Camp Christmas isn’t just where to go for the holidays this year; it’s where the holidays are going.
The too-fun-to-miss December attraction at Aurora’s Stanley Marketplace celebrates the idea that our merry little Christmas has actually grown up to be our fabulous, super-sized Xmas. That Christmas is officially no longer an abstract religious concept. Instead, it is, for so many of us, a thing we want to touch, feel, smell and hear, a thing we want to celebrate with our physical selves more than our spiritual selves, as this over-the-top, walk-through wonderland of lights and shiny gewgaws invites us to do.
Camp Christmas sparkles, glitters and glows. It blinks, sings and sashays. It’s full of high fashion, lowball humor and witty quips, and it doesn’t mind if you get a little drunk in the house. If Jesus were a drag queen who took a month off from his sacred duties to throw a party for all of his drag queen friends, it would look a lot like Camp Christmas.
If you go
Camp Christmas continues through Jan. 5 at The Hangar at Stanley Marketplace, 2501 Dallas St., Aurora, starting at 10 a.m. daily, tickets from $8-$21 at denvercenter.org.
In this way, the installation is very much a bold work of art, and it deserves to be discussed as such. This is not some commercially driven, department store window, and it’s not the local botanical garden decorating its trees to amp up off-season revenue.
Just the opposite; it has genuine creative cred. It was produced by two of the region’s tried-and-true art-making institutions: the non-profit Denver Center for the Performing Arts (the city’s leading, professional theater company with a $50 million annual budget), and artist Lonnie Hanzon, who has been making extravagant installations for a quarter-century. Both are world-class and highly respected.
What they’ve made here is well-crafted and family-friendly, and right on trend with what’s going on currently in the art world, where immersive installations are the rage. Lately, crowds have flocked to elaborate dioramas, like Meow Wolf’s famous House of Eternal Return, where visitors actually enter the artwork itself, stroll through and handle objects. Meow Wolf opened its doors in a former Santa Fe bowling alley in 2016 and has attracted enough visitors — and deep-pocketed investors — that it is now spending tens of millions to open satellite sites in Denver, Las Vegas and Washington, D.C.
Camp Christmas is, in a sense, one of the many Meow Wolf knock-offs that are sprouting up all over the country, but it has its own point of view and, frankly, it’s better because it is more self-aware. Hanzon has been in the business of immersive excess for a long time. He’s a pioneer whose resume includes everything from remaking Denver’s gaudy “Parade of Lights” to designing the annual mixed-media holiday light show at the Houston Zoo to creating larger-than-life sculptures that serve as centerpieces for Denver’s annual Pridefest.
He brings all that experience together for Camp Christmas, which takes place in a 10,000-square-foot, former airplane hangar and features tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of twinkly, multi-colored lights — lining tunnels, hanging from countless trees, soaring overhead on chandeliers. Around them are ornaments, packages, decorations of all sorts and 3,000 Santa statues. The objects are sorted by time period and style, so there are Victorian and Art Nouveau sections, and also mid-century modern and disco areas, and a lot more, of course.
At the front door, visitors are handed a stapled, paper “field guide,” reminiscent of the manuals that folks take on trips into the wilderness. Wanderers can collect stamps in their books as they venture through, a way of ticking off the things they spot, like campers might do with birds or plants in the forest.
But don’t be fooled. The “camp” in the title of this attraction isn’t the same word you see in “summer camp” or Girl Scout camp.” It’s the one you see in “high camp” or “gay camp.” There isn’t a natural moment in the mix.
Rather, it mines the age-old art of indulgence and exaggeration, with an art historical trail that leads back centuries to the baroque age, to the painter Caravaggio, the composer Bach, the architect Francesco Borromini. More, more, more.
If that’s too serious a context for a holiday attraction at the local shopping mall — and, yes, it probably is — then it’s possible to see inspiration for this piece in the work of modern-day icons like Carmen Miranda, Liberace, Andy Warhol and RuPaul. Either way, it’s legit.
Camp is an outsider art form, but a crucial one to helping us understand and express human nature. On one hand, it is romantic, nostalgic, beautiful — and we’re drawn to all that. On the other, it’s a dramatic slap in the face, reminding us that there’s no limit to our desire for stimulation; that we’re greedy and showy and don’t know when to stop; that our taste level, as a civilization, is questionable.
Camp Christmas is a brave work because it positions itself on the front lines of camp. There’s no holding back. The mid-century section, for example, is set up like a 1950s living room with pink walls, pink furniture, a pink fireplace, a pink shag carpet — pink everything. Hanzon is performing live most days, making giant sugar tree ornaments, and there are actors milling about all of the dioramas, dressed as elves or holiday revelers from different eras, and they stay in character the whole time.
There are two bars on-site, one with a beach theme and the other based on Santa’s workshop. They come with a wink, offering concoctions like “Papa Noel’s Happy Place” loaded with tequila, sweet-and-sour mix and mango juice.
To the credit of Hanzon and the DCPA’s Charlie Miller, who partnered on the project, Camp Christmas is relentlessly fierce, as it should be. The room, and the acoustics, are warm but the fact of everything all at once is dizzying. Add alcohol to that mix and it has the potential to be a total mindblower. Cheers to that.
Because, in truth, that’s what art is. Real, risky, a little dangerous. Things are going to break. Kids will surely climb on things they shouldn’t. Everyone is going to have fun.
