The Louisiana Renaissance Festival transports guests into a world of medieval magic, bringing together Louisiana residents and out-of-state travelers for an adventure straight out of a fairytale.
The Louisiana Renaissance Festival, located in Hammond, Louisiana, celebrated the 25th anniversary with its opening gate show on Nov. 1, marking the beginning of the festival’s 2025 season. The event will run for six weekends from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., ending on Dec. 7 with its Yuletide celebration.
Visitors who come to the festival can immerse themselves into the fairytale world of Albright Village by shopping for swords, completing quests and even dressing up as damsels and dragons.
The festival features around 200 vendors this year, including leather-workers, seamstresses, swordsmiths, glassblowers, painters, jewelers and more. These artists come from across the country to share their work with Ren Fest visitors.
Beyond what festival-goers can see and buy, there is a lot that goes into finding these vendors. Alvon Brumfield, CEO and founder of the Louisiana Renaissance Festival, explained how he searches for artists at Renaissance Festivals around the country, as well as at more modern arts and crafts fairs.
“We go around other places, looking for talent that is elsewhere, to bring them here. We want Louisiana to have all the best,” Brumfield said.
Some vendors set up shop for just one or two years, while others work to establish themselves as businesses that people can look forward to seeing every year. The festival offers small businesses the chance to grow and introduce more people to their art.
If you forget your own costume, there are dozens of options readily available from merchants all throughout the festival. Danielle Degutz, owner of Lizard Queen Leather, is a leather-worker who specially designs animal horns in a rainbow of colors, among other pieces. Originally, her work started out as a simple hobby.
“A friend gave me some leather scraps, and I was looking for something to do,” Degutz said.
What was once a way to pass the time has now flourished into a professional career for Degutz, an opportunity she attributes to the Renaissance Festival.
“I feel like it’s the one place where you can actually make a living off of your art,” Degutz said.
Another frequent merchant at the festival is Durian Songbird. He owns two businesses, Songbird Ocarina and Dancing Wings, and showcases both shops at the Louisiana Ren Fest, as well as other Renaissance Festivals in states across the country such as Georgia, California and Massachusetts. The California-based artist first discovered ocarina-making in 1989, and since the beginning, his process has been deeply rooted in nature and ancient technique.
“We got to find a nice tributary of a river, and you find the really nice clay that doesn’t have a lot of silt in it, but it’s got just the right amount of grog,” Songbird said.
After finding clay that is the perfect consistency — not too rocky and not too soft — Songbird molds solid balls of clay into shape by hand, as well as creating a liquid clay that he pours into plaster molds.
“We’re using 5,000-year-old technology of molds made out of plaster of Paris, or gypsum,” he said. “And so it’s very ancient technology.”
Both his ocarinas and his dancing wings, which are hemmed and pleated lengths of different fabrics that move gracefully with your arms as you dance, have a singular purpose: to bring joy to and empower everyone who stops by his tents. Songbird’s favorite moments are when customers express their excitement that they can play a simple tune on the unique instrument or dance beautifully with their distinctive wings.
“They’re like, ‘Oh, I could play music.’ And so it’s an empowerment thing,” Songbird said. “And then same with the wings. You don’t have to be a professional dancer. You can just move with them, and they feel beautiful and the way they flow. It’s kind of a creative license, creative empowerment.”
What truly gives the Louisiana Renaissance Fest its magic is not just the vendors and performers, but the tens of thousands of visitors who embrace the 16th century setting.
Festival-goers come dressed as fairies, knights, princesses, elves and anything else their imaginations can conjure. Many guests even follow the themes of each weekend, such as All Hallows, Wizards and Legends, Pirate, Celtic, Viking and Yuletide Market. These costumes can be as simple as a corset and maxi skirt to as intricate as handmade outfits.
If you visited the festival this past weekend, you may have seen three rats scampering around the village. Mira Buckheit, Zarya Curran and Violet Curran came dressed as rats from the Bubonic Plague. Zarya Curran said the trio took inspiration from others online.
“We thought it would be fun to just have some chaos,” Violet Curran said.
The three friends wore hats shaped like rat heads, all handmade by Zarya Curran herself.
“They’re just out of cardboard,” she said. “I work at a coffee shop, and I just kept taking boxes home and scrapped them all together like that.”
Buckheit expressed how the community aspect of the festival has drawn her in for the past three years, and she loves to watch the vendors hone their craft and grow as businesses.
This community is not a monolith — it draws in people from all walks of life no matter age, class, occupation or life experiences. Ultimately, the Louisiana Renaissance Festival brings people together in a space where they can come as they are.
“It’s a very intergenerational thing,” Songbird said. “There’s grandparents here and kids, so all ages kind of vibe to it. There’s not too many places in our world where that happens.”
