Gate Listing Requirements
In its current incarnation, the Northern California Danse Macabre tries to be as "all inclusive" as possible. We openly welcome those members of other guilds, acts, booths and even customers participating at a faire to "drop in" and join us for any parade that we're going to do. Such people are always welcome to join us as their schedules permit, with no obligations on them at all.
It is always possible for someone to list with us for a given faire or other event that we're scheduled to perform in. We welcome people to request gate listing with us at a given event. Some faires have "caps" (limits) on how many people a given guild can have on their gatelist. As such, it's important for you to know that if you ask to be placed on our list, you are making a promise to appear at that faire or other event and to perform in our shows/parades, in exchange for being on our list. If you are placed on our gate list, you are potentially locking someone out who also wants to perform with us. So please be sure that if you request listing and are placed on it, that you show up for the event and show up for the shows. If you become aware that you're not going to be able to make an event after being added to our gate list, please be sure to contact us as soon as possible, so that we might be able to let someone else in if it's not too late (past the cutoff date) for the event in question.
As noted above, we try to be as all-inclusive as possible. Unfortunately, the reality of the caps that some faires place on gate list size means that certain Faires have some additional requirements that we have to impose in order to qualify to be placed on our list for those events. This is not something that we do lightly, nor particularly want to do; rather, we do it out of necessity. Your understanding and cooperation on this matter is appreciated.
Faire/Event-specific gate listing requirements are listed below, along with the name of the faire/event.
Valhalla Renaissance Faire
The Valhalla Renaissance Faire, held at South Lake Tahoe, CA, is an event that's quite popular with our regular members and occasional gate-listers. This is good, because everyone knows that the bigger a parade is, the better it looks and the more fun everyone has! However, there are other faires that Danse Macabre performs at which are smaller venues and we sometimes have problems getting enough people together to make for a good parade. Because of the gate listing cap in place at Valhalla, we need to give priority to those people who give us support at the other venues. As such, to qualify for being on our gate list for Valhalla you need to participate in 8 of our parades during the year prior to the Valhalla event you want to be listed at. These 8 parades can be spread across any number of faires during the year preceding Valhalla. (Note: Parades at smaller venues will receive full credit, whereas parades at larger venues will not. I.E., if all you do is 8 parades at Casa and no others, you won't have enough credit to qualify for our Valhalla gatelist.)
Note that for any faire-related requirement listed above, guild management reserves the right to grant an exemption to an individual as deemed necessary on a case-by-case basis, at its sole descretion. Any exemptions granted will be extremely rare and only for specific circumstances, so it's really for the best if you just try to meet the requirements listed here.
Note regarding Bill Watters' faires: Bill runs the Renaissance Symposium during the early spring, which is a one-weekend event that provides workshops for the faires that he runs during the year. Anyone attending the Symposium and completing a minimum of 6 workshops will automatically get credit for 4 parades toward the requirement of number of parades that you need to do in order to attend those events which have that requirement.