This coming October, I and my family and friends will become the Mad Unicorn Collective. Together we will create our 6th annual Halloween spectacle, our creative gift to the Summit Park neighborhood specifically and Abq in general. This year the one-day theater event will be based on Jules Verne’s Journey To The Center Of The Earth (1864). Last year’s Alice In Wonderland was hugely gratifying, and with the addition of Art Street maven and Action Theater maestro Mindy Grossberg to the mix, exponentially more awesome and complex. We will be applying for a Fulcrum grant to support this year’s project.

Why Halloween? And what is the historical and political context of our neighborhood shindig?

Well. Let me try to articulate this.

Halloween is American pop culture’s Carnival–the one time in the round of the commercial year when masking is the norm, and a hint of Carnival’s medieval traditions of social inversion finds open expression. As a pagan holiday, Halloween is a time of resistance to cultural and spiritual oppression. And at the same time, it’s a trashy love affair with pulpy pop fantasies, a chance to send up oppressive tropes while wearing them.

Just as Carnival, the Maypole, and peasant political resistance went together in the 16th century, our Halloween will be centered around a kind of Maypole, and signals a kind of call to resistance for the peasants of our era–us. In the visual language of Journey to the Center of the Earth, a giant, phosphorescent mushroom, within a grove of its brethren. As members of the 99%, we want to make art that embodies joyous resistance. Rather than proselytizing, we want to invite other regular folk into the chaos of a creative space, knowing that such spaces are exceedingly rare, and very powerful. 

Our spectacle is a local and low-brow affair. Its theme is well-known, and the images we’ll create are venerable tropes. We do this on purpose, because we want participants to emotionally and imaginatively step into our fantasy with ease. We expect kids and families to spend an average of 5 minutes with us, so familiarity will be a boon to the use of the space.

Wish us luck in the writing and production process!

A note:

I first “read” Barbara Ehrenreich’s Dancing in the Streets (2006) in 2008, listening on my drives up to Santa Fe and counseling school. I’m drawing on her analysis of the history of collective joy for inspiration here. Here’s a review of the book, by Ann Canale PhD of Lindenwood University.

Journey to the Center of the Earth, illustrated by Eduoard Riou. Illustrations here are taken from that copyright-unprotected version.