For its show, (Residency): Process to Consumption, the city’s arts arm, Create Denver, handed out empty four-foot-by-four-foot wooden boxes to a group of selected artists. They were asked to use the back as a canvas and the inside to build something. Some collaborated; others created alone. Tonight, the show opens…
Psst, hey kid — want to go on an adventure? Fight some fearsome beasts, save the day, take home some loot? Maybe collect a shitload of polyhedral dice and a stack of arcane rulebooks as tall as you are? Sound fun? Then step into the world of pen-and-paper roleplaying –…
Nathan Winograd released his book about animal shelters, Redemption: The Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No Kill Revolution in America, eight years ago — and the response was so successful that he decided to create a documentary about animal shelters not only to reprise the information in the book…
From participatory performance art on a stage in a picture window to an improvised gag-fest about the pitfalls of speed dating, there are many ways to find relief from the summer heat, whether it’s in a gallery environment or a dark theater. Here are a few of the coolest performing-arts…
If the clothes of Yves Saint Laurent were groundbreaking, the designer’s mystique was as subtle as the curve of an invisibly molded sleeve. Those who have picked up just a little Saint Laurent lore may know about his beginnings at the House of Dior in the late 1950s, and his…
Who knows why, but the sight of apes sitting tall and proud on horseback is stirring in a primal way. That’s one of the best images in Matt Reeves’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the sequel to the enormously successful 2011 Rise of the Planet of the Apes…
Jan Ole Gerster’s debut feature, A Coffee in Berlin (originally titled Oh Boy), arrives in the U.S. riding a wave of success, having swept several major categories at the 2013 German Film Awards, where its main competition was Cloud Atlas (co-directed by Gerster’s friend Tom Tykwer). By comparison, Gerster’s film…
In the third act of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro at Central City Opera, sopranos Sinead Mulhern and Anna Christy sing “Che Soave Zefiretto,” the duet in which the Countess (Mulhern) composes a letter for her maid Susanna (Christy) to take down; the two women are playing a comic trick…
The Arvada Center sits on a very large site, but until recently, the venue had never used the seventeen-acre field just to the south to showcase art. That changed when exhibitions director Collin Parson, along with assistant curator Kristin Bueb, decided to transform the empty land into a xeric sculpture…
I Hate Hamlet. I Hate Hamlet is a bit like the curate’s egg: hilariously funny in parts, and in others so idiotic that you’re embarrassed for the actors. Why is the radiant Jamie Ann Romero wasting her talents wafting about as Deirdre, a stagestruck 29-year-old virgin who’ll have sex with…
Articulated Perspectives. Summer is group-show time, and Bill Havu and Nick Ryan have put together a great exhibit that looks at artists who combine representational imagery with abstract sensibilities. The exhibit, installed on both the main level and the mezzanine, includes the work of three painters and one sculptor. As…
“It’s the secret films you have to watch out for,” jokes Richard Linklater of his new movie Boyhood, a furtive experiment that he kept quiet for more than a decade. In 2002, he chose a first-grader named Eller Coltrane, the six-year-old son of two Texas artists; cast Patricia Arquette and…
When National Public Radio’s weekly news quiz, Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!, began, way back in 1998, host Peter Sagal and his sidekick, radio veteran Carl Kassell, weren’t even in the same room, let alone in front of a studio audience. The call-in show was recorded remotely from different studios. Now…
Sirens blare and an eerie voice announces that it’s best to remain indoors if you don’t plan to participate. While others make safety arrangements and some sharpen their knives, one man loads his black, steel-armored car with plenty of guns and begins cruising. Fires erupt along the street, and gunshots…
“I forget that people think that I’m the girl with a ponytail and a briefcase,” says Anna Kendrick, perched on a couch in a T-shirt and jeans. Her career-launching role as a prim go-getter in Up in the Air is so far removed from her actual self that she’s still…
“The confluence of the South Platte River and Cherry Creek was historically a gathering spot for Native people, used for trade and for bringing the nations together,” says Walt Pourier, founder of the Stronghold Society and promoter of the fifth annual ONE Gathering Skate for Life event at the Denver…
You’ll see them at every gathering of geeks: elaborately costumed people repping their favorite characters from film, television, comics and more. They’re cosplayers, fans who dress up and role-play as their favorite pop-cultural personage, from the iconic to the obscure. Now the subculture is getting recognition for the art behind…
A makeup artist by day who performs as Drag Nation regular Ginger Douglas by night, Briceson Ducharme leads a fantastic double life. Both personalities come together tonight for Apocalyptic Ball 5: The Revolution, a signature fundraiser conceived a half-decade ago to raise money for AIDS Walk Colorado. The multi-faceted, high-energy…
“Every year of the Colorado Burlesque Festival has been amazing,” says Honey Touché, one of the organizers, “but I really feel like everything is on steroids this year.” And that’s appropriate since the country’s reigning Queen of Burlesque (aka Miss Exotic World) is Denver’s own Midnite Martini, who will perform…
Great things often have catastrophic beginnings. In Lyons, a foothills town devastated by flooding last fall, that is especially true. The Lyons community stuck together through the disaster, though it’s still rebuilding almost a year later. And because the cozy town on the St. Vrain River already has a reputation…
Too often, anime enthusiasts hunker down in solitude, scouring the Internet for the newest Japanese animated release. “Anime fans have so many opportunities to stream it or just wait and get imported DVDs and Blu-rays and stuff like that. But the opportunity they’re missing, in a lot of places, is…
Fans of dystopian novels and sci-fi/fantasy, look out: Young-adult fiction writers Margaret Stohl, author of Beautiful Creatures, and Veronica Roth, author of the Divergent series, will be talking about their work tonight at the Tattered Cover Highlands Ranch. Stohl’s newest book, Idols, is her sequel to Icons. “It’s an emotional…
