Zorro hour
Anya Garner earns a paycheck tending to elderly clients as a nursing assistant. But during her off-hours, she is Anya the Swordswoman, a swashbuckling, rapier-wielding, rough-and-tumble-fighter.
“She doesn’t take any flak,” say Garner, a 43-year-old resident of Spokane’s North Side. “She doesn’t take much nonsense.”
Garner doesn’t inflict any actual harm on her enemies, though. She is a stage fighter and fight choreographer who performs at the Northwest Renaissance Festival and other events.
She’ll reprise her role as Anya the Swordswoman during this weekend’s Allegro Baroque and Beyond Royal Fireworks Festival and Concert at Riverfront Park.
“Anya is getting to be quite the heroine,” says festival artistic director Beverly Biggs.
Over the last several years, the crowd has been won over by her ferocity. Thousands of festival-goers chant, “Anya, Anya, Anya” as the small but mighty fighter bests many of the men she is pitted against.
The 26th annual Allegro baroque festival celebrates England of 1749 with music, theater, dance and, of course, fireworks. Some 30,000 people are expected to crowd Riverfront Park for the two-day event, Biggs says.
One of the festival’s highlights will be Saturday’s performance of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” directed by Spokane theater stalwart Jack Phillips, Biggs says. The show will be Phillips’ last in Spokane before he moves to suburban Chicago to head a theater there.
Shakespeare, of course, was long dead by 1749, but it was popular at that time to mount revivals of his plays, Biggs says.
At the start of each festival day, Garner and her teacher, Gary Williams, will lead a combat class. Anyone 14 and over can take part in the free class, in which participants will each be taught part of a choreographed fight. Once all of the fighters are assembled, “it’s going to look like a giant sword battle,” Williams says.
“Everyone that’s watching is fooled into thinking there are two dozen different fights going on.”
Fight-class participants will go to battle with fiberglass swords designed and built by Williams.
“At a distance of 10 feet, most people wouldn’t know it’s not a metal sword,” he says.
Garner’s passion for sword-fighting goes back to her earliest memories.
“From childhood, I always liked Zorro,” she says.
But it was in the mid-‘80s, while visiting a Renaissance festival in Colorado, that Garner was pulled into the past.
“You can step back in time,” she says. “It really created a certain atmosphere.”
She decided to take a fencing class and, later, a fight class. She’s now the assistant fight choreographer for the Northwest Renaissance Festival, as well as the director of the Society for Renaissance Performers.
She and her husband, Floyd, operate a booth at the festival called “A Lady and a Rogue.” They sell saddles, as well as period clothing and accessories such as cloaks and head wreaths.
But stage fighting, especially with her nimble rapier, is her real love.
“It’s a rush,” she says. “You have to be somewhat showy. You have to be bigger than life.”
And the fact that she’s a woman — supposedly the (wink-wink) weaker sex — only plays into her appeal.
“When you take a woman who is ordinarily a victim and make her the hero, you’ve got the crowd in your back pocket,” Williams says.
In one performance, a fighter jabbed Anya in the stomach with a 4-foot-long wooden stick.
“I had people gasp and jump to their feet because you never hit a woman,” Williams says. “I don’t believe in that. I like to push the envelope.”
It’s simply part of the theater, Garner says.
“To create a fight you have to figure out what the story of the fight is,” she says. “Every fight has a story.”
And for Garner, one of her favorite storylines comes in showing the youngest audience members that not all women have to be fairy princesses and proper ladies.
“The little girls get to see a swordswoman,” she says.