Take a colossal body of work, condense it into ninety minutes or so, drop it in the hands of the funniest cast you can find, and you’ll understand in a minute the sheer brilliance of those crazies from the Reduced Shakespeare Company, who first revolutionized the campy world of stage…
Few plays rocked the boat on Broadway more than Hair when the seminal rock musical left Joe Papp’s Public Theater in new York in 1968 — retooled and tightened up to showcase the music — for the Great White Way. Now it’s not so daring, even if it does espouse…
You might ask yourself why Chris Loffelmacher, the fount of creativity who runs the Denver Public Library’s Fresh City Life program, called tonight’s FCL panel discussion on art in the community “eatART.” Well, he’s happy to oblige with an answer: The moniker, it turns out, rose from a longtime fantasy…
As the Denver Handmade Alliance grows, so does the local crafting collective’s impact: Conceived of two years ago as a launching pad for independent local crafters and creatives, the organization just received status as a nonprofit, with a goal of doing exactly what it’s been doing all along — providing…
Imagine a line of chairs, 1,000 of them, lined up one after the other along the main drag in Manitou Springs, glinting in the early morning sun. Colorado Springs sculptor Sean O’Meallie did, and with help from the Business of Art Center in Manitou, he’ll be making The Manitou Chair…
Last year, Denver artepreneur Eric Matelski put together a themed Halloween gallery show riffing off Ouija boards. This year, his ode to the witching hour mines a global collection of bogeyman stories, including a few new ones that sprouted from the twisted imaginations of an artist or two. The Bogeyman…
How did Ietef Cavem Vita, otherwise known in these parts as DJ Cavem Moetavation, spend his summer? Under the sun, it turns out: shoveling dirt and planting seeds, growing greens and teaching kids. A food-justice advocate and proponent of mixing up the beats of hip-hop with the kind of backyard…
You’ll never look at an urban tree in quite the same way after you’ve been on the Fall Tree Walk offered annually on the University of Colorado at Boulder campus by the CU Museum of Natural History. That ‘s because it’s leaf-peeping with a purpose, a serene evening stroll led…
You know the town’s about to get weirder when Denver’s Japanese-street-fashion-obsessed couple Andrew Novick and Janene Hurst bring back their Gimme Gimme Pillow Toast pop-up shop, which is filled to the rafters of Mod Livin’s upstair gallery with Asian pop goods you won’t find anywhere else in these parts. And…
The big news at this year’s Bordo Bello skateboard-art fundraiser isn’t just that it continues to grow in size. It’s also growing in stature, featuring more works by national design artists, intermixed with rad decorated decks by a fine representation of talented locals. Also, you can bid in advance online…
Over the years, the bold Buntport Theater troupe has taken on literary giants, from Kafka to Eugene O’Neill, most of whom were male, as the subject matter of their original productions. But this year, says company member Brian Colonna, they’re lauding the literate ladies, at least with their season opener,…
It’s truly a new dawn for Denver’s LIDA Project: After a sabbatical by LIDA’s divining light, Brian Freeland, and a forced change of venue, the indie/avant-garde theater collective is back on the grid with a fully planned season. That season begins tonight, full-throttle, with Justin Bieber Meets Al Qaeda, a…
Author Don Campbell didn’t invent the concept of the Mozart Effect, but he did popularize it in his so-named 1997 treatise, which was based on the theory that listening to music — that of Mozart, in particular — will essentially make you smarter. It’s a controversial idea still being argued…
Skate-deck art? It’s not just a passing fancy. In a time when more and more talented young artists blaze a trail from a graphic-arts base, decks represent the perfect synthesis of their efforts: There’s a functional basis, but also a sweet blast of imagination and free thought all tied up…
Beginning Saturday, Paragon member and executive director Michael Stricker joins co-founder Warren Sherrill and Emily Paton-Davies in the troupe’s production of Jez Butterworth’s Parlour Song, the last show of its present season, as well as the last to be performed in a sublet venue (in this case, the Kim Robards…
Ever since the Rangeview Library District changed its name to “Anythink,” something peculiar’s been going on: The locals began to embrace their libraries like never before, and once you step inside Anythink Wright Farms, way up north on 120th Avenue in Thornton, you get an inkling of why. The building…
Artist Penney Bidwell knows the carnival life isn’t always a circus. She ought to — Bidwell comes from carny stock, and their memories and lore left her with a different view. And it’s not as though we haven’t all lived through a creepy-clown shiver or two in our collective lifetime,…
The new Lone Tree Arts Center will unveil its first theater run of the season — and its own short life as a performing-arts venue — tonight with a comedy imported all the way from the rarefied climes of Creede, Colorado. But though it showcases the esteemed Creede Repertory Theatre,…
In the Rangeview Library District, once famous for being the worst-funded library district in the state, they don’t even call them libraries anymore. They call them “Anythink,” and they don’t charge fines, use the Dewey Decimal System or even expect patrons to bury their noses in books. In that spirit,…
Imagining new worlds, both real and conceptual, is an objective for many artists, but few have achieved that goal as literally as German painter/sculptor Anselm Kiefer, who in 1992 moved to La Ribaute, an abandoned silk-factory complex in Barjac, France, and slowly turned it into a labyrinth of grand subterranean…
The International Film Series grew a little this year. To inaugurate new secondary digs in the University of Colorado’s state-of-the-art Visual Arts Center, director Pablo Kjolseth chose to fill the VAC’s auditorium seats with a documentary series that runs concurrently with regular IFS screening at Muenzinger Auditorium. Part of his…
If you think Third Friday is an invention of the Art District on Santa Fe, think again. You can give them credit, perhaps, and Santa Fe will be aglow with happenings tonight. But that doesn’t explain the profusion of excellent shows opening tonight in other gallery districts all over town…
