5 ways you can still enjoy the Renaissance Festival
The Ohio Renaissance Festival had high hopes to open despite the pandemic. Limited attendance. Social distance seating. Mask requirements.
In the end, organizers decided they couldn’t risk the health of the public, the festival participants, or their employees by hosting large weekly gatherings of people even with precautions in place.
However, renaissance vendors and entertainers haven’t disappeared. Like so many other people during COVID-19, they’ve simply migrated online. Here are five ways you can still enjoy some renaissance fun from home.
Digital Ren Faire
This Facebook page was started by a group of national renaissance performers. Here, you can find several videos of renaissance performances. There are full series such as “Towne Criers,” “Inside the Green Room,” and “Enchanted Creature Ball,” where the humans, fairies, and dragons who inhabit a fantasy forest dance, sing, play music, and tell stories. There are also individual videos by such performers as Axel the Sot, the drunken, singing sailor who performs the Ohio Ren Fest every year. Find it at www.facebook. com/digitalrenfaire.
Faire Relief 2020
This is another Facebook feature supporting renaissance festival vendors and performers whose livelihoods are threatened by COVID-19. Request to join the group.
Then, you can browse vendors by topic (leather goods, jewelry, apothecary, etc.) and purchase accordingly, or watch livestreamed performances by your favorite types of renaissance performer. Find it at www.facebook/ groups/FR2020.
Full Metal Jousting
The Knights of Valour, a fullcontact jousting company (where people can actually die), have been a fan favorite of the Ohio
Renaissance Festival for years. Although you won’t be seeing them this year, you can catch (or re-watch) “Full Metal Jousting,” a reality competition show that ran for one season on the History Channel in 2012.
The grand prize was $100,000 and highlights include a contestant who had to be removed from the show for punching a horse. Stream it on Amazon Prime.
Dirk and Guido and the Mudde Show
Other regular Ohio renaissance festival performers are Dirk and Guido, a pair of comic swordsmen, and the Mudde Show, who perform bawdy renditions of literary classics like “Beowulf ” and “Dante’s Inferno.” Dirk and Guido decided to withdraw from the fest in July, citing their high-risk status. In the meantime, they have videos of previous performances on their Facebook page, www.facebook.com/theswordsmen.
Theatre on the Ground, producers of the Mudde Show, made a similar, pre-emptive decision. You can catch member Ben McCauley at Starlight Radio Dreams, a podcast of comic radio-style sketches, and Jonathan Crocker, who has continued instruction on his “edible instruments” at Digital Ren Faire.
Artisans
People attend the Ohio Renaissance Festival for a variety of reasons. If shopping was yours, some festival vendors and artisans have online shops. For example, Naturecraft, which sells homemade beeswax candles and cosmetics, can be found at www.naturecraft.net.