Theres nothing that a little Bette Davis eyes can’t handle — even romantic trouble. As part of a series aptly named Sex, Lies and Celluloid: Old Hollywood, Bad Romance, the Denver Public Library has been hosting a weekly film night targeting the dark side of love. And as the series’…
The spectacle put on by Shen Yun Performing Arts is — and yet isn’t — the usual classical Chinese song and dance. It’s carried, on one hand, by an impressive cast of more than 100 dancers, choreographers and live musicians, and boasts a truckload of costumes to die for, plus…
During the slave trade, a ship’s route typically consisted of three legs: from Europe to Africa to trade goods for kidnapped Africans, from Africa to the Americas to trade the slaves for raw materials, and back to Europe to repeat the process. The most atrocious of these journeys, the one…
The idea is so intuitive, it’s hard to believe nobody’s ever thought of it before: Take improv, that most interactive of theatrical arts, and add the interactivity of social media. That’s the idea behind Bovine Metropolis Theater’s Like This Show, and it just may be the wave of the future…
Samuel D. Hunter’s The Whale, which began as a reading at the Denver Center’s New Play Summit in 2011, and was given a world premiere by the company this year — to glowing reviews (here’s mine) — has been selected by Playwrights Horizons in New York, a theater dedicated to…
The Boulder International Film Festival kicks off Thursday night with Darling Companion at the Boulder Theater, and continues through Sunday with fifty diverse films as well as celebrity appearances, workshops, and ways to get involved in social causes. Below, festival director Kathy Beeck shares her top five films for BIFF…
In this week’s art column — “The Faculty Triennial documents Colorado’s art history as it races by” — Michael Paglia writes of the Faculty Triennial at the University of Denver: The current exhibition, the Faculty Triennial, is part of his continuing program to “document and to stimulate Colorado’s art history,”…
Legendary illustrator John Powers Severin, whose 60-year career in the comics world stretched from the dawning of MAD magazine to the Silver Age at Marvel to a gay revival of the Rawhide Kid and beyond, died over the weekend at his southeast Denver home. He was 90 years old. “Truly…
In January we reported on a handful of homegrown Colorado ski companies making handcrafted and custom skis that stand up to or surpass anything else on the market. If we’d waited a few weeks, we could have added another local brand to the mix: Silverton-based Venture Snowboards. For the last…
Theresa Anderson may not be the first artist to incorporate text and art — Da Vinci’s journals testify that written language can contain aesthetic merit. But according to contemporary standards, what Anderson does in many of her drawings — adding an original narrative element — defines her as a conceptual…
Indian artist Bunky Echo-Hawk is an old soul in a cutting-edge suit — his bright paintings, slabbed with blocks of blinding color, mix traditional and pop imagery and ideas, resulting in a body of work that’s funny, sad, stridently satirical and very smart. He’s therefore an excellent choice as a…
An important piece of Denver’s cultural foundation will be revealed tomorrow night when West Side Stories, a film documenting the city’s deep Jewish history, is shown at the Denver FilmCenter as part of the ongoing DocNight series. The hour-long documentary tells the story of the Eastern European transplants who settled…
There’s a lot of buzz about Plus Gallery’s current show, Apocalypse? How! It’s grotesque, it’s freaky, and it draws on the hysteria about the end of the world! Nancy Hightower, whose written narrative ties together the work of the four artists (or the four horsemen) featured in the show, recently…
Today legislators will consider a measure that would provide an economic incentive for filmmakers to work in Colorado — a rarity these days, as detailed in “The Reel West.” But a century ago, there was a booming film business in this state, which got its start with an 1897 flick…
After the University of Colorado at Boulder’s meme page showed up on Facebook, I was convinced that the Internet could use fewer memes. While glittery animated GIFs were once the way to “show some love,” memes are the way to show some stupidity, taking an image and vandalizing it with…
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, as Friedrich Nietzsche observed. And for Ryan Ashley Knowles, that adage rings painfully true: He lost his mother to domestic violence when he was fourteen. But while his upbringing was filled with grief and tragedy, he is determined to carve out a career…
Stroll through the romance shelves at any Barnes & Noble, and one subgenre stands out like Harrison Ford in Witness. In a territory marked by heaving chests and flexing muscles, Colorado Springs Christian writer Beverly Lewis keeps sex under her bonnets. But while her Amish romances feature more hand-holding than…
“This is the first Telluride Gay Ski since the defeat of the marginalizing ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy for our LGBTQ U.S. military service members,” says Reichen Lehmkuhl, celebrity host of Telluride Gay Ski Week, in a news release touting the event. Telluride Gay Ski Week 2012 runs from February…
Young people love Quentin Tarantino. A lot of older people do, too, but there is something so electrifying about being twenty years old and hearing Samuel L. Jackson shout the word “Motherfucker!”…
Why is dance such a hard sell? There’s a stigma attached to the whole idea of beautiful, thin waifs whirling about to a different drummer under the faraway lights. Sometimes it seems like you have to drag people by the ear to go see dance — although they might just…
Love was in the air on Friday night at Zip 37 in the Navajo Street Art District, where the show LoveSick opened to the public. The exhibit, which features nine artists contemplating the meaning of being lovesick, was curated by artist Katie Hoffman, who unveiled her own piece, Heloise and…
While writing this column over the years, I have frequently thought about how my chief calling is to compose a rough first draft of the art history of Colorado done right as it races by. This kind of instant historicizing has a following in the scholarly world, and someone who…
