Time to get your Steampunk gear tarnished up and ready for this year’s Steampunk Festival at Heritage Square, Oxnard on Saturday, October 13th 11:00AM – 7:00PM, and Sunday October 14th, 2017 from 11:00AM – 5:00PM. Join the gathering of goggle adorned top hats, corsets, Victorian clothing embellished in clocks and gears, leather and lace or just come to learn more about this fabulous sub-culture. You may even find fully functioning body parts! For questions call 805.766.0861, oxnardsteampunkfest.com/about-us/ or [email protected].
Do you want an opportunity to explore the history of Oxnard, to connect with the Steampunk community, to listen to musicians, hear curiosities and oddities and generally get to know the mad, mad world of Steampunk? Then join in the fun at the Oxnard Steampunk Fest, October 13th and 14th, at Heritage Square, 715 South A Street, Oxnard.
Steampunk celebrates the Victorian-era culture: the style, dress, machinery, food, and the fascinations with wonders and curiosities. Over the years since its inception, Steampunk has taken that fascination beyond the literary genre into costuming, music, art, re-creation of history and even the re-purposing of the ‘throw away’ modern world. This new community embraces and encourages difference, allowing those to set themselves free and express their inner personalities. As a great genre for makers, Steampunk has helped to make characters that were dreamt up by the cosplayers themselves. Often creations are not from the movies or TV shows.
In addition to children’s activities, such as face painting, music and performances on stage, a marketplace of great vendors of all trades, there will be presentations of the weird and wonderful, food to keep you going, roaming entertainers, workshops, panels and much more. Enter the costume contest and win prizes from local merchants ($5 entry). It’s a gathering of the whimsical and adventurous as you travel to the fascinating destination of historic Heritage Square, $15 pp each day, youth 15 and under are free.
Oxnard boomed in the late 19th century, the same era celebrated by members of the Steampunk community. This festival is important to downtown Oxnard, because, although there is a vast internet community of Steampunk, this event is needed in Ventura County to draw them together in real life. It helps people to connect with the past in a way that memorizing actual names and dates cannot. It can add spice and depth to history and stimulate those to learn more about different time periods, especially the Industrial Revolution. Think about the “what-ifs” of history, and you think about Steampunk.
