Dlectricity

This free festival was SO GREAT this year; it was fun last year, but it’s expanded a lot. We got there just in time for the parade of lights — girls in lit up Caribbean costumes and huge headdresses, and electric skulls dancing to great live music. So much fun! A truly unique Detroit experience.

This was a great idea and got people to come out and discover the area, kind of like the Noelle nights festival. I wish there were more exhibits, but I believe it was the first year so I’m sure it will get better each time. My favorites were sculptures made out of shopping bags, and the light show on the DIA and library. Can’t wait for the next festival.

What Detroit needs are more festivals like Dlectricity. An explosion of innovative art, performance, and food spilled down Woodward and the side streets through Midtown. I watched children hug glowing yoga balls to make them giggle and saw teenagers staring rapt at the elaborate light show and architectural dazzle projected onto the stripped architecture of the Detroit Public Library. All that was missing from the techno beats bouncing over the traffic was Deadmau5 waving to a stoked crowd. Only on Noël Night have I seen hundreds of people stopped on the sidewalks, crowded on the steps of the DIA, staring up towards the sky.
Other luminous projections spilled over the Michigan Science Centre, showing otherworldly close ups of watercolour and oil paintings like biological microcosms. Performers set up in little metal stages shaped like igloos and apples played music. The silver helium balloons on the lawn of CCS was just spectacular in its simplicity. Despite a cool, windy night, the beau and I joined an exodus of curious residents prowling past buildings reimagined in their use, splattered with messages of creativity and hope.
Damn you, Detroit, stop seducing me with your brilliance, your amazing artistic skills, your raw innovation. Just when I think I have you pegged down, you go and astonish me.
You produce something that other cities ten times your size (New York, London) pull off, and you one up them with that rough spirit. It’s humble to see an empty building aching for residents or businesses illuminated with scrolling alphabetical messages and windows holding flickering, animated shadows. Someone needs to occupy that place. On a national scale, they need to see this Detroit to know it’s not all shootings or ruin porn or empty Rust Belt decay.
Food trucks were whipping up burgers, hot dogs, and tacos next to MOCAD. The Whitney makes a mean frank, let me tell you, improved by the cool air and the long walk. I wished El Guapo and some of the other great food trucks showed; hell, I’d pay plenty for Green Dot Stables to make an appearance. Despite the previous night’s rain, the turnout was good. I hope Dlectricity will be a growing annual event that pulls people from Livonia, Novi, Canton, Lansing, and Ann Arbor in to see what Detroit is. Come on, Windsor and Essex, Toledo, come and see what this city is.
Detroit’s spirit is alive, crackling, aching for direction. Give it a current, like this brilliant little two-​day festival did, and watch the sparks fly to illuminate these falsely dark corridors.
Next year, go.