Three short videos & some snapshots of the alternative medieval timeline on view one recent Saturday at the 2025 West Virginia Renaissance Festival. | June 24, 2025
By Douglas John Imbrogno | June 24, 2025 |
I was working late one recent night on video clips and photographs captured while attending the recent Pirate-themed weekend of the West Virginia Renaissance Festival in the green, rolling mountains outside Lewisburg, West Virginia. The month-long event takes place in a sprawling compound out in those hills all four weekends each June (with a final ‘Bacchanalia’ weekend approaching this year on June 28-29). I was about to post some of this work when I read online of Trump’s questionable bombing of Iran this past Saturday. Should I postpone my creative efforts? Shouldn’t I be back at the front lines of protest and commentary, instead of fine-tuning imagery of elves, knights, jousters on horseback, and free-range chickens? (A lot of chickens and roosters run the roost at this Ren Faire!) I paused my work that night and went to bed on that question.
The next day, I returned to my handiwork. Even as Donald Trump’s trainwreck administration crashes onward with his new Iran misadventure and ongoing ‘deportation regime,’ creating yet more global anxiety and trauma, we must somehow counter this onslaught of mis-rule with protest and solidarity while also continuing to lead rich, anti-traumatic lives. And also go hang out with pointy-eared medieval fairies while jonesing to harp music.
I try to do what I can with my small media megaphone and multimedia activism. I regularly publish my own and other voices raised on behalf of sane, human-centered politics and culture, via commentary, photography, videos, and lifting up into view worthy protest and great analysis I find elsewhere. Even some enlightened sermons, too. (See examples here, here, and here). I most certainly need to do more. Yet healthy spirits, communal gathering, and celebration are part and parcel, too, of resistance to the dystopian, soul-deadening, and anti-life worldview of the current cabal in control of America. Joy, after all, is a kind of resistance, also.
VIDEO: ‘IT’S JOUST US’: Horsing around at the 2025 W.Va. Renaissance Festival (Click to View)
So, then, at least for the few minutes that you are visiting the Free State of WestVirginiaVille, let us proceed onward to the faire. And after the visit, let’s vow to return to whatever barricades we are called to man, to woman, and maybe also to elf and fairy. And return, also, to the shared effort of well-lived lives. Let us doubly vow not to be done in by Donny, drawing strength from history’s long arc from medieval times to today—and its usual and damning final judgment on world-class bullies. After all, sometime in the not-distant future this pretender to American kingship, this wannabe influencer-autocrat, will be just a minor character and storyline, mocked at a wild and crazy faire full of far more fun and life-filled human beings. And who are those?
The ones who will outlast him with their hearts and souls intact.
Plus, I could use some bagpipe and drum music from deep within the enfolding Appalachian hills about now, courtesy of this multi-instrumental dynamic duo. Hear them live below at one very high-spirited Ren Faire way out in the weird and wonderful West Virginia hills.
VIDEO: ‘MGNUS & MAGGIE’: Live at the 2025 W.Va. Renaissance Festival. (Click to View)
ONE FOR THE ROAD
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