 I portrayed the character Sir Keegan O'Connor. I'm one of the four knights that jousted at the Marilyn Renaissance Festival, and I've been jousting with the Bracey Productions since 2017. In the 1100s, there was kind of an awkward period of peace in central Europe. We start seeing a pop-up of tournaments in northern France. Knights at the time were basically the first professional soldiers in history. Heavy-mounted knights with lance and shield were basically the powerhouse of the time period. So the tournaments kind of offered that opportunity to go out and practice your skills and show off your skills and also make a fortune sometimes. During a time of peace, this is your only time that you can gain standing politically, socially, for somebody from a lower noble house. That could be your only chance for, you know, really moving up in the world. My name is Bill Burch. I play Sir William de Bracey for de Bracey Productions at the Marilyn Renaissance Festival. As far as writing of the shows, what I start with is a drama. An extremely serious drama about four knights and a princess. The princess is hosting this tournament and each knight has a different motivation. And it's up to the audience to pick up on the subtle nuances to figure out what these motivations are. There's always many plot twists. There's multiple sub-stories happening. From there, we have our first tournament, our second tournament. It's all real, all actual competitions. We're hitting each other as hard as we can with shield and lance at the same time. It takes a lot of work, a lot of practice, a lot of guts, and a lot of trust in your horse and the horse is trust in you. A lot of the horses really get into it and can't wait. Other horses have their own personal vendettas out there with other horses because they get so competitive. You learn about the different stage-compact techniques and safety, safety, safety, and timing. These fights have to work and they have to be a very well-put-together dance and choreography. We change our fights every show. We never try to do the exact same phrase of fights in the same two shows because we want the audience to feel like it's brand new. The Marilyn Renaissance Fair makes you feel as soon as you walk in there, you could expect anything. There's so many things that people can see and pick up on and there's just wonderful interactions between human beings. I think that the Marilyn Renaissance Festival does a really good job of portraying that energy and really nailing it. If you're there and you want to, that immersive experience is there for you. So if you're looking for a really exciting adventure and a place to take your family, come out to the Marilyn Renaissance Festival and see all the hard work that everybody puts into this beautiful and amazing artistic event, see us choust, see our horses, and see us do our best to make you believe that you've traveled back in time.