Conceptualist Susan Meyer, who teaches art at the University of Denver, is the subject of the provocatively titled Plato’s Retreat at Plus Gallery. What makes the title provocative is that it’s a reference to a well-known heterosexual swingers’ club that existed in New York in the late 1970s and early…
Clyfford Still. For the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, director Dean Sobel has installed a career survey of the great artist that starts with the artist’s realist self-portrait and features his remarkable post-impressionist works from the 1920s. Next are Still’s works from the ’30s, with some odd takes on…
Dixie’s Tupperware Party. Dixie is a booze- and sex-addicted, trash-talking, child-neglecting ex-con from Alabama who holds Tupperware parties in her trailer, and she’s invited you to this one. Dixie’s Tupperware Partyat the Galleria really isa Tupperware party — you get a name tag and raffle number when you come in,…
Lisa Ohlin’s Simon and the Oaks has all the superficial elements of compelling drama but none of the interiority; it looks like a good movie without ever actually feeling like one. Try to imagine low-rent Spielberg set in Sweden: whimsical children with intertwined fates, Nazis looming on the horizon, and…
If Hollywood’s rut du jour is the origin story as bid for franchise immortality, you can’t say that Skyfall — the 23rd “official” James Bond film in fifty years — isn’t on trend. Eight years ago, in Casino Royale, Daniel Craig’s first outing as Bond, we learned that 007 owes…
The Loneliest Planet begins with a close-up trained on the body of a beautiful woman, naked and trembling. It’s not what it sounds like. Nica (Hani Furstenberg), on a pre-marriage honeymoon with fiancé Alex (Gael García Bernal) in rural Georgia, is in the midst of a makeshift shower. As Nica…
“Look out, Haskell. It’s real.” — From Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool, 1969 For all but a small sliver of U.S. society, wars are just a distant rumbling. But for those who have experienced them — soldiers, journalists, refugees — they are devastating. The images engrave themselves indelibly on the brain…
While we wait for Drag Machine, people start handing out freshly spun cotton candy to a line that snakes around the Jones Theatre. Inside, we find that the Drag Queen bathroom (there’s one for Drag Kings, too) sports a glittering tinsel curtain; decorated top hats are taped to stalls for…
Breaking out of consignment-shop confinement, tonight’s Holiday Fashion Swap aims to capitalize on recycled fashion’s burgeoning popularity. This organized clothing-trade party invites all you frugal fashionistas to bring a bag of up-to-date, gently used and seasonally appropriate attire to exchange for a bag of new-to-you goods in a pop-up boutique…
Bison are the largest land mammals in North America, and they have the richest cultural history (just ask the elected officials pushing the National Bison Legacy Act, which would make the woolly beasts our national mammal). Bison are so big, in fact, that MCA Denver needs two full days for…
From her legendary standup routines to her versatile work for television and radio, comedian Paula Poundstone has been interacting with audiences for more than three decades. Tonight, Poundstone comes to the Newman Center with her one-woman show — which is just the way she prefers it. “I’m so isolated in…
“Opera seems very conservative and traditional, but it’s not,” says Opera on Tap’s Eve Orenstein. “Opera’s not stuffy at all. It’s kind of fun and naughty.” The monthly series, which just moved from the now-defunct Bender’s Tavern to the Bar, is a raucous night of opera singers performing songs centered…
It’s never too early to start holiday shopping, and for those seeking handmade or unusual gifts, the first wave of sales begins this weekend, with many time-honored annual gift events rubbing elbows with a few fresh ones. One of the latter, the Paris Holiday Market Trunk Show, is actually in…
The RiNo art-studio community Wazee Union is a little like the proverbial beehive of activity all the time, with art being made in its studio cells and artists communing in its labyrinthine hallways day and night. But tonight’s Second Saturday building takeover, Rock Paper Projector, will raise the buzz to…
If Lighthouse Writers had tried to snag smoking-hot author Junot Díaz for a Denver appearance in the last year, it probably wouldn’t have happened, notes Lighthouse program director Andrea Dupree. But thanks to a an inside contact and discussions that literally began years ago, Díaz — a Pulitzer Prize-winner and…
France’s notoriously out-of-touch, extravagant and ill-fated queen will come to life tonight in the regional premiere of Joel Gross’s Marie Antoinette: The Color of Flesh. The intimate, three-person production by Spark Theater imagines a love triangle between the cake-loving queen; her portrait painter, Madame le Brun; and a count named…
Denver Arts Week unlocks one of the city’s most precious secrets: Almost all of the events and places falling under its diverse cultural banner are actually available to the public nearly 365 days a year, give or take an hour or a day. First Friday gallery walks and dozens of…
Thordis Niela Simonsen will bring her latest book, Dances in Two Worlds: A Writer-Artist’s Backstory, to life tonight with Building on Memory, a performance of her ongoing work as a writer, painter and photographer. Rooted in her journeys to Greece over more than twenty years, the book and the live…
People believe in some pretty funny stuff, from virgin birth to Bigfoot. For Ian Harris and his partners in The Evolution of Comedy show, all of those beliefs are fair game. “Even the most seemingly rational people, who might not have a particular religion or something, they still have some…
Steampunk and German lieder, a romantic form of song, don’t seem like they’d go well together, but Luminous Thread Productions likes to combine the unexpected. Nuptials for the Dead, which opens the company’s 2012-13 season, titled Dreampunk, gives German art songs a new life in this story of a woman…
Serious adult conversations can be boring, which is why pairing them with cookies and milk might be the best way to get people interested. That’s what Evan Weissman hopes to do with Warm Cookies of the Revolution, which he describes as a “civic health club” designed to get people engaged…
“When you walk into a bookstore, you’re faced with life in such a grand scheme, between fiction and nonfiction and travel and every-thing under the sun,” says Ronald Rice. “I’m so overwhelmed by how much there is yet to know, and that feeling makes you alive.” And he’s not the…
