KMXT 100.1 FM Public Radio in Kodiak, Alaska
SCA fencers. Photo by Travis Abe Thomas
Kayla Desroches/KMXT
If you’ve ever wanted to fence or feast like a character from “ye olden days”, now’s your chance.
Jonathon Clary is the local branch president of Kodiak’s Society for Creative Anarchonism, or SCA, which is an international organization that focuses on the arts and skills of pre-17th-century Europe.
Clary says the group will have a series of lessons and demonstrations on Saturday including fencing, his own specialty. He says he’s been been studying one particular style for eight years.
When he started, he says there wasn’t a lot of information avaliable.
“What I did find, though,” says Clary. “Was a SCA fencer whose wife had earned a doctorate translating a spanish manuscript on fencing from our period and based off of that translation, I started to develop the spanish destreza fencing style for myself.”
Clary says he’s reached out to different masters of the art both in and outside the SCA.
You can see some of Clary’s fencing on Saturday from 2:30 p.m. to 4 at the Saint James Parish on Thorsheim Street. You can also attend two classes: leatherworking from 10:00 to 11:30 a.m. and handspinning, a technique for creating yarn, from 1 to 2:30 p.m.
SCA will hold a period potluck at 11:30 a.m, and encourages you to cook some pre-17th-century dishes of your own to bring with you.
