Asheville Fringe Arts Festival: Kaleidoscopic Bone House

It’s not Fringe unless you exit a show — virtually or otherwise — and ask yourself, what was that? After all, Fringe is an opportunity to push boundaries, take risks, and present shows that, frankly, would not get a platform anywhere else.

Kaleidoscopic Bone House, from Brooklyn-based musical duo Cookie Tongue, certainly checks all the Fringe-y boxes. But it is also a sumptuous feast for the eyes and ears, a triumph of craftsmanship, and a genuinely original melange of mediums that is probably only possible in this moment of virtual theater.

Cookie Tongue, currently made up of Omer Gal and Jacquelyn Marie Shannon, has a unique vibe: hallucinogenic and a little grotesque, but also very warm and almost childlike. They’re Michel Gondry meets David Lynch, or Hunter S. Thompson meets Sesame Street. Once I suspended my expectations for a firm plot or conventional storytelling, I really felt carried away by Cookie Tongue’s dreamlike performance.

The “loose” premise of Kaleidoscopic Bone House is that Cookie Tongue and we, the audience, are both involved in the casting of a spell — for what purpose, I never quite gleaned. The spell requires items like “a frozen vial of electric tears” and “a spoon from the mouth of the paper earth.” In turn, these items can only be found by journeying to a range of different settings, perhaps in different dimensions, and by singing different songs, of which Cookie Tongue has plenty.

Utilizing different visual mediums like charcoal, pastel, stop-motion animation, and puppetry, Cookie Tongue creates phantasmagoric landscapes against which the actual performers are inserted. This interplay of prerecorded video and live performance — among animation, puppetry, and music — is honestly something I’ve never seen before. It took me a while to get used to, but once I abandoned myself to the chaos, it was really quite beautiful. 

And then there is the music. Cookie Tongue employ a wide variety of instruments, from the musical saw to the glockenspiel. The novel instruments and unique vocals create a sort of folk-punk sound that seems right at home in Asheville. 

I don’t know what software or technique Cookie Tongue employed to make this effect but it is really striking. I do hope that other performers can be as creative as Cookie Tongue in virtual performance pieces that push the boundaries of this new medium. We’re going to be all-virtual for at least another year, it seems... so performing artists still have time to create something genuinely new, bespoke for the pandemic era.

The 2021 Asheville Fringe Arts Festival runs through Sunday, January 24. For a complete listing of shows, visit ashevillefringe.org

(Photo courtesy of Asheville Fringe)