Olde Reed is So Back: Renn Fayre Projects

Renn Fayre celebrates the completion of senior theses with a weekend of revelry, debauchery, and creativity. If you are looking for a complete history of Renn Fayre, you will not find it here–consider searching the Grail website for the glorious "The Complete History of Renn Fayre" series by Opal Click ‘16 and Alejandro Chavez ‘17, with a final installment by Guananí Gómez ‘18, Lauren Mondroski ‘21, and Claire Pask ‘19. This article instead hopes to chronicle a brief history of Renn Fayre projects and highlight some especially funny projects from alumni interviews, in the hopes of sparking the creativity of today's Reedies and encouraging these projects in the future. 

A Renn Fayre project is whatever you want it to be. It can be visual art, performance art, a sporting event, or ritual combat. Renn Fayre, originally called the "Gaye Faire," was started by Linda Howard '70, a key figure in the Black Student Union occupation of Eliot Hall that led to the creation of Reed's Black Studies program. According to Reed Magazine's In Memoriam for Howard, “I wanted to bring people out of their dorms and onto the lawn, [so] that we could actually be a community together for a day.” Throughout the years, Renn Fayre has evolved and changed dramatically from its original form.

Early Renn Fayres were more focused on a Renaissance theme, with today's system of yearly themes only truly emerging in 2000. The first Renn Fayre was held in 1968, with projects including a maypole and craft booths. The maypole has remained a fairly consistent Renn Fayre tradition, with appearances including last year's Renn Fayre 2024 maypole. Renaissance attire and jousting in medieval-inspired suits of armor were common until at least 1999. In the late '60s and early '70s, other Renaissance-themed Renn Fayre projects were common. According to Comrades of the Quest: An Oral History of Reed College, these Renn Fayres included human chess between faculty against students, where people dressed as chess pieces were directed by teams on a giant chessboard. Human chess was still around in 1984, with Darunee von Fleckenstein Wilson ’84 as the white queen, in 1997 with statistics professor Albyn Jones directing the faculty team, and in the period between 2008 and 2017 as recalled in the "Complete History of Renn Fayre." During the late '60s and early '70s, history professor T. C. Price Zimmermann sold copies of a calligraphed translated letter of indulgence and dressed as a monk to lead a flagellant parade, which appears to still have been occurring on and off up to at least 1990. The flagellation parade was revived at some point by William Abernathy '88, who spoke about it in Comrades of the Quest. The first Renn Fayre softball tournament was in 1977, although whether that is a project or another type of tradition is open to interpretation.

Before the days of the Renn Fayre Committee and risk assessment, 1980s Renn Fayre activities included hot air balloons, skydiving, renting a Ferris Wheel, and allegedly dropping the Doyle Owl from a helicopter during the softball tournament, according to Brian Ruess ‘87. The Doyle Owl appears to have made several appearances at Renn Fayre throughout the years. In Comrades of the Quest, David Holinstat '78 recalled that a chemistry professor's explosive demonstration ended in an owl reveal. The Owl makes another appearance in Giving Up Steam, a documentary by Daniel T. Levin '90, where students appear to have built a candlelit shrine to it and engaged in an Owl Fight sometime during the festivities. Kurt Peterson Shanfield ’86's obituary in the Reed Magazine mentions that she stole a golf cart and drove it around the Quad during Renn Fayre. Alumni from the '80s in Comrades of the Quest remember projects such as naked students covered in fluorescent paint, and performance art such as a five-minute performance of an entire Shakespeare play. 

A relatively consistent Renn Fayre tradition from at least the 1980s to today has been the gigantic maze made of trash bags on the Great Lawn. It is mentioned in Comrades of the Quest as a Renn Fayre 1983 project, and in Giving Up Steam at Renn Fayre 1991. Josie Griffin '09 recalled that the maze existed every year from 2004 to 2009, and said that one year there was a slide over ten feet tall in one of the maze passages, so that students had to climb to the top and slide down to continue. According to "The Complete History of Renn Fayre," the "traditional giant maze" was proposed as a Renn Fayre project in 2017. Last year, Bring Art to Renn Fayre (BARF) constructed the maze on the Great Lawn with pillow chambers and hidden treasure. 

Another beloved Renn Fayre art tradition, Glow Opera, originated in 1988. Glow Opera is, essentially, an original student play performed with actors covered in glowsticks. The Grail and "Giving Up Steam," a documentary by Daniel T. Levin '90, both note that Reedies latched onto Glow Opera as a tradition remarkably quickly, with students in "Giving Up Steam" noting that it was only a year old but already referred to as traditional (it was actually two years old at the time, but the first and second Glow Operas were very different events). According to Comrades of the Quest, Leslie Hemstreet '88 ran a women's chorus, and decided in 1988 to put on a Renn Fayre show with glowsticks in their mouths, which they called Glow Opera. According to Joli Bennet '91, a performer in the first two Glow Operas and director of the third, the performers were arranged in a grid and could only sing tones, not words, as a result of the glowsticks in their mouths. They coordinated their singing to make "trippy patterns" with the glowsticks. The second Glow Opera was held in Cerf Amphitheatre, with the chorus, dancers, and a marching band. Glowsticks were relatively new at the time, so a musical featuring glowstick costumes was quite impressive. 

Glow Opera 1990 was more elaborate and longer than the first two, with a plot and even more performers. It was held inside Vollum Lecture Hall due to rain. Bennet wrote and choreographed the show for an independent study in choreography credit, and reports that the show involved singers, dancers, a marching band, a Reed band in the balcony of the lecture hall, and two bikes covered in glowsticks that did laps around the stage during one song. The plot revolves around a Reed student, Parsley's, dreams and nightmares as his thesis deadline approaches. Bennet described several scenes, saying "In one dance scene, the dancers were pages of Parsley's thesis whirling around him, always just out of reach. In another dance scene, the Reed dogs do a raucous dance that ends with them piling onto Parsley. There was an operatic scene inspired by the Commendatore from Don Giovanni, which I had studied in Hum 220. Another musical performance took its inspiration from a scene in David Lynch's Eraserhead that had really freaked me out. I was going for a 'fantastical dream bordering on low-key nightmarishness' vibe." The dancers dressed in black with glowsticks taped to them. Ben Salzberg '94 recalls that at the end of Glow Opera, performers would tear off their glowsticks and throw them into the audience. Bennet told the Quest that the original plan for Glow Opera '90 was for performers to walk up the aisles of Vollum lecture hall handing out glowsticks, but the room was so packed that performers couldn't leave the stage! The performers improvised by pulling glowsticks off their bodies and hurling them into the audience, which appears to have become a tradition for at least a few years.

Glow Opera continued to evolve throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. Tedra Demitriou '92 recalls that one later Glow Opera contained a swamp creature that rose from the Canyon mid-performance and attacked the shrieking performers with mud. Salzberg recalled that later Glow Operas featured electroluminescent (EL) wire and LED lights, allowing for greater control of their effects. Glow Opera was around until at least 2001 according to Salzberg's photo archive, and appears to have faded between 2008 and 2014. Renn Fayre 2022 had a small Glow Opera in the dome with neon clothing and glowsticks. According to Ella Arnold '25, the 2022 opera was a vaguely Dr. Seuss-themed spoof musical. Alumni consulted for this article wanted to ensure that today's Reedies understand that the WMD fire spinning show and Glow Opera are two separate and awesome Renn Fayre traditions, and they hope that Glow Opera returns. Bennet said of potential new Glow Operas, "The whole point of something creative is to make something new and original," and encouraged current and future Reedies to put their own spin on Reed traditions.

In 1990, Van Havig '92 and Ru Russell '96 decorated the library entrance for Thesis Parade, which has since become a tradition. Giving up Steam recorded projects including a sculpture of dangling ribs "for dogs to feel included in Renn Fayre," a dragon puppet marching in Thesis Parade, and a flagellation procession in which students shouted Bible passages and hit themselves and others with wooden boards. A DRUG ALERT pamphlet and a statue of Ronald McDonald in a tree holding an anti-drug sign both appear in Giving Up Steam. It is unclear whether these are Renn Fayre projects or real anti-drug PSAs. 

In the 1990s, many Renn Fayre projects appear to have focused on sports or combat. At the same time, Policy and Liability and drug and alcohol policies began to impact Renn Fayre planning, marking the beginning of the end for the wondrous and hazardous projects of the ‘80s. The 1999 Renn Fayre had "Olympic events" such as Capture the Flag, shopping cart chariot races, and the Iliad Toss, as well as the traditional knight in armor tournaments. Students would read a passage of the Iliad from atop Eliot Hall, then chuck the book as far as they could towards a cheering crowd on the Great Lawn. The final installment of "The Complete History of Renn Fayre" makes reference to a "Flaming Iliad Toss," which is presumably the same thing but with fire. There was also a slip ‘n' slide on the hill where the PAB stands today, which students slid down naked. Demitriou and Rob Coleman '92 both recall the existence of a water balloon launcher, which eventually became too powerful and had to stop after it became capable of launching balloons over ODB to hit targets. Picting and copting, where students with orange paintball guns try to shoot naked blue people, was started by Lynn Rosskamp '94 and continues to this day. 

In 1998, CHVNK 666 staged an enormous bike battle. CHVNK was a bike gang/performance art group with post-apocalyptic lore, and often ran Renn Fayre bike jousting. According to Comrades of the Quest, CHVNK was founded by Karl Anderson ’95, Al Kun ’95, and Justin Callaway ’94. Anderson welded two bikes together to create the first tall bike in recorded Reed's history, a contraption which would later become a staple of bike jousting. Their first event involved tricycling around a fire in the Quad. Bike jousting, primarily run by CHVNK, continued at least until 2010, with a particularly well-attended bike race at Renn Fayre 2005 forcing the group to reconsider their strategy and begin spreading out into smaller, sporadic performances. A bike jousting project was proposed in 2024, but did not receive funding. CHVNK was also known for building a large wooden tower that was the site of ritual combat during and after Thesis Parade and destroyed by the end of Renn Fayre, sometimes by fire. Another student group, Defenders of the Universe (DotU), made projects such as a giant hamster wheel. They operated on a year-round basis, but were also involved in building large Renn Fayre projects. 

In the 2010s, due to injuries and progressively stricter safety regulations for projects, the CHVNK Tower eventually fizzled out. Gary Granger, Director of Community Safety, told the Quest, "I was unpopular at Renn Fayre the first few years I was here, because I said people shouldn't set things on fire," but he stated that he did not directly put a stop to the CHVNK Tower. He also reported that the Renn Fayre fireworks were stopped by students due to concerns about pollution and debris in the Canyon, not for safety or fire concerns. 

In 2000, the first Renn Fayre theme was actually a Renn Fayre project! A "Mistress of Costumery" declared that the theme would be superheroes, and students wore superhero costumes throughout the weekend. The theme went over so well that themed costumes have been an official staple of Renn Fayre ever since. Salzberg recalled that his favorite Renn Fayre theme was "8-bit Renn Fayre," when the Library entrance was decorated with Pac-Man ghosts and the GCC basement was transformed into Bowser's dungeon, complete with a giant papier-maché Bowser. 

Griffin started Bring Art To Renn Fayre, or BARF, in 2024 in the hopes of reviving Renn Fayre art installations after their post-pandemic decline. She remembers the CHVNK battles fondly, and says that her favorite Renn Fayre project was a 30-foot-tall papier-mache crocodile clock from the movie Hook for a Neverland-themed Renn Fayre. Griffin and Salzberg both fondly remember "vent art," in which lightweight installations would be powered by the air vents in front of Eliot on the Great Lawn. Some highlights included entire rooms made of lightweight plastic and inflated by the vents, inflatable fish, and a waterwheel-like structure that dipped into bubble fluid and blew bubbles as it spun in the vent wind. Griffin brought back the vent sculptures in the form of inflatable fish for Renn Fayre 2024. She recalls that Renn Fayre projects were physically larger in the past, and that it is more difficult to put those large-scale projects together now that more Reedies live on campus and we no longer have a tool library. 

Beginning in 2024, many more projects were being proposed than in previous years, bringing more attention to the Renn Fayre Committee policy that all projects needed to be proposed by a deadline not only to get Renn Fayre funding, but to be allowed to be put up at all. This caused some consternation among BARF members who were worried about the policy preventing art projects from being seen, but the Renn Fayre Czars clarified that the approval process was intended to make safety and cleanup easier, and a wide variety of projects were approved and installed. Due to some confusion about whether non-funded projects needed to apply, the czars later did a second round of approvals exclusively for non-funded projects, which they then quickly pushed through Renn Fayre's safety committee and insurance approval processes, and a huge number of art projects were put up around campus. 

Some favorite alumni projects from the BARF brainstorming document and the authors of the "Complete History of Renn Fayre" include a pyramid with a giant eye at the top that functioned as a periscope, forests of fairy lights on the lawn trees, the Talk To God phone where you could talk to "God" (another student somewhere across campus), and covering the lawn with pink flamingos. In 2014, two physics majors, Anya Demko ’14 and Allie Morgan ’14, turned the Vollum spiral staircase into a musical instrument that could be played by jumping from stair to stair, inspired by a museum installation in Boston. In 2017, there was a Renn Fayre fashion show for students to show off their themed outfits. Some of these favorite projects, like the lawn letters and Decentralized Dance Party, returned in 2023 and ‘24 as alumni worked with current students to revive them. This year, Renn Fayre project submissions have just been submitted, and the Renn Fayre Committee, which includes the Renn Fayre Czars, Facilities, and other departments involved in Renn Fayre safety, are busily working to allocate funding and space to the projects. BARF build sessions, where students, staff, and alums work together to share tools and make their projects come to life, will start on the 22nd of March and will be every Saturday at noon until Renn Fayre begins on May 2.