Arizona Renaissance Festival won't happen in 2021

The Arizona Renaissance Festival, which originally planned to reopen in February 2021 after having to cut its run short this year due to the pandemic, now will “change course” and skip the season.

“With COVID-19 cases surging throughout the state, the Arizona Renaissance Festival has canceled its announced ticket Pre-Sale and will not be opening this season,” organizers announced Dec. 9, after drawing some fire for their original plans to go ahead with the event.

We are saddened this decision may result in further hardship for our valued renaissance community of artists and disappoint our patrons. Many encourage us to be open, our festival community truly wants to get back to work. We earned governmental approval to open with an extensive COVID-19 safety operating plan. However, negative Covid conditions that have dramatically increased over recent days, the worst since the beginnings of the pandemic, and are forecast to worsen over the next weeks. Festival artist, vendor, and audience support to open at full scale is now more limited in comparison to the support necessary to be successful. We love presenting our annual arts and entertainment celebration. Join us with hope and optimism for the vaccines that can start the trend of resuming normal life that will include the pleasure of the full Arizona Renaissance Festival experience in 2022. We also wish to address social media conversations. Please be cautious to discern between information from us and information that arrives from those who are not actually festival production management. Hundreds of valued individuals work seasonally at the Renaissance Festival. Their opinions are respected with the caveat that some Facebook readers appear to misconstrue that they are speaking for, or represent festival management, when they do not.