Sion Sono Asks: Why Don’t You Play in Hell?

Second in Japan only to Takashi Miike as an outrageously prolific and wicked genre geyser, Sion Sono is most notorious here for the four-hour teen-perv epic Love Exposure (2011). The cut-artery farce Why Don’t You Play in Hell is less typical, and a good deal goofier, riffing on yakuza films…

Well Worn

The fiber arts are elevated beyond a simple do-it-yourself craft in a new show at Boulder’s Dairy Center for the Arts. The Art of Fiber explores the rich history and modern technological advancements in the field while honoring the fiftieth anniversary of the Handweavers Guild of Boulder. Showcasing a juried…

Santa in Space

From now until the new year, tired music, forced cheer and gaudy decorations are the order of the day, and Scrooge you if you don’t like it. If you do like it — or maybe are just suffering from the holiday version of Stockholm syndrome — you might as well…

New Horizons

In the midst of celebrating twelve wonderful years of facilitating projects by kids and artist-mentors, PlatteForum is pulling up stakes from its Riverfront-neighborhood home and taking a leap into the Temple, a Curtis Park venue-in-progress in the heart of Denver’s growing artist community. Though the nonprofit still has a lease…

Art in Action

Most of the year, Britt Madden of the Banshee Press printmaking studio handles big loads of finely crafted commercial work that’s artful if not always actual art. But she’s decided to have some fun this month – during what she calls her “down season” — by collaborating with a handpicked…

Get Your Santa On

Denverites have an undying love for dressing alike and carousing through the city in throngs. Weather conditions and an innate sense of propriety are ignored as locals seize upon even the slightest pretense to don silly outfits and take to the streets in a spirit of beery bonhomie. Despite its…

Walk on the Bad Side

Santa Claus knows if you’ve been bad or good, and that means that most of us are screwed. Forget that fat, judgmental elf, and revel in your badness at Krampus Nacht Denver, a holiday festival for those who find it too damn hard to be good. “The legend of Krampus…

Go Home Again

When Anna Winter and Laura Conway put out a call for submissions for their in-home art show, Staycation, they weren’t expecting a global response, but sculpture, photography, videography and even live performers from as far away as Denmark, Poland and Russia all made their way to Boulder. The curators asked…

Just Like the Ones You Used to Know

Tonight is the fifth annual 1940s White Christmas Ball, and as befits an event that was put together to commemorate and celebrate the past, organizer Khyentse James is getting even more nostalgic than usual. “We’ve always thought of doing something completely different from the ‘White Christmas’ theme,” she says, “but…

Wrestle Mania

Colorado has its own homegrown wrestling entertainment scene thanks to Primos Hardcore & Wrestling’s commitment to training some of the ring’s brightest stars. At tonight’s Xtreme Xmas smackdown, Primos brings a mix of fierce longtime competitors and new brutes center stage for a wild night of celebration and fan appreciation…

First Tracks

Colorado’s entry in the “Lost Ski Areas” series from History Press turned out to be a bigger project than Caryn and Peter Boddie imagined: They found 140 abandoned ski hills in all and ended up writing two books. They’ll introduce the first, Lost Ski Areas of Colorado’s Front Range and…

Yippee Ki Yay and Merry Christmas

Christmas traditions come in all shapes and sizes, and it’s never too late to add another one to the mix. This year, consider the potent combination of a drinking game and the world’s best (only?) Christmas-action movie hybrid at Films on Tap: Die Hard. “Die Hard is my favorite Christmas…

I’m Your Puppet

Mare Trevathan is learning that Balls! A Holiday Spectacular, the annual variety show she helped found six years ago, has a life beyond her and the others who created it. “Now I feel like it has its own stamina; it now exists beyond any of us,” she notes. The charitable…

Taste of the Season

Before Garrett Ammon’s ballet company got its makeover as Wonderbound, The Nutcracker was a stock annual performance for what was then Ballet Nouveau Colorado, just as it is for so many other companies. But in the present, Ammon wanted to drop the stiff crinolines of the Tchaikovsky classic for something…

Scrooge Loose

Everyone has seen A Christmas Carol — probably more than once. But no one has seen that story as it’s told in An Improvised Christmas Carol. “When I was in Seattle last year, I saw fliers for An Improvised Christmas Carol, and being an actor-producer-improviser person, I went to see…

Mall for One

“If David Sedaris had known then what we know now about how commercial the holidays have become, we would have thought he was a prophet when he wrote this,” says the Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company’s Stephen Weitz, director of The Santaland Diaries. Opening tonight at the Jones Theatre, Sedaris’s play…

A Place at the Table

Judy Chicago always wanted to be a professional artist when she grew up. She never noticed, while wandering the galleries at the Chicago Art Institute, that men had created most of the works on display. “So it was with a great deal of surprise, when I was in graduate school,…

Twenty-five Holiday Markets in Denver in Early December

The art of craft can include everything from affordable art to locally-designed clothing to handmade everything and, in Colorado, to limited-edition microbrewed beers. All make great gifts — or little presents to ourselves — and in keeping, there’s a show or market in the metro area with just the right…

Review: Conceptual Art from Judy Chicago, Ann Hamilton and Jae Ko

Surveying Judy Chicago RedLine 2350 Arapahoe Street There are three solos on display now through the holidays that focus on internationally known conceptual artists. RedLine is hosting a retrospective dedicated to Judy Chicago, a pioneer in feminist art, while Robischon has given space to two artists, Ann Hamilton and Jae…