Paseo lauds light instead of fright in Oklahoma City
Halloween: Celebration to include costume making

BY BRANDY McDONNELL    Comments 2

Published: October 23, 2009

The Paseo Arts District is celebrating Halloween a week early with "a night of light instead of fright.”
The annual Magic Lantern Celebration will be from 3 to 7 p.m. Sunday in the neighborhood businesses, art galleries and outside on Paseo Drive, which will be closed during the festivities.

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Magic Lantern Celebration

→When: 3 to 7 p.m. Sunday
→Where: Paseo Arts District, between NW 28 and Walker and NW 30 and Dewey
→Cost: Free but donations will be accepted
→Information: 525-2688 or www.thepaseo.com

"It’s to give children a different perspective of Halloween,” said Lori Oden, executive director of the Paseo Arts Association, which sponsors the event with the Oklahoma Arts Council. "It’s making it something fun and not scary.”
The hands-on event also moves the focus away from gobbling up candy and buying Halloween costumes at the discount store, said Lorrie Keller, artistic director of Theatre Upon a StarDanceSwan, the multigenerational Paseo dance company that organizes the celebration.
"The whole philosophy behind it is nurturing creativity and giving parents and children a chance to really work together in an authentic and unique way,” she said.
Children from toddlers to teenagers are invited to come in everyday clothes and make their costumes in a series of "playshops” in the Paseo.
"The first year of the event, we asked kids to come in their costumes and we noticed that they came in all these store-bought kind of boring costumes, and many were gory,” Keller said.
Participants can twist, crumple and tear craft paper and then sculpt it into outfits. They can decorate their costumes with ribbons, sequins, leaves, old photographs and beads. Rather than gruesome monsters, most children opt to dress themselves as fairies, animals, superheroes and the like.
In other playshops, youngsters can make paper hats, decorate their faces with sparkles and create LED light crowns, the magic lanterns of the event’s name.
"Our concept is that they are the magic lanterns,” Keller said. "It is a celebration of imagination and the light within us.”
The celebration will culminate at 6:30 p.m. with the Spin ’n’ Sparkle parade.
New this year, many of Paseo galleries and businesses are decorating their windows with old-fashioned shadow plays, putting up Halloween-theme cutouts and lights against white paper. The shadow windows will stay up through Oct. 31, Oden said.

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