The MadNest is a speakeasy-style event space in a former home in Madison. If you've never heard of it, that’s because the first rule of MadNest is not to talk about MadNest. This month, the mysterious venue will host an ambitious immersive indie art production that's part haunted house, part bereavement ritual and part amusement park built out of memories and bones.
Afterlife is the spectral child of local filmmaker and Defy Film Festival co-founder Dycee Wildman and singer-songwriter/performance artist Sarah Saturday. Afterlife blends the immersive theatrical experience of New York’s Sleep No More with the interactive art installations popularized by Meow Wolf, and invites them both to a séance. It hosts small groups on a creative ritual journey through the various rooms and spaces at the MadNest, which are populated and curated by a standout roster of local collaborators.
There's fearlessness and freedom to be found in the acceptance of death. And there's also a fearless quality to Wildman and Saturday's ambitious genre-jumping creative careers: Wildman and Billy Senese's Defy Film Festival turned 10 last year. Wildman herself is the auteur behind a filmography of experimental shorts she's screened at international festivals, and a jewel box of music videos crafted for local bands like sugar sk*-*lls. She's also collaborated on stage performance installations with Saturday, whose Gardening, Not Architecture music project also finds the artist in a committed relationship with theater and technology. Afterlife was funded by a Metro Arts THRIVE grant, and it reads a little like a stepping stone from one-night-only stage shows to a more permanent space/experience for this dynamic duo to operate in.
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Afterlife's ticketed visitors will rendezvous in a small outdoor group — they sit on folding chairs beneath the kind of black tent a cemetery might employ at a rainy afternoon burial service. This first scene is a prelude to the Afterlife tour, when visitors meet the funeral director (Wildman) and receive a wireless headset featuring three different audio channels. Inside MadNest, they encounter halls of mirrors, monochromatic room decor, performance-video installations, even an appearance by Death itself.
How exactly would you plan to wade through a laser swamp? This being Nashville, you might have guessed that Afterlife would feature a Tornado Room — it's like an electronic music rave in a lightning storm. And if you think a haunted house has to have a mad scientist's laboratory, Wildman and Saturday wholeheartedly agree.
There's a ton of original music throughout this experience, but what visitors hear depends on where/when/how they listen to the varied content on the headphone channels. Curious visitors will be served well when it comes to discerning hidden clues and codes, including the kind of discoverable experiences that will make every visit personal and unique.
Along the journey, Afterlifers will encounter local dancers Joi Ware and Phylicia Roybal, in addition to other performers who might be found off the tour's beaten path. Visitors will find their experiences all lead to the cemetery — but you'll have to grab a ticket to find out if anything at all waits beyond the grave.
In addition to all the performers on hand, Afterlife will be brought to life by a crew of talented local creative technicians, including costume and set designer Kat Tierney-Smith, lighting designer Caleb McLaughlin, projection designer Samuel McDonough, game designer Jennifer Bonior, soundtrack co-producer (with Saturday) Latifah Alattas, new media artist John Holmes, and makeup artist Nichole Lim. This is a local creative community production at scale, not just a two-person show. The size of the production highlights the way the best THRIVE-funded projects can benefit a whole team of creative workers beyond only the awarded artists.
In seventh grade, John Christian Phifer told his parents that he wanted to be a mortician.
On June 13, Afterlife extends beyond The MadNest with a companion event at Larkspur Conservation, greater Nashville's natural burial ground. The Burial: An Afterlife Grave Nesting Ceremony gathers just 15 participants around a grave-size table in Larkspur's Library and Learning Center for an intimate guided ritual of decoration, reflection and communal closing. This isn't a performance event — it's Afterlife's themes escaping into the real world, offering visitors a chance to sit with mortality and grief alongside neighbors in actual sacred ground.
Afterlife runs June 11 through 13, and again from June 18 through 20, with two showtimes each night. Tickets are limited to 10 to 15 people per show, with a possible third show being added on each night. The exact MadNest address will be revealed to ticket-holders only.
In recent years, now-established local arts institutions like OZ Arts and the Kindling Arts Festival have brought new breadth to Nashville's performance art landscape, and Afterlife feels like the proof of concept for giving that scene a permanent attraction.
As of this writing, all of the Afterlife showtimes are sold out — but you can join a wait list at afterlifenashville.com in case more tickets become available.
