Perhaps it started decades ago with Toshiro Mifune and Seven Samurai, but who knows? Whatever the case, Americans have an ongoing love affair with samurai lore. It also could have something to do with our love of costumery and big swords, but samurai gear, though beautifully crafted in the Japanese…
The Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company produces some of the most interesting plays around — contemporary, smart, surprising — and it’s just added a regional premiere to its upcoming season. George Brant’s one-woman play Grounded has generated a lot of buzz and hugely positive reviews. At a time of acute international…
In only its second season, Theatre Esprit Asia is on the rise; as TEA co-director Tria Xiong notes, the pan-Asian company was the toast of last month’s Colorado Theatre Festival, winning six of nine categories for which it was nominated and getting a standing ovation for its repeat performance of…
It’s a good year in Colorado for lovers of artist Dale Chihuly’s large-scale glass works, with two major exhibits opening along the Front Range for the summer. One, an outdoor exhibition of site-specific installations, opens in June at the Denver Botanic Gardens, sending up tendrils in and among the gardens…
Ever wondered what would happen to an out-of-control truck speeding down the pass from the Eisenhower Tunnel in a snowstorm? Rather than finding out in real life, local game developer Ryan Seabury has just released Rush ‘Hower on the iTunes App Store and Google Play. It’s a free “endless runner”…
The Boulder International Fringe Festival is one of many fringe fests around the world where cultural gatekeepers have opened the dam and flooded audiences with playwrights, filmmakers, dancers, artists and curators showing off their works without censorship. Nobody gets turned away. Anything goes. The joy and trouble for audiences is…
The Moth is coming to Denver! The internationally beloved, true-stories-told-live-on-stage-without-notes series will host a Moth Mainstage event (the theme is “When Worlds Collide”) on Tuesday, September 30, at the Paramount Theatre. And it needs one more storyteller — a local one — to join the four others who’ll be standing…
All the Rage is a sequel to Martin Moran’s first one-man play, The Tricky Part, which told the story of his molestation by a counselor at Colorado’s Camp St. Malo when he was twelve — a relationship that continued over three conflicted years. Moran, who’d grown up in Denver and…
The landscape has long fascinated artists, particularly in the American West, with those interested in the form today falling into two broad categories. There are artists who re-create the high points of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century realism and impressionism. And there are those who try to introduce new ways of dealing…
Dr. Drew Pinsky — better known as just Dr. Drew — has been a prominent voice of the medical profession in popular culture for more than two decades, dispensing advice on both radio and television and working with everyone from actors and musicians to everyday folks as an addiction specialist…
“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” So said J. Robert Oppenheimer of his work on the atomic bomb, quoting the Bhagavad Gita. There’s grief and guilt in the statement, as well a daunting realization of just what he’s unleashed on the world. But as you think about it,…
George Saunders is one of America’s most celebrated short story writers. Winner of the Folio and Pulitzer prizes and been granted. MacArtuthur fellowship. Since 1996, he’s professor at Syracuse, itself an incubator for the best authors of his generation. Saunders returns to town this week to the Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop, both to participate in a big reading and signing event for fans, and also to conduct a narrower and more focused writers’ studio. However, that group is already full. Westword caught up with Saunders for a phone interview before his trip, to discuss finding out which literature is bullshit, writing stories based on dream images, and how creatively, it’s always best to steer towards the rapids.
Back in August, I wrote a love letter to Denver, the city I used to know. Though my intention was to remember the good things about my city that are gone now, it was also, perhaps, a thinly veiled criticism of the way progress is going in Denver. Recently, there…
#56: Alvin Gregorio and Petra Sertic Petra Sertic is a curator with more than fifty exhibitions under her belt; Alvin Gregorio is an artist and CU professor whose own exhibitions have circled the globe. Together, they founded Launch Pad in 2012, a flexible forum bringing together artists and art-loving audiences…
When the International Film Series launched in 1941, there were no debates about the merits of film verses digital distribution. There were no videos, no DVDs, no Blu-rays and no digital files. Film was film. You could touch it and scratch it and cut it and paint it and what…
On Sunday night, the Church hosted a dance party focused on anime, hentai and cosplay. We spotted a variety of costumes there, but a common theme was prevalent: stylish, furry felines and wolves. Keep reading to learn what subcultures inspired these looks. See also: On Trend: Neon Colors Our World…
Last week’s 24-hour cold snap was an instant reminder that fall is on its way. But as with any typical season change in Colorado, that just means we have a little more time left before summer is officially over. In honor of these last few weeks (or days, depending on…
Davey B. Gravey’s Tiny Cinema is everything the size-obsessed movie industry is not. The screen is small. The theater fits no more than four. The longest film lasts seven minutes. Instead of projecting the latest digital files, Gravey shows movies with an old Super 8 mm, home projector. Forgoing booming…
Another side of cosplay was explored Sunday night at the Church, where cat-eared Neko slave girls and big-eyed, pink-haired lasses in skimpy maid costumes mingled on the floor with leather-clad anime he-boys. Photographer Aaron Thackeray brought back these images and more from the decadent evening. See also: Photos: Nan Desu…
Margaret Tobin Brown was not the perky, Debbie Reynolds-like character from The Unsinkable Molly Brown. In fact, she was not even known as Molly when she lived in Denver. The “Indomitable Mrs. James J. Brown” might have been a better nickname, since despite being snubbed by this city’s society mavens…
If you’ve seen the billboards around town for Odysseo, which opens on Wednesday, September 17, in the Pepsi Center parking lot, then you know that tastemeister Larry King says this horse-and-acrobat extravaganza “surpasses the world’s greatest shows.” In fact, there’s a lot of hyperbole surrounding the performance, but after chatting…
Jim Havey’s soon-to-be-finished feature documentary, The Great Divide, aims to tell the tangled story of water in Colorado — a subject as vast as the state and the eight states that Colorado supplies water to. He’s looking at the acequias (ditch irrigation systems) in the San Luis Valley, the export…
