Nowhere have I seen this better showcased than at Montana's annual World of Wearableart. Every year artists from all around the world create absolutely stunning pieces using any and every material you can imagine to fully transform the models into something that redefines the corporeal and marries it to the realm of the imaginary. If I sound melodramatic, it's because the show is incredible and deserves its due amount of sappy praise. WOW (yes, apparently to make the anagram WOW they made wearableart one word, although I find nothing wrong with WOWA. Better yet, World of Wearable Zany Art, WOWZA. Zany is probably too low-brow for the people that make fancy wine, but the non-word wearableart annoys me.)
Upon walking into the event you are sucked into a Hensonesque carnival of friendly, technicolor monsters, effeminate, silver living statues, masked carnival ladies hunched over, head askew, pecking around like birds, acrobats and dancers sporadically turning each other upside down in front of thousands of other wild-eyed spectators like yourself. You watch as elderly folks with twinkles in their eyes, enthusiastically embrace each other as they timidly ask the purple and green monster to have a picture with him, there is nothing more endearing. The stage is empty save for a small four piece band all in top hats with red ribbons playing that classic French circus music I do not know the name of. The seats are mostly empty this early but a few well dressed young couples have already taken their seats. Then, as if prompted by remote, they flip over the seats, doing handstands and pirouettes on chairs, only to uniformly sit down again as though nothing happened.
Then the music slows to silence the lights dim to darkness and the show begins. A boy is running through a forest that comes to life. Sunflower girls skip around the stage, bushes in suits manifest from the ground like soldiers in battle. Praying mantis' and caterpillars slink around the white, sinewy dandelion seed pods ambling in the foreground. You remember the dump lady with the house on her back from labyrinth? Yeah, she's there too. From there the costumes get increasingly more elaborate, the categories more hazily defined until each costume seems to exist solidly in its own universe amidst the others twirling around in theirs. There are Geigeresque aliens outfitted in cold, sleek white fabrics. There are southern belles dressed entirely in spindled copper wires, one in meticulously carved wood. There are warriors, cars, emotions, furniture and those that do not resemble anything.
The stage is constantly in flux. There are the costumes themselves parading in large, loosely defined bands and there are the performers, men dressed in black ball gowns spinning on ropes hung from the ceiling, superheroines battling Superman's dopplegangers, enormous wooden puppets slowly traipsing around the stage, singers, comedians, dragqueens and bodybuilders. At one point everything is illuminated by black light and disembodied faces dance with jellyfish while blinking eyes curiously zig-zag around the stage, rainbows flutter in the wind and join together to form a butterfly.
It's hard to describe what I saw and felt and it's hard to convey the scope of the show without rambling on, I felt like a kid, like the universe of all my strange childhood imaginings bubbled back up to the surface of me and brimmed over in excitement. I guess, for the sake of brevity at the expense of inaccurate comparisons, if Fashion Week knocked up Cirque du Soleil, their baby could only hope to be this spectacular.
*I would be absolutely remiss if I didn't thank Mark and Allison who made this possible for Katie and I. Thank you. *
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