LEAF Festival (Lake Eden Arts Festival)

Twice a year since 1995, Black Mountain — about fifteen miles east of Asheville — hosts one of the stranger and more honest gatherings in American music culture. LEAF started as an acronym: Lake Eden Arts Festival. By 2012, the organization had outgrown the name and become LEAF Community Arts, though most people just call it LEAF.

The site carries more history than most festivals could handle. Lake Eden Events and Camp Rockmont occupy the grounds of Black Mountain College. Albert Einstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Anni Albers, Merce Cunningham, Rothko, and Buckminster Fuller all spent time on this land — Fuller designed his first geodesic dome here. Before the college, Edwin Wiley Grove — the same man who built the Grove Park Inn and the Grove Arcade in Asheville — developed the property, constructing buildings with his trademark native stone fireplaces. Before Grove, the Lake Eden Inn and Resort drew visitors seeking its healing waters and mountain air. Three distinct phases of American life, layered into the same ground where people now set up tents and tune drums.

The festival itself runs wide: international and local music, handcrafts, dancing, cuisine, children's activities, outdoor adventures, drum circles, a zipline, canoeing. LEAF runs year-round now through several programs — LEAF Schools & Streets brings performing artists into schools and community centers for workshops, residencies, and interactive performances, putting youth onstage alongside resident artists with their families watching.

What LEAF built, across thirty years of twice-yearly gatherings, is a structure where the distance between performer and audience keeps collapsing. The grounds at Lake Eden are where that started, and where it keeps happening.