Storytime: Meow Wolf Leans into the Narrative in their immersive adventures

Tarra Gaines·
Dallas/Ft WorthHoustonVisual Art
·

Several years ago on a trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico, I visited my first Meow Wolf project. As someone who loves and writes about theater as much as visual arts, I found myself thinking of Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return as visual art framed theatrically. Entering into the first section of the immersive art adventure, an actual Victorian-style house built within a former bowling alley, I felt like I had wandered into an immense and exquisitely detailed theater set, but all of the actors had disappeared. While I explored the ever transforming visual landscape, House beckoned me to solve the mystery of its absent owners and the story of their lives.

A showcase of  the freshest local, national and international contemporary art lies at the heart of each Meow Wolf venture. Yet, the way they frame and connect such a diverse art selection through a fantastical and science fiction narrative is what makes each Meow Wolf experience so unique. So when Radio Tave, Meow Wolf’s most ambitious project yet, opened in Houston, I set out to get the story behind the story-making.

“Storytelling is how we bring our audiences into the worlds that we make. It allows them to start creating stories about their time in the space, and it also brings them into that space as an actor or a storyteller,” describes Sarah Bradley, senior creative director for both Radio Tave and Grapevine’s Real Unreal, which opened in 2023.

“Storytelling helps engagement. It helps people let go and really immerse themselves into these worlds and leave that other world behind. That’s a big difference between what we’re doing and what you might experience at a museum or art institution. We’re trying to get you to forget what you left outside that front door.”

In a Meow Wolf experience that core narrative usually begins with seemingly ordinary entrances and doorways into the fantastical art spaces. In these stories a place of normalcy becomes a conduit into another dimension of reality, where all those contemporary artists are given dominion to explore their art.

“We really just created the structure of a different world that these normal places ended up in. And that world is one that can be pretty much anything. It’s a place shaped by the essence of creativity by this element that we call the Source,” explains Bradley.

For Real Unreal, like Eternal Return, that entryway is a family house. For Radio Tave, the gateway to the creative worlds beyond is a small town Texas radio station, going by the call letters ETNL. (Said aloud, it sounds like eternal radio.) But that entrance place of normalcy has its own complex and layered narrative and collection of characters. For Radio Tave, Meow Wolf began with the general concept of a radio station, wanting to do more with sound for their latest project.

“We work with an amazing team of musicians, audio engineers and experimental music people. We have a lot of talent there and they’re always fantastic collaborators, but we thought what if we highlight that a little more, what if we make that more of a focus.”

Early on they began creating the story of ETNL, its staff and community and what happened to it when it became a doorway into a spacey creative dimension. Julianne Aguilar acted as story lead, but they used a writers’ room organization for building the story, somewhat reminiscent of a television series writers’ room. Bradley says it became a very collaborative process, beginning with writers but then also bringing other creative fields, including graphic designers and sound artists.

“We do it in stages. It doesn’t all come at once. The story is something that’s very important as we’re developing,” describes Bradley, adding, “The story is fully written by the time that the art production actually starts.”

Part of Bradley’s job as senior creative director is to oversee the construction of the narrative and then bring that story to life in the actual construction of the radio station as a real place visitors can explore.

“It’s making sure that everything that’s happening within a space like the radio station is coming together to a unified story of the space and the people who are there and what their current situation is.”

And this is where writers and visual and graphic designers collaborate as they continue to construct the narrative and physical radio station. Wandering through the hallways, sound booth, record library, offices and break room, visitors find layers of what Bradley calls “ephemera” that makes the spaces feel real and lived in, as if we just missed the ETNL staff and DJs before they stepped deeper into the sci-fi art worlds just beyond the doors.

“I have a love of ephemera, little bits of paper you hang on to. You stick it in a book to find years later. Our visual designers are really into that stuff too. We geeked out a lot over the little shreds of paper and postesr and all sorts of fun stuff we could make to tell this story.”

The radio station concept also opened possibilities to layer even more art mediums, as the ETNL radio programming continues throughout the station on a multi-hour loop. This even allowed them to bring in local Houston theater artists and writers Peter Ton and Mai Le, who helped create some of the programming for ETNL’s Music Director Daniel Tran, and therefore helped to build the character.

The radio station narrative also leads to a stronger connection to one of the biggest art spaces beyond the normalcy, the section they call the Bailiwick, a place of sonic experimentation and transmission, which lies just outside the ETNL break room.

“That space in particular was more tied to the story development,” explains Bradley.

Although visitors might not ever realize the amount of collaborative story creation that went into building this small Texas radio station, ETNL’s ever-expanding narrative waves make for a more connective Meow Wolf visual art adventure.

“There was something really, really special about the amount of collaboration that we were able to do on this project for Radio Tave,” says Bradley. “Just having access to more writers brought out some really interesting things. There was joy in the idea-sharing that came through this project.”

—TARRA GAINES

Tarra Gaines

Tarra Gaines is a writer and teacher in Houston.