Slingshot Festival
“Welcome to the first ever Slingshot Festival in Durham!”
The room erupted into cheers, clapping, and raised beer cans. For a moment, there was little to do but absorb the auditory overflow of shouts and a liquifying bass beat. Multicolored lights blinked above us, and glow sticks lit up around sweaty necks and wrists. The air smelled sharply of machine-made fog.
We turned to each other and laughed: so, this is the Slingshot festival.
Slingshot is an international festival that supports next wave music and electronic art in the South. Hundreds of creators and performers from around the world have taken to the Slingshot stage, bringing with them a wide range of experimental music. For four years, the festival was hosted in Athens, GA, but now, Durham, NC is its proud home. It is a place that strives to include a broad scope of creativity, forward-thinking music, and art on the fringes—right here in the heart of Durham.
In the line for ticketing, we begin to feel the energy of the place. A woman dressed in all pink leans over her DJ equipment and asks us if we want to make music with her. Men in skinny jeans stand against the railing and smoke. A woman behind a fold-out table makes casual conversation with her friend while we scramble through our emails, trying to find our tickets to show her.
Inside the venue, we’re blasted with the feeling of Dorothy in Oz: a dark, mostly bare building, spotted with signs for a bar here and restrooms there and another bar around the pitch-black corner. There’s a room with a honeycomb-themed bar, glowing warmly between old couches. There’s a constant channel of thirty-plus people, who look more caricaturish than real—a man dances past us, his baseball hat askew, his blue cardigan bouncing as he pumps his arms in the air. And, of course, there’s the main stage, which is more sound than space, sending shudders from the speakers to the exposed piping to the abandoned ladder in the corner to your own collarbones.
At this first stage, The Warehouse, all fifty-something pairs of eyes are either fixed on the DJ at the center of the room or shut as if in prayer. It’s impossible not to feel something religious here — at each beat, everyone bounces with the same chest-heaving, fist-banging, full-body force. Everyone: the skinny men in fishnet sleeves and the trench-coat men in Matrix-esque sunglasses, the women in shin-length cargo shorts and the DJ with some inversion of untamed, curly hair. The woman with moon-sparkle nails, the woman in a neon yellow beanie, the man squatting in a corner, nodding. The man in nineties pants holding hands with another in white Converse, the short woman dancing alone, moving impossibly fast. The men in tie-dye tank tops, the over-the-shoulder fanny packs, the hoodies, the baseball caps. The hands and heads and shoulders—impossible to separate into individual bodies.
A trip around the rest of the venue produces a continued collage of sights and sounds. Down a steep, narrow staircase into The Basement, the volume increases and the ceiling lowers. The room is packed with more people, flashing under red and blue lights, eyes focused on yet another DJ. To one side, a passageway leads people to a tiny room that holds a giddy couple dancing around an empty dentist’s chair. To the other side, a bartender wipes a counter as straggling guests wander between drinks and music. An old floral couch sits against the wall.
We end our night back upstairs and outside, standing under a full moon. The patio is peacefully cold and quiet. People make conversation in groups, drink from cans, wrap their bare arms around one another. Women huddle on the steps, smoking, laughing, and looking out at the street. Maybe we’ll stand there for a moment, maybe we’ll look around at the window box plants and folding chairs. Maybe we’ll stay out, maybe we’ll slip back in, ears still ringing. Regardless, we are fully there, consumed by the present and bursting with the sensory magic of this place.