Sharpen your sword and get your best costume ready, the 10th annual Utah Renaissance Faire will take place this Friday and Saturday.

The fair is a family-friendly event suitable for all ages and will be held at Thanksgiving Point’s Electric Park in Lehi on Friday and Saturday from 10 a.m. until 8 p.m.

On Friday, the Utah Renaissance Faire will celebrate its 10th anniversary with one of Utah County’s first-ever synchronized drone shows and a performance from The Fire Celtic Band, a high-energy Scottish music band. This event will be free to the public.

“This will involve about 150 drones, and they’ll be forming dragons in the sky and doing all kinds of stuff,” said Richard Thurman, founder and executive director of the Utah Renaissance Faire. “We also have phenomenal fire dancers after the show.”

Saturday night will be headlined by the casts of BYUtv’s sketch comedy show Studio C and the musical improv group Show Offs after the last jousting show of the day.

Each day, the Knights of Mayhem and 12-time world jousting champion, Charlie Andrews, will present unscripted full-contact jousting contests.

For Thurman, the enthusiastic response he sees from those who attend the fair is what inspires him to put it on each year — despite the fact that putting together such an elaborate event has been a massive undertaking.

“We can’t make everybody happy, but most people leave happy and the last few years people have been lingering, they don’t want to leave,” he said. “So that to me is a good sign that people are enjoying it, and I certainly don’t put this on for myself, there is a myriad of workers who invest a lot of time into this.”

According to Thurman, the Utah Renaissance Faire isn’t all fun and games, visitors can expect to learn a lot as well.

“If someone has never been to a renaissance fair and they don’t know anything about history, first of all they’re going to get an education,” he said. “We have a lot of education stuff in the shire, we have artisans that show how you bite a bullet, how you weave a rug, and William Shakespeare will be there teaching people how you make a sonnet.”

Adult tickets are $17.50 when purchased online and $20 at the gate. Children 6 and under receive free admission. In an effort to support local education, groups of school children will be eligible for $5 admission to the fair on Friday from 10 a.m. until 3 p.m. and receive free bounce-back passes to the fair on Saturday.

For more information on the Utah Renaissance Faire or to purchase tickets, people can visit https://utahrenfaire.org/.

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