Q-Staff Theatre is transforming its space into an indoor Halloween carnival Friday.
Simultaneous hour-long performances will take place throughout the theater, including a magician, a demonic dance, a bone pile, a dream machine, a scary-story reading and a projected stop-motion animation piece with dancing skeletons bursting forth from hellfire.
The band Yoda's House will play for about half an hour afterward.
It costs $8, or $5 if you wear a costume. Doors open at 8 p.m. at 4819 Central Ave. N.E.
Nick Sedillos, who built the graveyard scene for the stop-motion animation piece, will be dressed as a doctor and will read short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft and others.
"In the room, there will be some atmospheric music loops, so it'll be spooky, and the projection will be also looping behind him of an ambient graveyard setting, and I think a ghost is going to pass by every so often," coordinator and Yoda's House member Joe Annabi said. "Nick will be essentially reading the stories in a graveyard."
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Q-Staff has a new café, where Benzini the magician will perform sleight-of-hand card tricks, and in one of the back areas, there's a bone altar where two people will perform as well.
"Just piles of bones. Daniel (Bergman) and Joseph Angelo are performing some ambient freak-out music under the name Smashan - it's some Indian word for the ashes of burial or something," Annabi said. "They're going to be wearing creepy cloaks, and it'll look like dark magic's going on. They're going to have dream machines set up - these, like, rotating lights that are meant to hypnotize. People can be zoning out in the drone, creep-out, human-sacrifice room, or they can go entertain themselves with magic and drink coffee drinks or whatever in the café, or they can go listen to the haunted stories. Or they can walk through all the rooms and take it all in."
Jenny Hipscher, from the UNM Theatre & Dance Department, will dance as a sacrificial virgin who comes back as a zombie.
She adapted the dance from an earlier piece she did for a solo show.
"It had some creature-of-the-night kind of feel to it anyway," Hipscher said. "Stuff I do tends to be sort of weird and twitchy. That kind of thing."
After her dance, she will be dragged to the main performance space, where she will rise and act as a dead conductor for the start of Yoda's House's opening number. The band will also be in front of the projected graveyard scene.
"I asked if we could do real flames, but no one thought that was a good idea," Sedillos said. "The panels are going to slip apart, and then hell's going to burst open, and there's going to be a demon that comes out and a lot of bugs and ghosts and a bunch of skeletons.. They're all going to dance."
Yoda's House will open with a song called "Air is a Ghost Town."
"It was the creepiest song I've written so far," Annabi said. "At the end of the song, I'm not even playing the accordion anymore. I'm, like, screaming and stuff, like a crazy witch man or an insane man."
Afterward, there will be a dance party.
