NEW SCOTLAND — You’ll want to be sure to double check the dates of upcoming events at Indian Ladder Farms; otherwise you could find yourself learning about farmland preservation whilst attired in a full suit of metal armor.

This weekend is the sixth annual New York Capital District Renaissance Festival; the preservation conversation takes place June 13.

Gia Pace, entertainment director for the festival, said this year’s event will have jousting tournaments, live performances, giant turkey legs (there will be vegan and vegetarian options as well), artisans hawking their wares, and “William Shakespeare’s going to be there.”

“It’s just a fun day for adults and for families,” she said, citing the festival’s pub crawl as an adult-oriented activity.  

Greg Hogan will be at the festival performing with his band, Wandering Monsters, but, he said, his first Capital District Renaissance Festival experience was as a customer.

“I’m really a big fan of fantasy; I’m an avid Dungeons and Dragons player,” he said, referring to the fantasy tabletop role-playing game, which drew him into it. For his first experience at the festival, he and his girlfriend, Lauren, “decided to go to the costumer and dress up,” he said. “We both picked out some costumes … We just felt fully immersed, like a fantasy setting.”

For Hogan, a Cohoes resident, his experience as both performer and festival-goer have been quite similar. In costume at his first festival, Hogan said, he had a lot more interaction with the festival’s actors, performers, and entertainers — and with festival-goers as well. They assumed that he worked for the festival and would ask to take a picture with him or ask where they could find the nearest turkey leg.

It’s why, when anyone asks if they should wear a costume, they receive from Hogan an emphatic “Yes.”  

“I always recommend getting dressed up because, when you get dressed up, you feel like you’re more immersed into the setting,” he said. And it seems to be working, because Hogan said that the festival gets bigger and bigger with each passing year, which he actually attributes to the popularity of “Game of Thrones”

“With the growth of ‘Game of Thrones’ as well as Marvel Comics movies,” Hogan said, what had been a niche culture has become mainstream. “You see them, they start off small,” he said of new converts to the culture. “They might rent a costume or they might rent a sword … But now, they’re really getting into [it].”

Feeling joy

Gia Pace isn’t new to any of this.

“I was bullied in school and I used to sit at home, and I was watching TV one day and I saw an advertisement for the New York Renaissance Faire — this was when I was 8 or 9 years old,” she said. “And all of a sudden, I brightened up and thought, ‘Oh my goodness — I saw the jousters on horseback — I have to go to this thing.’”

Pace begged her father for a year, she said, eventually convincing him to take her and her little sister to the Faire.

One two-hour car ride later, upon entering the Faire, Pace said, she “felt like I was OK,” that she “felt joy,” and that for at least a little while she could “get away from being that bullied kid.”

She went back the next year but that was it until after she graduated from college, when she then auditioned and was hired to be a performer at the New York Renaissance Faire. After a year, Pace said, “Things kind of just took a different turn in my life. And later on, I went back to [the Faire].”

Pace began to perform at other Renaissance and Medieval festivals when she eventually met Kendall Hudson, a Capital Region native, now her business partner, who asked her if she wanted to try to put on a festival in the area.

The partners then approached Peter Ten Eyck, then the owner of Indian Ladder Farms, since passed along to his children, with “this kind of crazy idea” that Ten Eyck had not been familiar with.

Pace said that she and Hudson showed Ten Eyck their plan and the research to back it up, “and he took a chance on us … .”