentals. At a basic level dancers don't care what notes you play if the timing works.)

I taught the technique that Rosina and I used when we reconstructed the balli for Joy and Jealousy: start by independently counting up how many tempi (measures, in modern parlance) of what misure (think time signatures, sort of) you think the dance and the music call for. Then compare and start reconciling, drawing on other manuscripts and translations as needed. We did not get all the way through the dance -- I find workshops really hard to plan, timing-wise, and I talked too long at the beginning before diving in -- but we got far enough that people seemed to be getting it and enjoying themselves. Several of the students were non-local and I failed to get contact information, alas, so I don't know if I'll ever hear about reconstructions they end up doing. I hope I do.

One of the visitors from Cleftlands, whose name I asked and have failed to retain (sigh), was amazing to watch on the dance floor. She had excellent posture, made eye contact, knew what to do with her hands, and seemed to always be aware of the room around her. I asked: she's a professional dance teacher. :-) Maybe next time she'll teach a class on these things!

(A class I would like to see, but don't know how to structure, would be something like "beyond the specific dance" and would cover things like that, using the space (constraints and opportunities), and adjusting your styling based on the instruments providing the music. This last is something that the Italian sources specifically call out as something to strive for, and I have only the basics of it.)

The choir performed a subset of our Pennsic concert and I thought it went well. There was somebody in the audience who was the perfect magnet for making eye contact; I hope we didn't all pick him. :-) (Ok, I did move around the room, but not necessarily with an even distribution...) The consort also performed, and the students in a choral class sang three songs. It was a good set of performances.

The food was tasty and there were more vegetarian-friendly dishes than I'm used to (yay!). The assorted sauteed veggies in which ginger and garlic (separately) were treated as full-fledged components rather than scant additions were particularly nice. :-)

It turned out that this was lefkowitzga's 30th anniversary of autocratting her first event, and her co-autocrat was a first-timer. Nice blend of seasoned and new there.

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[SCA] Castle Schola

We had a very nice schola event this past Saturday at the baron and baroness' castle (hence the event name). The classes I went to were quite good, lunch was tasty (including a nice vegetarian soup), and the feast (cooked by

illadore) was excellent.

We missed the first couple class sessions (it would take an awful lot for me to willingly miss Shabbat morning services...). The session that was just about to start when we got there didn't have anything that grabbed me (good stuff but topics I already knew); I wish I had noticed the last-minute addition of a battle-tactics class. I would have taken that for the novelty. But I didn't notice it so instead I ate lunch and talked with people.

Leifr and

risiko gave a slide show on their trip to Scandinavia -- not the typical vacation pictures you might expect, but lots and lots of stuff from museums off the beaten path. It appears that in Scandinavia, like in the parts of Israel I visited, they are perfectly content to let people crawl around ancient ruins instead of protecting everything behind glass. That definitely enhances my experience of such sites. (In contrast, I remember visiting Plymouth Rock decades ago and being surprised to find that it was roped/walled off so you couldn't get near it. Also, that it was much smaller than I had imagined.)

After that I went to two cooking classes taught by a visitor from the Cleftlands (we had a bunch of people from Ohio, which isn't usual for us even though it's nearby). The first was on mustards and the second on sauces. Mustard might be worth getting a blender for; mmmm. :-) (A tip he gave: mustard seed can be gotten in quantity from Indian groceries. I wouldn't have thought of that.)

At dinner we sat and conversed with some visitors from Cleftlands. The feast, as I said, was excellent. It was all from Forme of Cury (except one sauce that was ~20 years later, Illadore told me) and it hit that rare combination of tasty and well-balanced and vegetarian-friendly (without short-changing the meat-eaters) and aesthetically pleasing and well-timed and a plausible re-creation. It had chicken with mustard sauce, roast beef (with sauces), tarts for ember day (cheese/onion pie, more or less), cheese, nuts, fruit, pickled vegetables, a salad of greens, peas, mushrooms, and more, with apple pie and gingerbread for dessert. We often eat well in this barony, but especially well this time.

This was a free event with a lunch and feast that cost money. I don't think we've tried that model before; we've had completely-free pot-luck events (usually though not always with a donations basket set out), and we've had events where there is a site fee and food fee (the usual event model). A (good) feast adds a lot to an event for me so I prefer that to pot-luck, but I also want us to do free events, so I'm glad to see this combination being tried. I wonder how we did on donations.

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[SCA] barony 12th night

( Read more... )

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[SCA] war practice

Yesterday after I got home from services we went up to Cooper's Lake for AEthelmearc War Practice. This is a multi-day event (I think it's up to four now, maybe five), but, well, only Pennsic is worth the hassle of camping, so we just went up for the day. And it's been raining all week, so I would have punted even that, but we had reasons to be there.

New since last Pennsic: they finally put a traffic light at the end of the exit ramp from I-79N onto Route 422. Yay! That left turn (onto an often-busy 55MPH road) is the worst part of my drive to Pennsic. (The left turn out of the campground is the worst part of the drive home. No, I didn't get that lucky. :-) ) There seems to be some small amount of development along that stretch of 422; there is another (new) light before getting to the campground, at what used to be an open field sometimes occupied by a farmers' market, and now occupied by a gas station, a McDonald's, and a Subway. Hmm. If they add a beer outlet and grocery store, the two weeks of Pennsic business might pay for the rest of the year.

( the event )

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[SCA] Siege at Harlech Castle

( local event )

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sca: events

[SCA] weekend plans

We're day-tripping AEthelmearc 10th-year tomorrow. Events at Cooper's Lake tend to spread out, making it hard to find people, so here are hints for me for those who care. I plan to be at the investiture of our new baron and baroness (morning court), the reception following, a (different) reception for a Laurel elevation, and court. With luck, I should also be able to catch the artisans' forum. I'd kind of like to see the equestrian activities, but I don't know the schedule for that. We are not staying for the feast.

Sunday afternoon we'll be back at Cooper's Lake, in the oversized-trailer area, painting my house.

Maybe I'll see some of you!

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Purim

The event went well, from what I saw. People seemed to be having fun, we got entries for both the brewing and illusion-food contests, I Genesii did a great take on the Purim story, and people ate the food. There were about 20 no-shows, which I didn't know until late in the day, which explains some of the food excess. Not all of it; for some things either I over-estimated or I just plain didn't know how much people would eat.

( food analysis )

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sca: events

busy busy busy

Most of the advance prep for the Purim feast is now done (which is good, as it's almost Shabbat). Tonight

lorimelton and

ralphmelton valiantly peeled and chopped the veggies I'll need first thing in the morning while I hard-boiled a gross of eggs and did some other stuff. Ralph taught me a trick for peeling eggs (which, he pointed out, is described in a book I own): it's easier to peel them if, after soaking in cold water immediately after cooking, you then put them back in the pot and bounce them around to crack (but not remove) the shells. I don't want to actually peel them this far in advance, but things should be much easier Sunday morning now.

Last night the autocrat took me shopping at Sam's Club (I don't have a membership), where I sometimes got items that would have cost me twice as much for half as much at Giant Eagle. Yay, Sam's. Selection is limited, though, so I still have to pick up a few things. (They had no almonds, spinach, or parsnips, for instance.) Last night we also delivered much of the food and all of the gear to the site, which will also make things much easier on Sunday.

The event has been keeping me very busy this week, and work has also been hectic (not that I can directly read LJ at work anyway), so it's probably safest to assume that I won't catch up on the last few days. If there's something I should see, please tell me? Thanks.

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busy (SCA-filled) day

This morning I learned that the Strip District (source of food, not porn) pretty much closes on Sunday. Fortunately, I had called the alleged Mecca of pickles, olives, grape leaves, and the like before going there. And fortunately, Dani -- who loves olives and therefore has a vested interest -- is willing to pick a few things up for me since he works nearby.

After brunch I picked up the pots, platters, untensils, and miscelleanous supplies I'll need. Oof. My car is full of stuff. If this were a 200- or 300-person feast instead of a 100-person one, I don't know if I'd be able to fit all the stuff in my car. (And that's not counting food!) Fortunately, I can take some stuff to the site on Wednesday, including much of the food (which I'll have just bought). The autocrat has a membership at Sam's Club, so she's going to take me shopping for the good prices.

Next I went to pick up the smoked salmon from someone who volunteered his smoking services. Mmm, it looks and smells great! It might be more than we need, but I doubt it'll go to waste.

Then, it was home to do some pre-cooking. I tried two desserts, one successful and one not so much. Once again, dough is my undoing. We'll be fine, though; I knew that was an experiment, so I didn't count on it. (Hmm. All of the desserts have nuts in them. I should come up with something that doesn't. I can't document hamentashen, or I'd do that.)

I also made 15 meat pies and all the kosher meatballs. I had planned to do more meatballs, but I ran out of steam. I'll do the rest Tuesday.

(I don't have the budget to buy all kosher meat, and I wouldn't be able to justify it for the small number of people who care. So instead, I bought a smaller amount of kosher meat and will prepare that separately. Everything at the feast is kosher by ingredients, but most of the meat won't come from a kosher butcher.)

Tomorrow night I have class. Tuesday night I make chicken soup, meatballs, and probably the white beans (which are served cold and are best after a few days). Wednesday is shopping (and delivery of all the food cooked thus far). Thursday I prep some vegetables, hard-boil a gross of eggs, and make a couple other things. All week, I use the bread machine to make dough for fish pies. With luck, Saturday night I relax before getting started Sunday morning. I think I'm going to take next Monday off from work. :-)

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sca: events

[SCA] wow

A week ago, we had about 50 reservations for the Purim event. 24 hours ago, we had 80 (about what I figured we'd top out at). Half an hour ago, we had 100 and pending inquiries. That's a lot more people than I thought would want to come to our event!

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some updates

I do have meatier stuff I want to write about, but things are a little hectic. Sorry I'm not being that interesting right now.

Plans continue for the Purim feast in two and a half weeks. I expect we'll get a bunch more reservations at tomorrow night's meeting. I did a test run of one of the looks-good-but-haven't-eaten-it recipes tonight, and it passed. I'm pretty happy with the way the menu is shaping up. I'm also grateful for the offers of help I've received.

Apropos of Purim (but not this event), I recommend megillah2a to anyone who's either following the Daf Yomi cycle or just interested in some of the talmud's coverage of Purim.

Our associate rabbi is starting a beginners' talmud class. Good! It's during the work day -- not so good for me, but if it works for others, I'm glad. I hope someday to take an evening class from him.

The person signed up to read torah this Shabbat fell ill, and I've been tapped to pull together something. I'll probably read rather than chant because that's faster to prepare, and everyone's ok with a partial reading given the circumstances. A couple years ago I wouldn't have been capable of pulling something together at almost the last minute, so that's progress! (Last time I got one not-too-long aliya up to speed (with chanting) in about six hours of work, and then it was just maintenance from there. I remember when it took six weeks.)

I received a call from my vet's office today. I had the last two appointments of the day, and gee the snow and sleet are looking bad, and if I wanted to reschedule they just wanted to let me know that that would be ok... yeah, I can read between those lines. :-) It's just routine checkups, so I suggested we let the vet and technicians go home a little early.

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sca: events

[SCA] Purim event

A few of my non-local readers -- though I cannot now remember which ones -- have made comments in the past about possibly coming to the Purim (SCA) event in Debatable Lands on Sunday, March 4. If that's still interesting to anyone reading this, making reservations soon would be a good idea. We're about half-full right now. Event announcement. I hope to see some of you there!

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short takes

A good discussion of rights by

xiphias.

I'm cooking an SCA feast for Purim. I have recently learned that I can get goat, and I have this lovely-sounding recipe for a goat stew. Must investigate. (I have a draft menu that is now awaiting comment from some of my partners in food perpetration.) I'm looking forward to the event, especially the treatment of the book of Esther by I Genesii, the local commedia del'arte troupe.

For gamers and foodies, from ohiblather comes this link to cupcakes of Catan.

Someone published a parody of Second Life, called Get A First Life. The makers of Second Life, rather than sending a "cease and desist" letter, sent a proceed and persevere letter. Good for them!

Forwarded by osewalrus, Nigerian kitten spam.