This year’s 2025 Kindling Arts Fest is happening Thursday through Sunday. Kindling Arts is an organization that helps support and provide the practical infrastructure necessary for creatives to make original, innovative and independent live performances. The festival will feature 19 original projects ranging from an electropop musical and contemporary dance to interactive performances at eight different venues across Nashville.
“This year’s theme is Fortunes and Fates, and it is just a evocative place for folks to start,” founding Artistic Director Jessika Malone shared. “We have artists contemplating what does it mean to control your fate? What does it means to question your fortune? And you see that translated in an incredible array of different ways across a variety of new esthetics.”
“We are in a moment where arts are under attack, from revoking funding to political censorship,” she said. “It is more important than ever that folks get out and support the art that they love so that it can still exist. We can show our community that this matters to us, we can hold space and we can lift up all of the various forms of expression that help us be human and that help remind us how we’re all connected, and help lift our spirits when things are tough out there. All of our artists participating are local artists and they run the gamut of every imaginable discipline. We’ve got dancers, actors, improvisers, circus artists, musicians, singers, acrobats and puppeteers. It is just an incredible weekend where over 150 artists of all of these different genres are coming together to cross-pollinate and inspire each other, collaborate and make new forms of art. It’s just an amazing opportunity to see all the different kinds of artists that are working in Nashville beyond just music. There’s so many forms of art happening here, and so many amazing artists, and we’re really excited to give them a home for a weekend to celebrate what they do.”
This week in live music:
Tonight (July 23) WNXP Presents Hotline TNT at the Blue Room. Thursday night (July 24) at The Pinnacle Snail Mail and Dinosaur Jr. performs. We go back to the Pinnacle on Friday (July 25 & 26) for two nights with Lord Huron; and Alabama Shakes is at Ascend (July 25). On Saturday WNXP Presents Ducks LTD. at the Blue Room and Sunday night at City Winery hip hop legend Rakim performs.
