Coming to Cannery Hall on October 30!
COVEN: Where Darkness, Desire, and Community Gather
There has always been something theatrical about popular music. Long before concerts became standardized affairs of microphones, lighting rigs and video screens, performers understood that a stage could be a place to construct another reality—to assume an identity, tell a story, provoke an audience, or create an experience that could not exist anywhere else.
Few artists understood that more completely than Alice Cooper, who in the early 1970s transformed the rock concert into a kind of horror spectacle, combining music with costumes, characters, elaborate staging and deliberately shocking theatrical effects. Electric chairs, guillotines, straitjackets and mock executions became part of a stage language drawn as much from horror movies and vaudeville as from rock ‘n’ roll.
Cooper’s innovation was not simply to make concerts more spectacular. He helped establish the idea that the concert itself could become theater—that persona, costume, movement, narrative and audience manipulation could become part of the music’s meaning. David Bowie pursued a more fluid version of the same idea through his many identities, while KISS and The Rocky Horror Show pushed theatricality, sexuality, spectacle and audience participation in still other directions.
The lineage matters because COVEN, coming to Nashville’s Cannery Hall on October 30, does not treat the concert as a fixed form. It takes the older idea of music as theater and moves it somewhere stranger: toward immersive performance, horror, sensuality, femininity and collective ritual.
Produced by Emmy-nominated producer Alie Stewart and Nashville artist representative T Tucker, COVEN is described as an “experiential haunt” that combines an immersive theatrical environment with a nocturnal femme concert. Inspired in part by Sleep No More and Nashville’s growing goth scene, the event announces its governing principles with unusual bluntness: “CREEPY, HORNY, and EMPOWERED.”
Rather than presenting a conventional evening of performances, COVEN will weave six short musical sets together with surprise haunt activations throughout the venue. The organizers describe it as an immersive, genre-bending performance-art experience designed not simply to be watched, but to be felt.
Among the artists participating are Weeping, Anastasia Elliot and Arily Michele, three performers whose work makes the boundaries between music, theater, visual culture and identity particularly porous.
For Weeping, whose music she describes as “horrorpop,” horror provides a way of exploring a distinctly feminine form of power. She connects her work to Barbara Creed’s concept of the “monstrous feminine,” the idea that representations of monstrous women can become a means of confronting and reclaiming female power.
“I liken The Monstrous Feminine ideology to my self-appointed genre of ‘horrorpop,’” Weeping explains. “Modern horror has embraced the idea that the monstrous feminine is ultimately a woman’s power, and embracing that … is cathartic. It is sensuous, vengeful, emotionally vulnerable and raw… the reclaiming of the most innate self.”
That sense of reclamation is central to the atmosphere COVEN seeks to create. Weeping is a singer, producer, multi-instrumentalist and creative director, and the press materials describe her as the force behind a feminist undertaking in electronic and mystical horrorpop. But for her, the visual and physical components of a performance aren’t secondary to the music. They are part of the work itself.
“As an artist, creative autonomy is key,” she says. “Every facet of performance is a ritual practice.”
That becomes especially important in an immersive environment such as COVEN. “Everything must be considered for full immersion,” she says, citing wardrobe, movement and emotion as elements that must work together “to serve the vision, for the audience, for the muse.”
Anastasia Elliot approaches the evening from a similarly expansive perspective. Described in the COVEN press materials as an operatically trained singer and “true maximalist” whose multidisciplinary work pushes conventional boundaries, Elliot has little interest in treating music as an isolated art form.
“Maximalism is at the core of everything I do,” she says. “For me, it means taking an idea as far as it can possibly go, turning it inside out, pulling it apart, making it bigger, and exploring it to its edges until it’s whatever it needs to become. More is more.”
For Elliot, music naturally exists alongside visual art, theatricality, movement, fashion and atmosphere. She wants audiences to feel as though they have entered a world rather than simply attended a performance.
“I like building worlds,” she says. “I want the audience to feel like they’ve walked into something, not just watched somebody sing some songs.”
That philosophy makes COVEN a particularly natural setting for her. The event’s premise gives her permission to bring together the disparate elements that have long informed her work: music, spectacle, fashion, theater and a healthy dose of the unexpected.
As for precisely what Nashville audiences will see, Elliot isn’t saying.
“The theme is horny and haunted, which is already a pretty ideal playground for me,” she says. “I’ll just say I’m not planning to behave.”
Her classical vocal training gives her another set of tools with which to play. Rather than seeing vocal technique and theatrical excess as opposing forces, Elliot describes them as “weapons in the same arsenal.” Years of disciplined training have given her the control necessary to distort and manipulate the voice, while theatricality, movement, sensuality, humor and discomfort provide the means to push that technique somewhere less predictable.
“I really love the intersection between something highly controlled and something that feels completely free,” she says. “There’s something exciting about putting years of discipline in service of chaos.”
COVEN, she adds, is essentially designed for that tension. Its invitation to explore sexuality, darkness, camp and theatricality means that she doesn’t have to impose her aesthetic on the evening so much as enter into a creative relationship with it.
“It feels like I am co creating with the show rather than doing my own thing,” she says.
Arily Michele brings yet another perspective to that collision of old and new, classical and contemporary. A classically trained vocalist and vintage synthesizer enthusiast, Michele draws on opera and theater alongside electronic textures and neo-psychedelic pop. Her music is a meeting point between ethereal textures, dreamy rhythms and her operatic and theatrical background.
For Michele, the apparent contradictions are precisely the point.
“I’m a huge fan of juxtaposition,” she says. “I often feel as though I’m caught between worlds, so from an artistic standpoint, it makes sense to pull from seemingly different places of inspiration.”
She sees an obvious connection between opera and theater and the gothic folklore that informs much of her songwriting. At the same time, she is fascinated by the possibility of placing those older art forms alongside contemporary technology.
One of her early influences was Wendy Carlos’s Switched-On Bach, which demonstrated to her the possibilities of combining classical training with electronic sound. Vintage synthesizers, she says, can be simultaneously “haunting and hypnotic” and nostalgic, making them ideal instruments for the hazy, dreamlike environments she enjoys creating.
At COVEN, she hopes to push those qualities even further.
“I’m hoping to create an experience that feels otherworldly and simultaneously mesmerizing and terrifying,” Michele says. “Something that feels a lot like grappling with the Id, that invites you in and scares you away at the same time.”
Michele’s involvement with COVEN extends beyond her performance. She is also identified as one of the event’s lead partners, and she says the project’s initial vision was what drew her in: a theatrical, almost cult-like exploration of the sensuality and darkness of womanhood.
What began as an intriguing concept eventually grew into something considerably more ambitious.
“It felt scary at first,” she says, “but that was how I knew it was a challenge worth taking.”
That challenge is part artistic and part communal. COVEN is not merely using darkness and spectacle as an aesthetic. Organizers are finding ways to support community organizations such as the American Red Cross, for whom they are organizing a blood drive specifically attached to the event and encouraging people to sign up at COVEN and through discounted ticket deals. Artists are using their followings to create visibility for the budding organization Healthy and Free, TN and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are hoping to engage with younger audiences. These are wonderful things to feel good about on October 30th as you enjoy the event’s signature “blood bag cocktails!”
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