Critical 2023
Haus Anima’s second year at Critical was a blast. We attended for more days, brought more art, and had so much fun meeting new friends, crafting, and celebrating in the forest.
Ribbit and Kalesta expanded The River adding Hades. Zhigalka and Ribbit labored to created a Pedestal for Mourning Owl. Lilac and Skipper ran Sound Baths. Taylor sang, Christine hosted painting workshops, and everyone practiced their flow arts.
Late in the week we formed a The Cult of The Eye processional: inducting new members, baptising converts, and distributing literature on The Eye.
Above: Packed and headed to the event!
Below: Our fourteen bins unloaded and the camp taking shape.
By Tuesday, 24 hours after arriving, the camp was mostly up. Meanwhile Kalesta had already been at Critical for three days as Art Grant Co-Lead.
Filling Hades’ white space with color was Dream Willow; an 8-foot ethereal weeping willow filled with 900 LEDs and draped with 1600 yards of ribbon. Its trunk was made by drilling hundreds of holes into an upcycled PVC tube and its base contains all of the offerings left for Charon at Reignition 2023. Here are some of our process and behind the scene photos from that project.
We added an interactive pedestal to our 2022 Seacompression piece, Mourning Owl. Matching the copper plates changes the LED patterns on Mourning Owl. Ultimately it was a large but satisfying endeavor. Here are some of our process and behind the scene photos from that project.
Wish Fish, originally shown at 2022 Luminata, made an appearance near the river. It featured a new edge-lit acrylic sign to indicate its touch-activated nature.
Ribbit made an eye mask last year that everyone loved. Rifting off that everyone created eye costumes and we walked around on Thursday as The Cult of The Eye. We inducted members drawing eyes on their hands, performed three baptisms, and had a silly time doing performance art.
The Rude Rocket camp brought a huge number of plywood panels for a new mural wall to separate the Red Light District. Ribbit planned and painted a panel early in the week.
Then at 2am on our Cult Procession day Kalesta, Zhigalka, and Ribbit walked by and the sight of an empty panel tempted us.
Initially we planned to paint only two panels but the mural expanded and expanded till we had covered all five panels.
This is our second year attending Prom at FunCon and this year’s Not-Our-First-Rodeo theme was one of our costuming highlights of the week.
Group costumes are one fun way we enjoy coming together as a camp. In addition to Cowpoke Prom and Eye Cult we did Tutu Tuesday and Togas.
Something we brought home from last years Critical was Flow Arts. Zhigalka is a cheerleader for juggling, Skipper is attending flow workshops for fans and poi, Ribbit hand-crafted several ribbon poi, Kalesta is learning fire fans, and Lilac is a devout disciple of the levy wand.
Earwig, a new Haus Anima member, graced our camp with song. They encouraging everyone to do karaoke and performing several original songs during the week.
Critical was phenomenal, we were excited to see friends we made last year, to meet new friends, to spend time in nature, to be openly queer, to hear original music, and to make art.
Critical doesn’t happen without the IgnitionNW board, a Producer, dozens of leads, and hundreds of volunteers.
Thank you Paddy, Spacement, Ethan, Holly, Duke-E & Powerwheels, Gattaca, Rachael Lavendar, parking, and so many others for all their work making the event smooth and easy for us as a theme camp.
We look forward to seeing our friends at our now regularly-scheduled list of events: BitF, Seacompression, Luminata, Fremont Solstice Parade, and others.
