Interacting with the other cast members and with guests is a big part of Kilt DeNamur’s job as Clopin. (Tammye Nash/Dallas Voice)

Being the court jester at Scarborough RenFest is serious business for Kitt DeNamur

Tammye Nash | Managing Editor
nash@dallasvoice.com

Each spring, for eight weekends — 17 days — out of the year, Kitt DeNamur puts aside his 21st-century self and dons his brightly-colored, custom-made costumes to become George Devereaux Clopin, the king’s jester at Scarborough Renaissance Festival. But even though he may dress the part of a clown and spend his time making people laugh, this annual gig is serious business for Kitt.

Kitt, a California native who made his way to Texas, joined the Scaborough cast some 15 years ago, playing the role of the king’s jester to King Henry the 8th and Queen Anne Boleyn, played then by actors Richard Patterson and Shannon Hopps. After a couple of years, Kitt switched characters and became Henry Fitzroy, prince of England, a role he kept until Hopps retired from the festival at the end of the 2013 season.

“I liked being Prince of England,” Kitt said with a laugh. “But you can only be Dudley Do-Right for so long before you want to do something else.”

When Kitt returned for the 2014 season, he came back as Juan Carlos of the Spanish Court, a part he played until two years ago when Scarborough’s directors decided to change things up a bit. They moved the “village faire” back even further in time, to the year 1521, when King Henry was married to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Florencia Arrechea-Collis began portraying Catherine, and Austin Zurovetz Davis took on the role of the younger King Henry.

And Kitt returned to his first Scarborough role as king’s jester.

“I am kind of the king’s secretary,” Kitt said in explaining his role. “I emcee the show at opening gate. I used to participate in the human chess match, but that is now the Clash of Champions. A lot of renaissance festivals had started doing human chess matches, so we decided to change it up.”

Kitt’s Clopin also participates in the Children’s Knighting Ceremony, the Country Dance, the Court Dance and more — including, of course, the Grande Parade held each day of the festival at 1 p.m.

Considering the size of the Scarborough cast and the number of patrons who attend the festival dressed to the nines in their best renfest garb, you might think Clopin would occasionally get lost in the crowd. That’s not likely, though, thanks to the jester’s handmade hat and costumes.

The hat is a costume piece Kitt is especially proud of. He designed it himself, then turned that design over to Sharon Sullivan with Dream Hats (located in the Holy Fields section of the Scarborough village). “Sharon made it for me from that design,” he said. “She is just wonderful and does amazing work.”

“Amazing” also applies to the custom-made velvet costume created by Ariana Reaves, a Fort Worth seamstress commissioned to make the suit. Kitt noted that Reaves hand-dyed individual pieces of the fabric to get the colors just right.

He calls Reaves’ one-of-a-kind creation his cold weather costume; he has a second one, made of lighter-weight fabric, for when the days get longer and hotter. But in either costume, Kitt said, he gets to focus on doing what he loves — entertaining people.

A life in theater
Kitt’s theatrical experience dates back to his childhood with his father, who was a stage technician and his step-mother, who was a musician. His parents divorced when he was five, and when he was about 8, he lived for awhile with his father and step-mother, when they were working at the Big Bear Performing Arts. His step-mother was a musician in the orchestra there and was stage manager when she wasn’t “in the pit” with the orchestra.

He went to high school in San Diego and was involved in the drama department and the choir there. He even performed at California’s Renaissance Pleasure Faire and got to attend the Barnum & Bailey Circus Experience in Florida.

“I was 15 or 16 when I started [at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire],” Kitt said. “They had a guild system, and each guild handled a different part of the faire.”

When it came time for college, Kitt headed for the University of Texas at Austin. It was a friend from UT who first introduced him to Scarborough Renaissance Festival. He met several cast members and performers, including one of the members of the a cappella group Queen Anne’s Lace and Ron Robinson, “a little person who was playing Donk, the jester for Queen Margaret.”

Everyone he talked to encouraged him to audition to be on cast the following year, and he enthusiastically took their advice.

Not still for long
Although being on cast at Scarborough is a demanding job, the festival is only open for 17 of the 365 days in each year. That leaves Kitt plenty of time for other jobs and hobbies.

“I don’t sit very well,” he smiled, “so I tend to keep very busy and active.”

While the Scarborough Academy Performing Arts cast members are only “onstage” for a relatively few days, there are months of rehearsal and planning. Kitt is part of the three-person “Language and Dialect” staff. “All of our performers are trained improv actors. There are no scripts. I just teach them to sound the right kind of different,” Kitt explained.

They get started around September or October on creating a curriculum, creating accent tapes and putting lesson plans in place for when other cast members get ready to start preparing for the next season. Then in February, the cast begins gathering each weekend for workshops and rehearsals.

Kitt also finds time for his “day job” as an IT solutions expert, and to volunteer as HR executive for an organization that stages an annual convention. Part of his work with the convention is to stage a drag show each year that raises money for the Center for Animal Research and Education, which specializes in large cat rescues (“large” as in lion and tiger large, not fat housecats). Kitt was in Pride as the witch at the Dark Hour Haunted House, participated in drag in a fashion show for Dallas PinUp at The Church at Lizard Lounge.

“When I lived in California, I did drag pretty regularly,” he said, adding that his mother helped him refine his style. “The first time I ever did drag, I got into her Mary Kay makeup and then went in her closet and put on one of her silk pants suits. It had this great floor link coat. She saw me and told me I looked like a ‘business lesbian.’ So, she picked out one of my sister’s dresses and redid my hair and makeup.”

But Kitt said his favorite was to stay busy is spending time with his husband, Ryan DeNamur. The two met at a gig as back-up dancers for Smile DK, a Swedish pop group known for music of DDR; Kitt has had years of training in various styles of dance, while Ryan specializes in para para, a kind of synchronized dancing that originated in Japan. They have been together for eight years and were married four years ago, on Halloween, in a friend’s backyard.

Kitt noted that he took Ryan’s last name when they were married.

Where Kitt is outgoing and loves to be “on stage,” Ryan is quiet, much preferring a sedate conversation one-on-one over a board game. “He is so wonderful,” Kitt said of Ryan. “He supports me in everything I do. He is the quiet side of me, and he is amazing.”

Finding acceptance, finding himself
For Kitt, the world of theater has always been “so open, so inviting.” And, he said, growing up in that world has taught him to be “so open, so welcoming” to all kinds of people and experiences. Working at Scarborough, he added, has given him and others the chance to grow and learn and find themselves.

“Faire gives you the chance to put on a character, to use that character to explore and find new parts of yourself,” he said. “I came to Scarborough and put on a new character, and saw that there is acceptance, and then I saw the affection and the kindness. I didn’t have to go somewhere waving a Pride flag to find acceptance.”

The renaissance festival world “doesn’t label itself as a specific community. We have people there from all walks of life, and they are letting people just be people. I love that we have such an amazing community,” he said. “I’m not going to say we are a family, really. We are there doing a job, and at the end of the day, it is theater. But as long as the curtain is up, we are family.”

Kitt also believes that the “residents” of Scarborough Village have a responsibility to the patrons who visit, to help them find something new and joyful within themselves, too. For him, he said, the actor’s job is explained eloquently and succinctly in a line from the movie Alegria, based on the Cirque de Soleil show of the same name when Frank Langella, as Fleur, the leader of the circus, says: “We step into the light for the people in the dark.”

Especially in the role of the jester Clopin, Kitt believes it is his responsibility to entertain the children who visit Scarborough Village, certainly, but also to help the adults who come “think of the child inside them, the child they left behind when they grew up. I want to help them leave all the stress and the frustration ‘out there,’ to forget about the outside world just for a little while and enjoy themselves.”

For the LGBT people who go to the renaissance festival, that can be especially important right now, Ki continued. “It’s really a very draining time for our community right now,” he said. “When they are at the faire, I want to find that shared pain and try to fix it, to make it better. We all have pain; we all have shared pain. But the more we share it, the less of it we have.”