Krafthouse at Center for Craft
Asheville Stages has never reviewed anything quite like what’s happening in the basement at the Center for Craft.
Krafthouse 2023: Forest of the New Trees features many of the elements of theater without actually being a performance. The exhibition is effectively a set, but one that visitors walk through rather than view from afar. It has costumes, but they’re shared between the cast and audience. It has actors, but there’s no specific script for them to follow.
There are precedents for this sort of art — Krafthouse is clearly inspired by the work of Meow Wolf, the Santa Fe-based collective known for immersive projects such as Denver’s Convergence Station and Omega Mart in Las Vegas. Yet the approach is new to Asheville, and creative director Jeannie Regan should be commended for taking an ambitious swing.
The project’s website describes Krafthouse as “an imagined post-major event Appalachia,” a forest dreamworld “where craft is the only way to survive and thrive.” To someone who hadn’t read that blurb, however, it wouldn’t be immediately apparent what was going on.
Visitors to the installation gather in the lobby of the Center for Craft before being escorted down to the basement and invited to put on costume pieces. But I found myself wanting more introduction or guidance along the way. A short pre-show spiel mentioned only that the audience would enter a “moneyless economy” of craft — not a reason why that brave new world would be in place or why outside visitors would find themselves there.
(On the theme of orientation, I also want to note the incredibly disorienting experience of leaving Krafthouse. Visitors are directed out a basement side door into a back alley, and even as someone who’s lived in Asheville for seven years, it took me a minute to figure out where in downtown I was. A bit of wayfinding signage would be in order.)
After reading the extensive collection of Krafthouse artist statements, things became a little more clear. Each of the many contributors to the installation is interpreting the idea of post-apocalyptic Appalchia in their own way: Jenny Fares, for example, imagined the “Temples of the Bald” after a pandemic that left survivors hairless, while the Local Cloth costuming team created clothes suitable for those rebuilding after climate change-driven social upheaval.
What it lacks in thematic cohesion, Krafthouse works to make up for in visual spectacle. I was particularly struck by a centrally placed video installation playing “Rubuto - Emprexx,” a trippy, mystical film by Asheville-based Damkianna. I also enjoyed “The Oasis of the Juicy Fruits” by the Swannatopia collective, a Day-Glo fantasy of singing produce.
And I appreciated the opportunities for audience participation throughout, with multiple stations where visitors are encouraged to draw or craft trinkets for trade with the artists. At one point, I was approached by a woman who claimed to have lost all her memories after getting “bonked on the head by a tree,” and after offering a memory of my own, I was rewarded with a pair of psychedelic glasses that I got to take home.
As Asheville’s first foray into immersive installation work, Krafthouse is a notable experiment. I’m eager to see what lessons those involved take into the artistic future of Western North Carolina.
Krafthouse 2023: Forest of the New Trees runs through Friday, Oct. 13, at the Center for Craft. For details and tickets, visit this link.
(Photo by Molly Milroy)
