Dark Arts Festival: Haus Party 10

Haus Party 10: A Hipster Douchebag Attends the The Tenth Annual Dark Arts Festival

I have seen way too many B-grade horror films to be totally okay with walking down a flight of rickety wooden stairs into an unfinished basement which looks like it could double as Cameron Hooker's sex dungeon away from home. But I'm hoping that if I survive to finish the article, SLUG will compenstae me in bar bucks. Is it grounds for matriculation into an Alcoholics Anonymous program if you are completely willing to put yourself in apparent peril for the faint possibility of getting 25 free PBRs from Burt's Tiki Lounge? If I leave this interview with Alanja Oliver alive, I'll have to ask my local pastor. For now, I'm here to check out the 10th and final Dark Arts Festival – at least it is the final festival spearheaded by Utah's Dark Arts Foundation. The future of the festival is uncertain, but it is said that Area 51 will take over next year, and local scenester Aaron Shea will attempt a festival of his own in 2012.

Alanja Oliver furrows her brow. “My favorite memory from Dark Arts over the last decade – and it's hard because the festivals are always such fun – is probably when Apocalypse Theatre set the stage at Sanctuary on fire. They had a guy playing a metal drum barrel and they lit it on fire. Well, it ended up spreading all over the stage. They felt horrible, but the show must go on.”

In its most embryonic form, the Dark Arts Festival started as “Nightmares” a weekly Saturday-night party at Oliver's house. “We'd ask a 5 dollar donations and we started bringing performers and bands in from out of state – the kinds that normally don't come through Utah.”

Eventually, Oliver and another active member of the scene joined forces and began the Dark Arts Festival. Things started moving forward. A non-profit was set up in 2003. “In the first year we had four people on the committee. A few years later, we had twenty. Then we got back down to nine, which is a respectable number. I think most of the kids that were in that group of twenty were afraid of work.”

And work it was. For the past decade, Oliver and the rest of the Dark Arts Committee have toiled yearly to bring music, performance, and fashion to a relatively small but devoted scene which has been thriving here in the harsh wastelands of Zion. And not with small results either. In 2003, David J. of Bauhaus graced the Festival attendees with his presence. In 2008, London After Midnight came. In fact, it would seem that the Dark Arts Festival has garnered no small amount of respect from Goth kids not only in the state, but in the outlying areas as well. “It's sad that this will be the last Festival we run as the Dark Arts Committee,” Oliver says. “We thought that, by now, new blood would have entered the scene and taken over. It just didn't happen.”

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