In these anxious times, who would choose to immerse themselves in other people’s anxieties?
We did.
On the night of a near full moon, the eve of All Hallows Eve, my husband and daughter and I went to “No Place To Go.” Instead of a traditional Halloween haunted house, “No Place To Go” is a haunted tour by car through the west Denver suburbs. The route goes by a cemetery and past a motel called the Trail’s End.
Artistic directors Serena Chopra, Kate Speer and Frankie Toan designed “No Place To Go” to defy thinking that reduces the world to “male or female,” “straight or gay,” “black or white.”
Chopra puts collaboration at the center of the queer aesthetic. Working together is revolutionary in our militantly partisan times. Chopra, Speer and Toan brought in nine other artists to create vignettes for their show.
Speer told my Denverite colleague: “Our brains have been working in binary structures, at least in the U.S. culture and in Western cultures, for so long that it’s hard to conceive of multiplicity. So it’s a practice: the organic practice of trying to cultivate this collaborative project and hold nine different visions and synthesize them with a narrative.”
Carload by carload, audiences visited parking lots, stores and a coffee shop to see, and often to take part in, installations and brief performances. It was like driving through a movie – a psychological thriller – and pausing to get out of the car to explore each scene.
At the start of the tour we downloaded a phone app that we played as we drove. It provided directions to each stop, plus commentary and music that tied everything together. The narration provided coherence for groups of audiences approaching the scenes in different orders.
Chopra, Speer and Toan organized the schedule and itinerary to ensure that no more than one car was at any site at any given time. We got backed up a few times, but everyone we encountered was polite about social distancing.
We wore masks when we were out of the car. When a vignette included performers, they also wore masks and were either behind plastic screens or at a distance from the audience.
One of the installations included mesmerizing videos that audience members had to start by pushing buttons. A box of PPE was set out, with instructions to don a glove before touching any buttons.
At one stop, outside a brightly sinister fun house, I lost at tic-tac-toe to a slump-shouldered clown.
I was particularly intrigued by a performance piece called “A Liberace Dream.” Candelabras glittered in a dim, warehouse-sized storefront. Scenes from the pianist’s life were projected on a wall. As we watched Liberace hide behind glamor, a performer in the foreground was caught in an agonizing loop of flamboyance and secrecy.
Many of the pieces explored the horror of having to contort and limit the self to meet brutal expectations in a world where it can seem we are constantly being surveilled and judged. And let’s never forget that punishment has included death for those judged to be less than or to be outsiders.
Several “No Place To Go” scenes were set in empty stores in a West Colfax Avenue mall that has a Casa Bonita restaurant. Men were working out in a gym next to the “Liberace” performance. Families were picking up meals from fast food joints across the parking lot. People experiencing homelessness were rooting through dumpsters along the street.
I wondered whether any of the people going about their lives realized that challenging art was going on in what looked like abandoned shops. The juxtaposition underlined that “No Place To Go” was not about escapism.
“No Place To Go” was inspired by “Killjoy’s Kastle: A Lesbian, Feminist Haunted House” by Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue that has played in Toronto, London, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. The “Killjoy” monsters include polyamorous vampiric sex positive grannies, lesbian zombie folk singers and women’s studies professors. Speer and Toan, two of the “No Place To Go” creators, saw “Killjoy’s Kastle” last year in Philadelphia.
When Chopra, Speer and Toan began planning their own queering of the haunted house experience, they timed it for what they expected to be the culmination of a charged presidential campaign. The trio had not anticipated the pandemic, which has added to the tension that is almost a character in “No Place To Go.”
No place to go? There’s no need to go. I emerged from the show thinking about what it takes to stand where you are, and to share space with others. In confronting society’s fears of queerness, Chopra, Speer and Toan show us how to be brave.
Happy Halloween.