Sadly, my guild (I am not the GM) no longer finds the time it seems to have any sort of training or organizational meetings, at least they haven't had one in over a year. And it is a court guild! No, I am not happy about this, and have requested we get back to our usual once a month day long meetings where we do training exercises, costume work, repair work, and all the stuff one normally does as part of the guild experience.

As to the faires I do, there are a few in my area that are one weekend events. One the the end of April, then the next weekend in May, then a long stretch to the one October, then one in November. If I wanted to, I could travel further, as there are at least one small faire event a month (sometimes more) in the state of CA that we could be involved in some way with. I used to do so as a Scots guild, along with dance practice on a weekly basis, and various other forms of training on a monthly basis every month except during the winter holidays when we hibernated.

And while our guilds in the local area used to, once upon a long time ago, work together to prepare for the faires in some form or another (usually following the court guild's lead), such practices seem to be falling out of favor in my local area. Most guilds now do some form of activity within their encampment for the education/entertainment of the crowds, some do more street gigs, and the various noble/court guilds do work together to put on one unified (sorta) court entertainment. We are stretched across many miles so most of that work is behind the scenes, with one large group rehearsal the weekend before the planned event, if that.

Traditionally MNRF has held "Academy" for new cast members. If I remember it was two weeks of evening classes that were primarily focused on things like acting/interacting/improvisation a couple weeks before opening weekend. Other groups like the mayor's entourage and Royal Court made appearances to introduce them to the new street characters, but those groups had their own meetings/rehearsals.

RPFS in general has workshops/build/rehearsals for four weekends prior to a seven weekend run.

Specific guilds, groups, and troupes that perform at RPFS have their own schedules of meetings and rehearsals.

I can speak specifically for the Country Garden Dancers. We currently have weekly practices mid-week and an additional monthly practice on a Sunday to work on learning and drilling dances. Closer to Faire-time we'll start rehearsing our show.

At Nor Cal Ren Faire, we basically follow the same schedule as RPFS, We have faire-run 4 weeks rehearsal and workshops directly before run of faire and again like Southern each guild has their own schedule of rehearsals.

Possibly someone from court can verify or correct me but for example, I know that our court guild has weekly dance classes as well as, I beleive, monthly rehearsals.

For my guild, St Lukes, (we are a merchant class guild) I have found that like Rydell, I can't get everyone together once a month. I find that a quarterly combination of workshop and rehearsal (usually it's a half-day or sometimes longer) is not too much to ask for most of the members. We have around 25 or 30 active folks. During the above mentioned workshops pre-faire, we also usually have more guild-specific rehearsing in additon to the faire-run workshops.

Val
GM St Lukes at NCRF

St George South has monthly meetings that usually run from 9:30am to about 3-4pm - singing, notes/announcements, some kind of focused activity or lecture, dancing, character interaction. The focused part can be anything from a lecture on time & place or activity, or workshop-style on character development, period language, etc. On top of that we have bi-weekly singing and dance rehearsals. Sadly we don't get full guild participation at these either, but we do manage to truck along with a core group.

St Ives has pretty much a meeting or two before the run of faire, and we usually require guild member attendance at the workshops our members teach because they're generally focused on middle-class life.