Southside Halloween Festival at City Reliquary

What Halloween would be complete without a candy-corn-in-a-jar estimation contest? Guests were treated to a ghoulish night of games, performance, and plenty of candy at the family-friendly Southside Halloween Festival, produced by local artists Stephen Cedars and Christina Latimer, at the City Reliquary last Friday.

Besides an abundance of sweets and spooky Halloween decorations both inside and in the backyard of the Reliquary, the festival also featured Fortune Teller Mikaela Corbo, local musician Jeff Davis playing eerie songs on a saw with a violin bow, and the main performance of the night, a theater piece based on “The Cask of Amontillado,” a short story by Edgar Allen Poe.

“At first we didn’t want to do Poe because so many companies do Poe story telling plays,” Cedars said. “But we tend to do plays with voice-over and sound and realized that we could something that was pretty distinct. It’s a loved tale—Poe’s story is four pages long but he really gives us something; there’s so much richness and you can spend so much time in it. To explore the story was a great challenge for us and the actors.”

“It was a great crowd,” Latimer said. “I love how interactive it was with the play going through the audience, and the crowd shifting around the stages.”

The play was done in a voice-over style and featured two stages, which the actors, Amir Levi and Matthew Barbot, moved between while also snaking through the audience. Cedars and Latimer also put on the production for school children at the Brooklyn Public Library in Williamsburg, with two showings that drew over 150 kids and families.

The Southside Halloween Festival was sponsored by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by the Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC). This is Cedars and Latimer’s third year receiving the grant from the BAC—the past two years they have used it to put on a summer festival in August, featuring Puerto Rican and Dominican musical and theatrical cultural performances. This year, students from El Puente were to do a dance performance, although they had to cancel due to scheduling conflicts.

Cedars and Latimer, who lived in Williamsburg for several years, have produced the festivals keeping the neighborhood in mind as much as possible.

“Over the years we’ve made relationships with the community that we are so involved in,” Latimer said.

“When we applied to the BAC, the idea was that we wanted to make it a theatrical event that was indicative of the community and that was from the community,” Cedars said. “When we did plays about Puerto Rican and Dominican folk tales, it was because that was the demographic of the neighborhood. We want to make sure to make something that’s for a particular area.”

This year, Cedars and Latimer shifted from a summer festival to a Halloween one.

“We both have our varying degrees of interest in the macabre, and this year we wanted to make a spooky play and do something creepy, with the same general goal,” Cedars said. “This isn’t just about making a piece of art and thinking about where we can put it up, but rather, we’re making a piece of art specifically for spaces.”

“We lived in Williamsburg for a couple years and it’s a neighborhood where the demographic might look at us as just some indication of gentrification,” Cedars continued. “But we did this fiesta the first year and suddenly they’re noticing us; they know our names now. It’s not that we do it for the glory, but it’s a sort of immeasurable, beautiful payoff you don’t get when you’re just doing it for yourself.”

The Reliquary, with its cozy space, sense of New York history, and myriad of odd artifacts and displays, seemed like a perfect space for the festival.

“Over the years we’ve admired the Reliquary, their events, the space, and their mission,” Latimer said. “Everything that they’ve done, their programming—we really like what they’re doing, who they are, and how the space has grown in the past years.”

“The turnout was great,” Cedars said. “I’m happy—we’ve been to a lot of events at the Reliquary, and they don’t tend to get a lot of kids. Tonight there were a number of kids here who seemed to enjoy it.”