ASHEVILLE, N.C. (828newsNOW) –– This week welcomes the 2025 Asheville Fringe Arts Festival to the city. Meet Shadow Girls Cult, one of the troupes participating in the alternative arts festival.
The Shadow Girls Cult Fringe Fest performances will be held at 7 p.m., Friday, March 21 and 6 p.m., Sunday, March 23 at Asheville Community Theatre.
Shadow Girls Cult is comprised of two puppeteers, Cass Bray and Zane Exactly. The duo incorporate shadow puppetry and projection in their cinematic-style productions.
“We both really like short-form animation and we’ve been able to create this style that feels like it’s animation, feels like it’s this kind of cross-section of cinema, theater, puppetry, animation,” explained Bray.
Shadow Girls Cult uses three overhead projectors to create their puppet narratives. Two-dimensional shadow puppets, human silhouettes and lighting techniques combine in a Bray and Exactly show to form different story vignettes.
“UNRAVELING” is the name of Shadow Girls Cult’s Fringe Fest show.
“It’s a series of different cinematic shadow vignettes about different moments in time when these worlds and our characters fall apart,” Bray said. “We work in a style that’s very surreal, so there is a narrative, but it’s also very surreal and can be abstract at times as well.”
The show is influenced by several cinematic genres, including sci-fi and film noir. Segments include homages to everything from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” to “The X-Files.”
“We get inspired by everything we watch. We see things and we go, ooh, how can we recreate something like that on the overhead projectors? It becomes this really fun challenge to ourselves,” Exactly said.
However, Shadow Girls Cult is also interested in exploring difficult, thorny ideas, even if they are performing them in a fun, interesting way.
“Both of us are genderqueer, nonbinary people, but we’re really drawn to these stories that revolve around feminine characters specifically, and often playing a little bit with the identity and kind of loss of identity that can come from the queer experience,” Bray shared about characters in “UNRAVELING.” “We’re definitely pulling from some of the aspects that comes from just living in this world as a queer person.”
Shadow Girls Cult prides themselves on bringing as much as possible from real life to their shows. Everything in a Shadow Girls Cult production is live, even if it all looks like a movie.
“We’ve had people come back and ask where the digital projector is, and it’s really exciting to be like, no, this is all happening live with just the two of us,” Bray said.
“This pile of paper bits and framing mats and all the bits sort of strewn across the tables,” Exactly described. “We go, no, this was it. We didn’t press play on anything except for the sound cues. Everything else is just done with all this stuff you see here.”
Tickets for “UNRAVELING” are $16 and can be purchased at tickets.ashevillefringe.org/events/unraveling.