Recently we attended one of Dublin’s largest gaming conventions Gaelcon! Where we put on demonstrations, workshops and talks throughout the day.
The day started at around 9am when my student Matt and I showed up to the convention. After getting signed in and being handed our pass cards we headed straight to our performance area in order to set up and check the space we had been given.
It was a nice spot directly beside the main announcement area overlooking the entire convention hall. After setting up the table with a menagerie of weapons and fencing kit we secured the surrounding area so no attendees could accidently wonder into one of our demos. This as usual took the best part of an hour as we needed to adjust our space accordingly as well as allow time for attendees to arrive and become aware of our area.
By 11am we began to warm up as the first games of the day began to kick off in and around the conference room, which I have to say was a spectacular space. Immediately we had the attention of attendees and so began our first talk of the day covering the art, who we are, the school and the weapons.
Our first interactive workshop quickly followed as myself and Matt began teaching the use of the rapier, rapier and dagger, rapier and shield. This segment actually ran ahead of time as the announcement for it rang over the hall a good twenty or so minutes after we started. Which was fine of course as we never really stopped during the day.
This took most of the day with a solid five hours put into teaching as well as performing demonstrations in-between.
At around 5:30pm we began to wind down after having been on our feet since 9am not including traveling. However this lasted about ten minutes or roughly enough time to throw a coffee down our throats and continue until about 6 when we started to wrap up for the day.
All in all it was a very enjoyable day with great interest from attendees. The convention (or what we managed to see of it) seemed to go well with the organisers running the show fairly smoothly or at least on our end.
With that I would like to thank the organizers and volunteers at Gaelcon and to all the attendees for being excellent around our demonstrations. We will be back next year and we hope to see many of you again soon.