Arts & Culture

“How many cameras have gone to Alaska and British Columbia and places that consistently provide good skiing?” asks Boulder-based filmmaker Nick Waggoner, director of Solitaire, the Best of Festival winner at this year’s Backcountry Film Festival. “In South America, that does not exist: There’s no promise. You think that there’s…

Many Doomsday theorists have circled December 21, 2012, on their calendars with a red pen, marking the date when humanity comes to a violent end. Yet indigenous people around the world see 2012 as an era of transformation and heightened awareness. A change is gonna come, they say, but the…

Josh LaBure of vegan advocacy group Plants & Animals Denver had seen vegan proms in New York City and San Francisco, and he thought it was high time the Mile High City got in the game. So tonight, Plants & Animals and Vegan Coloradical are teaming up to present the…

“We knew we wanted to do something around Johnny Cash. We knew we wanted to call it Square of Ice,” says Emily Tarquin, the co-curator (with Charlie Miller) of Off-Center@the Jones, and that’s pretty much how ideas begin in the offbeat wing of the Denver Performing Arts Complex, which hosts…

The grow-local movement is about more than good taste. Food justice is an issue that’s taking root in Colorado, where a range of citizen-led initiatives strive to stimulate the local economy while providing healthy food to people in low-income neighborhoods. Today, locavore foodies and activists alike will find something to…

Gabriel Garcia Marquez didn’t create the character of Florencia Grimaldi, but he did open the door to the world of magical realism through which she emerged, as the heroine of Daniel Catan’s Florencia en al Amazonas. Inspired by Marquez’s work, the opera unfolds during a riverboat journey through the verdant,…

Confessions aren’t just for Catholics anymore. As proof, Denver’s Dangerous Theatre is presenting Steven Fales’s ninety-minute solo play Confessions of a Mormon Boy. It starts off with Fales as a Mormon boy in Utah and follows him as he becomes a high-priced call boy in New York City. This adventure…

Mike Doughty’s story isn’t uncommon: Guy falls in love with alcohol and drugs, pushes through a major-label music career while still abusing alcohol and drugs, recovers and survives to tell the tale. But what is special about Doughty’s experience is how he tells it. In The Book of Drugs, the…

Physics, especially the study of movement, is always the focus of Robert Mangold’s abstract and kinetic sculptures. The nationally renowned sculptor’s career stretches over five decades, and for most of that time, he’s been working right here in Denver. That makes the over-the-top exhibit Time, Space and Motion: Robert Mangold…

Author Richard Brautigan, whose novels were compact and dreamy, was a conundrum of a man: Embraced by the ’60s counterculture, he didn’t return the favor, and at the end of the era, the fame built on the strength of his novel Trout Fishing in America petered out. On a parallel…

It’s a tale as old as time travel. Three aliens from Zots, a planet on which romance destroys the atmosphere, travel to Earth to break their hearts and save their home. If they’re not in love, they’re not in danger of environmental collapse, right? As part of the Denver FilmCenter’s…

Considering the rise of abstraction at the beginning of the last century, it’s interesting to note that even now, more than a decade into the current century, some artists persist in creating old-fashioned representational depictions of the human figure. A secret to the success of these contemporary realists is their…

Architects and designers will get a chance to play with their food today as Canstruction Colorado 2012 gets under way at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. To compete in this colossal building event, seven teams will use nearly 10,000 donated cans of food to create visual masterpieces such…

Lafayette-based artist Lisa Michot wants you to know that it’s Ignacio Mouser, her papier-mache rodent alter-ego, and not Lisa herself, who is an associate member of NEXT Gallery, so take that knowledge and a grain of salt with you when you go to see Ignacio Mouser and Friends, a small…