By John Wenzel, The Denver Post
Real-world fears can’t help but intrude on this year’s Halloween revelry. But for some out-of-work or idled Denver artists, confronting fear is their best chance at finding paid gigs, developing their art and commenting on the overlapping crises around them.
“We’ve been planning this for awhile, and we knew October 2020 would be right before the presidential election. That was part of our brainstorming for the theme,” said Kate Speer, who along with Serena Chopra and Frankie Toan created the artist-driven Halloween experience “No Place to Go,” debuting Thursday, Oct. 22, in Lakewood.
Billed as a haunted house, “No Place to Go” is actually a driving route of site-specific installations that tell a non-linear story of “the horror of the binary — where neither choice is desirable.”
That’s because two of its founders (Chopra and Toan) and many of its artists identify as queer. Their idea of scary is trying to fit into a world that sees only two choices — not just in gender, but in politics and other areas of life.