Marshall Space Dance!

On the first day of Spring I drove twelve hours to Marshall, NC to attend a Buckminster Fuller blowout at the Marshall High Studios, a former high school that has become an arts center.

Marshall is listed in Ripley's Believe It Or Not! as "The Town That Cannot Grow". It consists of one main street, complete with blue cupola county seat courthouse, squeezed between cliffs to the north and The French Broad River to the south. Down the tracks a bit is The Depot, where locals hold a country western jam every Friday. And across the river from the center of downtown is Blannahasset Island, where Marshall High Studios sits.

I have been spending every free moment I can in Marshall since 2004. Mostly, I hang out at the small church building on main street which is home to The FBI, an arts organization that Lee Ann & I founded last year. But tonight, I was headed straight to the island, which had become a whirlpool of creativity for the region. And tonight the whirlpool was churning.

The place was packed. I had never seen so many people turn out for an event in Marshall. There must have been three hundred people wandering through the interactive environment. The event was Spaceship Earth, curated by Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center & The Eluminati.

The place was filled with Bucky Domes and cellular constructions. A long line lead to David McConville's "Geodome Immersive Theater", where viewers were treated to a 3-D tour of the universe, from the North Carolina coastline to the nimbus of radio radiation beyond the galaxies. Later, there were fire dancers outside, and a "Space Dance" inside. Watching little kids and southern grandmothers shake glow sticks inside a geodesic dome lead me to conclude that the mainstreaming of 'rave' culture was not necessarily a bad thing.

When Black Mountain College was creating American Post-Modernism fifty years ago on the other side of Asheville, the incredible minds at work there were undeniably elitist. They felt like civilized explorers amid Appalachian savages. But a legacy is less prejudiced than the fallible humans who create it. Anyone in the South who is drawn to cutting edge ideas in art and architecture find their way to the Asheville area where the ideas of BMC live on. And on the first chilly evening of spring, the manifestation of that spirit was in full swing.