Hail Zombo!
After Temple burn at Burning Man, I was saying goodbye to everyone when Stevie suggested a reunion in Detroit for Theatre Bizarre. I did not hesitate to say yes to a road trip and reunion. Upon getting back and settling in my day to day life, we started planning the trip.
Ultimately, twelve of us headed to Detroit on October 20 to experience one of the best Halloween parties I’ve ever been to.
Theatre Bizarre is an annual Halloween Masquerade running since 1999. In 2010, after running illegally for ten years, the city of Detroit moved to shut down the event. In 2011, the event moved to The Detroit Masonic Temple where it has been hosted ever since.
One of the reasons this event is so unique and special is the venue where it is hosted. The Detroit Masonic Temple was built 92 years ago and today it is the largest Masonic Temple in the world. The building was designed in neo-Gothic Architectural style, making it eerie in it of itself. Several of the rooms have different decorative treatments, the motifs of decoration being taken from the Egyptian, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Italian Renaissance, Byzantine, Gothic, and Romanesque styles. When you combine the building and its interior design with the decorations, props, and lighting that the creators of Theatre Bizarre install and curate, you get what could be the best Halloween venue in the world.
The event spans eight floors, featuring sixteen different rooms (Excluding hallways and minor rooms with art and side performances) with over 100 acts and 300+ performers. With so much going on at any given time, it is impossible to see it all.
Roller Girl was one of the many performers walking around the venue doing performances to groups of people as small as two. This allowed for a lot of interaction between patrons and performers. Some of the patrons engaged in performing acts, blurring the line of who was who. In a way, I felt like I was a part of the event! I can’t remember attending a party with that degree of immersiveness.
One of the first performances we saw was The Dirty Devils Peep Show, a collection of performance acts by burlesque dancers and ‘freak shows’ hosted by a hilarious master of ceremonies and his assistant. The show is designed as if we were in the 1920s. It was very entertaining and amusing. I had never seen a show of its kind.
Another performance I enjoyed was the contortionist at The Observatory, a lodge room transformed into a small theatre were speaking, phones, video, and photography were prohibited. The music in the room had a very dark feel, and both the lighting and the show made it seem like we were in the underworld. It had a very otherworldly feeling.
Eventually, we found ourselves at The Dancehall, a retro-futuristic hall that was transformed into a dance floor, featuring many local DJs spinning House and Detroit Techno. We danced our hearts out to the beat of the music.
Towards the end of the night, we found ourselves in The Ballroom, where many bands played throughout the night. The feeling of the hall when we were there was one of bliss and celebration: a band playing Irish music was rocking hard and confetti cannons were going off. It was an incredible time.
We rocked the party hard until almost 4:00 am. We all had a blast dressing up and experiencing one of the greatest Halloween events on earth. I am super stoked to turn this into an annual tradition. Not only do I get to experience an incredible,unique event, but I get to see part of my Burn family, which I usually see only once a year. Can’t wait for Theatre Bizarre 2019.
