Queer Mythmaking, Southern Opera, and the Radical Imagination of Kindling Arts Festival 2026
For nearly a decade, the Kindling Arts festival has occupied a singular place in Nashville’s cultural ecosystem. While much of the city’s artistic identity continues to orbit commercial music industries and increasingly polished institutional programming, Kindling Arts has persistently carved out space for the strange, the interdisciplinary, the unfinished, and the defiantly experimental. This year’s festival theme, “Utopias,” may be its most ambitious provocation yet. Scheduled for July 23–26 across multiple venues in West Nashville, the 2026 festival invites artists and audiences alike to imagine what kinds of worlds might emerge if creativity were untethered from cynicism, scarcity, and convention.
The word “utopia” arrives burdened with contradiction. Coined by Thomas More in the sixteenth century, the term simultaneously suggests an ideal society and “no place” at all — a perfect world that cannot exist. In contemporary discourse, utopian thinking is often dismissed as naïve fantasy, particularly amid political instability, ecological anxiety, and cultural fragmentation. Yet Kindling’s framing of the concept appears less interested in perfection than in possibility. The festival’s official language asks what it means “to create in the direction of a world that isn’t here yet,” positioning artistic practice not as escapism but as a rehearsal for alternate forms of belonging, justice, and joy.
Kindling’s utopianism foster[s] fleeting but tangible experiences of collective imagination.
That ethos aligns naturally with Kindling’s history. Since its founding by co-artistic Directors Daniel Jones and Jessika Malone in 2018, the festival has become one of the few major platforms in Nashville dedicated specifically to boundary-crossing performance work. Previous editions have featured immersive theater, experimental dance, circus arts, multimedia installations, queer performance, performance art, and productions that resist easy categorization altogether. The annual themes — from “Counterculture” to “Imperfections” to last year’s “Fortunes & Fates” — have functioned less as curatorial restrictions than as conceptual invitations, encouraging artists to interrogate broad social and emotional questions through radically different aesthetic vocabularies.
What distinguishes Kindling from many multidisciplinary festivals is its investment in local artistic ecosystems. The organization explicitly prioritizes Middle Tennessee artists while offering logistical, technical, and marketing support that many independent creators would otherwise struggle to access. In a city where experimental performance frequently exists on the margins — underfunded, underpublicized, and overshadowed by commercial entertainment economies — Kindling has become a rare infrastructure for risk-taking. As Malone told the Tennessean last year, “We work with artists that are working outside of the traditional institutional models. They’re making work that’s really risky and what we do is we hold their hand while they take that risk.”
This year’s “Utopias” theme seems especially well suited to that mission. Experimental performance often operates as a laboratory for alternate social arrangements: audiences become participants, disciplines collapse into one another, conventional narratives fracture, and unfamiliar communities emerge temporarily within shared space. The festival’s very structure, being spread across venues and artistic forms, creates a miniature civic experiment in which spectators move between worlds over the course of a weekend. In that sense, Kindling’s utopianism may not reside in depicting perfect futures so much as in fostering fleeting but tangible experiences of collective imagination.
The 2026 edition also reflects Kindling’s continuing evolution geographically and artistically. Jones notes that several new venues will reshape the audience experience this year, including performances at The Curb Center, Spero Dei Church, and the Back Bar at Verna, formerly home to Café Coco. The festival will also introduce new formats like the “New Play Platter,” an evening of staged excerpts from original plays that allows audiences to encounter multiple theatrical worlds within a single event. Additional showcases ranging from experimental dance to performance art further reinforce Kindling’s identity as a festival committed less to categorization than to discovery.
Two productions already associated with the festival suggest the breadth of artistic approaches likely to define this year’s programming: a new opera, Faith by Jeremy Smith and the musical Fairy Floss by Madeleine Hicks and Kara McLeland. Though radically different in tone and form, both projects explore the unstable territory between belief and fantasy, sincerity and spectacle, intimacy and mythmaking.
Smith’s opera, Faith, approaches utopian thinking through spiritual ambiguity and Southern musical traditions. The title itself carries layered philosophical implications, something Smith consciously embraced while composing the work.
“The word Faith has multiple meanings in this work, just as it does in real life,” Smith explains. “We use the word faith as a synonym for trust, we speak of people being faithful to their spouse, and we might call a particular religious practice ‘our faith.’”
At the center of the opera are three principal characters: The Preacher, The Other Woman, and Faith herself, the preacher’s wife. Yet the work resists moral simplicity. The preacher projects certainty while functioning as a narcissist; the Other Woman embodies worldly seduction and ambiguity; Faith, paradoxically, becomes the figure whose genuine spiritual conviction places her in danger while also allowing her to endure it.
Smith notes that naming the heroine “Faith” became a conceptual breakthrough. “Using the heroine character’s name as the opera’s title is an old operatic tradition,” he says, referencing works like Carmen and Tosca. “When I realized the opportunity to thread the play conceptually to the character’s name, it was a real eureka moment.”
Though Faith engages operatic tradition formally, Smith’s musical vocabulary emerges directly from his upbringing in North Alabama’s Church of Christ tradition. Southern gospel harmony forms the emotional architecture of the piece.
“My first exposure to music was in church,” Smith explains. “I grew up Church of Christ in North Alabama, and we sang a cappella from southern gospel hymnals. That music, and the harmonic tropes it utilizes, has ingrained itself in Southern culture so deeply, but we don’t see it implemented in art music.”
That decision gives Faith a fascinating dual identity. Structurally, Smith insists he wanted to write “an Opera with a capital O.” The work contains recitative, aria, leitmotifs, congregational choruses, and even a traditional finaletto in which multiple thematic strands collide simultaneously at the climax. Yet the sonic world remains rooted in Southern sacred music rather than European romanticism.
The result feels especially resonant within Kindling’s “Utopias” framework. If utopian thinking involves imagining alternative worlds, Smith’s opera imagines an alternate operatic lineage — one in which Southern vernacular traditions occupy the center rather than the margins of serious contemporary composition. At the same time, the opera’s emotional architecture refuses certainty. Smith repeatedly emphasizes ambiguity as a core artistic principle.
“I am not interested in offering answers,” he says. “Metaphor, inference, and openness are the tools I like.”
Such uncertainty feels particularly timely. In an era increasingly dominated by ideological absolutism and algorithmic certainty, Faith proposes ambiguity itself as a productive artistic space. Utopia here does not emerge from ideological perfection but from openness — from the possibility that meaning remains fluid, relational, and incomplete.
If Smith’s Faith approaches utopia through spiritual and philosophical inquiry, Fairy Floss embraces theatrical excess, queer joy, and historical absurdism. Created by Madeleine Hicks and composer Kara McLeland, the musical reimagines the invention of cotton candy in Nashville as a queer love story.
“When I initially discovered that a dentist and a candyman were behind the invention, I immediately started envisioning this sort of Romeo and Juliet star-crossed lovers dynamic between them,” Hicks explains. “Kara and I decided to really lean into a Cole Escola-style Oh, Mary! treatment and let our imaginations run wild.”
That imaginative freedom seems central to the project’s identity. Hicks describes a production overflowing with puppets, elaborate musical styles, camp aesthetics, and surreal theatricality — including, memorably, “a tap dancing, two-person horse puppet.” Yet beneath the absurdism lies a deeply sincere emotional core.
“Everything is centered around this deeply sincere effort to lovingly reimagine our local history through the kaleidoscope of queerness,” Hicks says.
Cotton candy itself becomes an unexpectedly rich metaphorical object within the musical. Its bright colors, fragility, sweetness, and impermanence shape both the visual and emotional language of the production.
“There’s this element of sugary sweetness to the show — thematically, aesthetically, and musically as well,” Hicks explains. “Cotton candy evokes feelings of nostalgia and childlike wonder for a lot of people, and we hope to invite the audience into an emotional space where anything feels possible.” That tonal openness extends musically. McLeland’s score reportedly moves fluidly between dreamy waltzes, electronic club music, and Broadway-style chorus numbers, embracing stylistic excess rather than coherence. The maximalism appears intentional: Fairy Floss constructs a theatrical utopia where contradiction itself becomes celebratory.
Importantly, Hicks frames the production not simply as escapist fantasy but as an act of queer cultural reclamation within a region where LGBTQ+ communities continue to face hostility and politicized discrimination.
“We want to make Nashville a sweeter place for everyone, but especially for our queer community,” Hicks says. “The show itself takes place in this sort of utopia where we can celebrate the beauty of falling in love in a very pure and magical way.”
Independent artists often possess a freedom unavailable to larger institutions…
Taken together, Faith and Fairy Floss illustrate the extraordinary range of what Kindling Arts Festival means by “Utopias.” One project turns inward toward ambiguity, spirituality, and operatic tradition refracted through Southern culture. The other explodes outward into camp spectacle, queer mythmaking, and historical reinvention. Yet both works share a commitment to transforming inherited forms into spaces for alternate futures.
At a moment when arts institutions nationwide increasingly face economic pressures, political scrutiny, and audience fragmentation, Kindling Arts’ continued expansion feels significant. The festival’s existence argues that local experimental art scenes matter not despite their marginality but because of it. Independent artists often possess a freedom unavailable to larger institutions constrained by subscription models, donor expectations, and commercial viability. They can fail publicly, pursue eccentric ideas, and build temporary communities around shared curiosity rather than market logic.
That spirit may ultimately define the deepest meaning of “Utopias” within the 2026 festival. Not the promise of flawless futures, but the insistence that artistic communities can still generate spaces of collective imagination amid exhaustion and uncertainty. For four days this July, Kindling Arts Festival will once again ask Nashville audiences to enter unfamiliar worlds — worlds built not from certainty, but from experimentation, vulnerability, desire, and hope.A
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Joseph E. Morgan is a father of two, husband, teacher and recovering guitarist in Middle Tennessee.
