Way Out Open Mic Encourages Performers to Get Experimental

“We’re just looking for people that are doing something that’s outside of the box,” says Dylan Gilbert says. “We try to let that definition stay loose, because what might be outside of the box for a dancer might be different for a musician.” 

The songwriter, producer and sound artist is trying to pin down the guard rails for Way Out, a monthly experimental open mic at Goodyear Arts in Camp North End that features musicians, actors, dancers, poets, performers and artists of any medium who are interested in forward-thinking, alternative and avant-garde performance. 

That’s why it’s hard for Gilbert, who founded the event, to express its ground rules; there really aren’t many.

“It’s a question that we ask ourselves every time booking comes up,” Gilbert notes. “Are we giving the right people opportunities? That’s one of the trickiest parts for me.” 

Each open mic spotlights a featured performer alongside any local artists who sign up. The free open mic launched in February 2025, with Charlotte free-jazz duo Ghost Trees as the first featured performer. 

Curiosidades de Bombrile, Phaze Gawd, La Brava and Coughing Dove are among the experimental artists that headlined last year, with 2026’s lineup having already included raw bass-and-cello duo Okapi in January and sophisticated noise punks Julian Calendar in February. 

Way Out’s upcoming show on March 4 will mark the 14th iteration of the series, featuring experimental dancer and choreographer Reba Bowens.  

Gilbert has fronted genre-bending rock band Hectorina and released a string of garage-psych-folk-electronica-drone solo albums. He’s been in the Goodyear Arts orbit since 2016, when he completed a residency at the artist-run space. 

He seems the ideal artist to host the outre’ open mic — with the collaboration of other members of the Goodyear Arts Collective — that takes place on the first Wednesday of every month. But he didn’t get the idea to do Way Out until after he’d moved away from Charlotte.

He and his wife, fellow Goodyear Arts Collective member Sarah Ingel, moved to Philadelphia in fall 2022, where she got her masters of Fine Arts from University of the Arts – Philadelphia (UArts), then took a job at the school.

A return to Charlotte didn’t look to be in the couple’s future at that point, but once that opportunity presented itself, Gilbert’s drive to collaborate and curate was resparked. We caught up with the prolific producer to discuss the one-of-a-kind series in the lead-up to the March 4 event. 

Queen City Nerve: Where did the idea for an experimental open mic first come from?

Dylan Gilbert: I went from being in a music community where I knew everybody [in Charlotte] and had been part of the southeastern music scene since I was a kid. Suddenly, I’m up in Philadelphia where I didn’t know anybody. So I did something that I hadn’t done since I was a teenager and I started going to the open mic that was just a couple of blocks up [the street]. I was a little bashful at first, but I just fell in love with it all over again.

(UArts closed in 2024.)

The universe brought us back down to our hometown of Charlotte again and I started thinking, how can I bring a lot of these cool radical ideas, these forward-thinking music and performances that I saw and experienced in Philadelphia, with me back to Charlotte?

My wife and I have been Collective members over at Goodyear Arts since pretty much the beginning. So that was the obvious spot for a community event — an open mic that felt free for people to express themselves performatively. I wanted to hold a space where people felt the agency to do something out of the box. I went to some of the more popular open mics around town and noticed there’s a lot more parameters around those open mics. You have to make sure your guitar’s in tune before you get up there. 

With Way Out, I wanted to tell people to get up here with an out-of-tune guitar and play something atonal if they wanted to. I had a big team of people that helped me — De’Angelo Dia, Renee Cloud, Nathan Matthews, and my wife, Sarah Ingle. They were all super instrumental in helping get this off the ground.

How far out can you or will you go with the performances?

We’ve had nudity. We’ve had people go up on stage and break things. People are allowed to break their own things but we encourage them not to break the venue or any of our stuff. One of my favorite events was our recent holiday show. Our featured artist was this noise musician who goes by A Song You’ll Never Hear Again, and he created an ice sculpture snake out of contact mics and invited the audience to come play with the ice sculpture snake. Of course, [it] all shattered and it just turned into a big pool of water.

We had to pull out another stage to put in the middle of the water. And then everybody performed on an island stage for the rest of the night. We’ve had puppeteers [and] performance art that’s like Andy Kaufman stuff, where it looks like an argument is happening and it’s not. There are a lot of conceptual pieces. 

I’ve had people walk up on stage and construct some sort of contraption — we’ve had a borderline Rube Goldberg machine up on stage. A big treat for me is a tremendously wide-ranging amount of music. I’ve been really blown away with how creative people can be whenever you give them the opportunity to be.

There’s some structure for Way Out, right? Doors open at 6:30 p.m., sign-ups start at 6:45 and performances start at 7, for example.

The basic rule of thumb is that the featured performer gets a 20-minute slot and everybody else gets 10 minutes. We’ve tried to stay pretty strict on that. In my experience, going to a traditional singer-songwriter open mic, there’s always a danger that somebody is going to play too long. I found that to be the opposite problem at Way Out most of the time; very few folks fill their full 10 minutes at Way Out, which has been a big surprise to me. Maybe it’s because the material is more experimental, [and there] may be less of it.

Do you have some idea what the featured performer will do before they do it?

That’s usually the one thing I’m sure of. We also have two or three regulars that I can count on popping in most times. It’s been wonderful to see them too, because slowly they start to challenge themselves over time instead of coming back and doing the same act.

Is there anything you don’t allow?

I give a short curtain speech [where I say], “Silence your phone and don’t break anything.” We added a new rule recently that says we support and encourage human-made art first and foremost. We’re starting to slowly kind of say no AI within your performance. Some people seem to be trying to test that boundary a little bit.

The rest is like no Nazi shit, no sexism, no hate speech. Way Out supports women, people of color, queer people, immigrants. We want this to be a safe community space in that way. [We’re] going to try to protect folks and make sure they feel supported however they’re trying to express themselves.

Can you tell me about the featured performers coming up?

Reba Bowens [on March 4] has been part of the Goodyear Collective since the beginning. She’s been teaching and dancing in the community ever since I’ve known her — probably for 20 years now. 

She did a piece as part of a group performance back in the fall that seemed particularly outside the box from what I had seen her do in the past, and I was really struck by it. She voiced to me that she wanted to continue exploring that work, and I very quickly [said], “You should do this at Way Out.”

Dallas Thrasher [April 1] is the solo moniker of Charles Ovett, a musician who I know mostly from the band Joules and Psychic Graveyard. He’s been around for a long time making experimental music. I have no idea what he’ll do. There’s just trust that whatever he does will be really fantastic. 

Jody Mattiacci [May 6] is a noise musician. He just became a resident at Goodyear but has been on the periphery of the Goodyear Collective for a few years now. He was in the bands America is a Mistake and Skewed Collective but mostly does solo stuff these days. He plays extreme noise sound-collage stuff. He’s also a really interesting person to physically watch, because a lot of his performance has to do with his body. He’ll tape microphones to himself or things like that.

Mono Feo [June 3] is a younger member of the Goodyear Collective, and I guess they would describe themselves as a performance artist. This is another artist that I have no idea what they will do. There are usually a lot of costumes and props involved with Mono’s performances, and [they] are usually particularly subversive.

What do you hope audiences take away from Way Out?

Every time I go to Way Out, I’m surprised by the performances — and I am overjoyed by that. It’s one of the most enjoyable projects for myself that I’ve ever put together. If a person can sit there and revel in the surprise of what’s being presented to them, I think that’s what I’m hoping for.

Why is Way Out important?

I think that humans are making art at their best whenever they don’t have any guardrails. Freedom of expression, allowing people to get up on stage is, for me at least, so rewarding. 

There have been a couple of times at Way Out where a kid got up on stage and it seemed like they were trying to piss everybody off in the room. But instead, the entire audience whooped and clapped and cheered and you could see that performer’s face change when they realized that they weren’t going to get chased out of town for what they were saying or doing. 

Allowing people the freedom to get up on stage and be creative is the most important thing we can do in 2026.

Way Out takes place on the first Wednesday of the month at Goodyear Arts, 301 Camp Road, #200. Doors open at 6:30 p.m., sign-ups start at 6:45 and performances start at 7.