Maryland Ren Faire returns.
Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye. Let it be said aloud and all those that gather to lend ear. The Maryland Renaissance Festival has returned. Here is the entertainment Schedule
The Maryland Renaissance Festival has become the region’s premier outdoor event and the second largest Renaissance Festival in the country. Since the Festival’s first season as a ramshackle village in 1977, the event has matured into a large theme show with more than 1,300 participants and 225,000 guests per season.The Maryland Renaissance Festival employs more than 600 people during each season, working in entertainment and customer service. Eighty-five acres of parking space handle an average of 12,000 customers daily. The English Tudor village is 125 acres of woods and field that transport patrons to an era of chivalry, bawdiness, and good fun. There are more than 130 craft shops displaying many wares handmade by the village artisans. Forty-two food outlets provide a feast of foods rarely seen at other festivals. Each season, more than half a million beverages are served at the Festival’s eight soft drink stands, five beer stands, and five taverns.
More than a single business, the Festival attracts thousands of tourists and tour groups to the region. The Festival has been recognized by the American Bus Association as one of the 100 best events in North America. Here is what are good friends over at Wikipedia have to say about it…
A Renaissance fair or Renaissance festival[1] is an outdoor weekend gathering ostensibly focused on recreating life as it was during the Renaissance, a period usually set during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, and usually in England, but sometimes earlier, during the reign of Henry VIII, and in other countries, such as France.
Chicago journalist Neil Steinberg said (of the Bristol Renaissance Faire), “If theme parks, with their pasteboard main streets, reek of a bland, safe, homogenized, whitebread America, the Renaissance Faire is at the other end of the social spectrum, a whiff of the occult, a flash of danger and a hint of the erotic. Here, they let you throw axes. Here are more beer and bosoms than you’ll find in all of Disney World.”[2]
While historical reenactments are by no means exclusive to the United States (for example, the Earl of Eglinton in Scotland sponsored a large tournament as early as 1839), the Renaissance Fair is, arguably, a uniquely American variation on the theme, having as much the flavor of an amusement park or mall as of a historical reenactment. Since the mid-1990s, their popularity has been spreading into western Canada. The people acting the roles (‘participants’ or ‘actors’), frequently young volunteers, often attempt to recreate swashbuckling movies, The Lord of the Rings, or Monty Python and the Holy Grail as fervently as other participants attempt to be ‘historically accurate’, while guests (‘patrons’) may be equally interested in drinking, eating, shopping, and watching farce as they are in an educational experience.
Experienced fairgoers often admit that attempts at re-enactment vary in their degree of success, being heavily dependent upon the ethos of fair management/direction, the culture and precedent of the specific fair, and the demographics of its audience. Some fairs endeavor to limit their scope to a comparatively narrow slice of history, while others may attempt to cram approximately 600 years of history from the High Medieval period to the High Renaissance into one place, juxtaposed with recognizable fictional characters and events (Three Musketeers or Dragonslayers). Although religion was a very important part of life in the renaissance era, this aspect is often downplayed.[citation needed]
Spinoffs of Renaissance Fairs include fairs set in other time periods, such as Christmas fairs set in Charles Dickens‘ London.
Most Renaissance Fairs are arranged to represent an imagined village in England during the reign of Elizabeth I, as this period is generally considered to correspond to the flowering of the English Renaissance (most especially because this was the time of Shakespeare).
There are stages or performance areas set up for scheduled shows such as plays in Shakespearean or commedia dell’ arte tradition, or (frequently anachronistic) audience participation comedy routines. Other performances include dancers, musicians, jugglers, and singers. Between the stages the “streets” are lined with stores (’shoppes’) where independent vendors sell their wares, alongside food and beer vendors, as well as game and ride areas. Fairs will also often include a joust as a main attraction. Meanwhile, strolling minstrels, mimes, fools, jugglers and jesters mingle with the fairgoers. Actors (often called participants) portray historical figures and common people, from royalty and nobility to merchants and peasants, and are often organized into thematic “guilds” (such as the peasant guild, Scottish guild, or parade guild). Actors wear period costumes, some meticulously researched recreations and others more generic impressions, and speak using an approximation of the vocabulary and accents of the time. The accompanying bazaar features traditional crafts, from jewelry and stained glass to metal and woodwork, as well as traditional English foods like bangers and mash.
Increasingly through the past decade, fair patrons have begun “getting into the act” by dressing up right along side the professional “cast members”. A secondary industry of providing and selling renaissance and fantasy garb, some equally as elaborate and costly as the professional costumes worn by the cast, is booming. These “playtrons”, as they are known (a combination of the words “patron” and “player”), add a second level of enjoyment to their experience by “getting into the act” as renaissance Lords and ladies, peasants, pirates, belly dancers, or fantasy characters.
While every fair is unique and holds its own complex history, many include one key event. At the end of each day, the musicians and performers gather together on a single stage in order to perform the Pub Sing, where patrons and actors alike come together to end the day’s festivities. The tunes played can often be sung along to, and many times the musicians all play together for one final piece before closing. For those who work at the Fair, the last Pub Sing that a festival holds is traditionally an emotional moment, as it also is their last goodbye to the festival before it comes back next year. At other fairs, the closing parade becomes the focus for the final day of the run. At the two main California fairs, the final closing parade on the final day is called Grand Ringout, and the procession, in a tradition dating back to the earliest Faires, includes most of the cast, crew and staff.
At its peak, the Renaissance Pleasure Faire in Black Point, Novato, California hosted as many as 18,000 visitors in a day. For a time in the 1980s the Renaissance Pleasure Faire in Agoura, California held the Guinness Book of Records record for most beer sold at a single venue.
My wife and I will definitely be there, Taking our daughter for her first one. If you have not checked it out before, you really ought to give it a shot, if for no other reason the people watching is priceless. Talk to you soon Kids
CHEERS!!!
L
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