THURS, 4/21 The heck with Elvis: What about trail-blazing rockabilly royalty Wanda Jackson? This little lady with a powerful voice came up around the same time and even shared stages with the King, who is said to have encouraged her to loosen up a little and take the rockin’ route…
The Center for Visual Art in LoDo is currently taking on the interesting — and risky — topic of “post-Chicano” art in the group exhibit Leaving Aztlán: Rethinking Contemporary Latino and Chicano Art. It’s interesting because many of the pieces in the show are great, risky because there’s an entire…
In the same way that the works at the Center for Visual Art may be described as post-Chicano (see review), three of the four artists in discourse & decadence at Studio Aiello (3563 Walnut Street, 303-297-8166) are doing what could be called “post-queer.” Addressing this particular topic is an act…
Balance. Rarely has Walker Fine Art come up with an exhibit as successful as Balance, which pairs recent abstract paintings by Denver artist Don Quade with abstract sculptures by Colorado Springs-based Bill Burgess. Quade was formerly at Fresh Art Gallery, but Walker picked him up when Fresh Art closed last…
Edmond, currently being staged by the Denver Repertory Theatre Company, is about as nasty a play as I can imagine. When I see something that angers me this much, I usually try to figure out some interpretation I may be missing, something that justifies the enterprise. But for the life…
Fire on the Mountain is an evocation of the lives of Appalachian coal miners in the first few decades of the twentieth century. Created for the Denver Center by Dan Wheetman and Randal Myler, who also directs, it is told primarily through song, with snatches of dialogue and narrative taken…
Cats. This company does as good a job with Cats as one can imagine. The dancing, choreographed by Stephen Bertles, who also directed, is seamless. The cast is lithe and graceful. They slither like snakes. They leap high and land without a sound. They’re wonderfully into character, batting at each…
Matthew Parkhill’s Dot the I is the kind of tricked-up mental exercise that may intrigue the most impressionable film-school students and a philosophy major here and there. But anyone who’s gotten through sophomore year is more likely to find it a pretentious load of crap. Set in contemporary London and…
Lost Embrace, by Argentinean director Daniel Burman, looks more like a handheld video by the purist Dogme school of Denmark. Centered in Buenos Aires, it’s an unevenly amusing comedy of family reconciliation that looks like a thumb in the eye and tastes of Europudding throughout. Ariel is a hangdog thirty-something…
The Woody Allen who wrote and directed Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) back in 1972 was not yet the full-bloom, all-promises-delivered Woody who gave us Annie Hall and Manhattan — but at least he wasn’t the inert and seemingly dispirited moviemaker who…
In my mind’s eye, I am Karsten Heuer. Someone who would walk 2,200 miles along the spine of the Rocky Mountains from Yellowstone to the Yukon. Nothing but me, my dog and my pack. I, too, could fend off bears, shoot glacier-fed rapids, ski next to fresh wolverine tracks and…
Thursday, April 14 If you channeled a female nude through the eyes of British painter Jenny Saville, you’d have to pass through a few influential gates — Peter Paul Rubens, Willem de Kooning, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon — to arrive at the monumental, unsentimental, grotesquely fleshy, thickly painted figurative…
“I’m actually surprisingly calm, which makes me nervous,” says Ginger White, consultant to the Denver Office of Cultural Affairs and project coordinator for the inaugural Doors Open Denver, a free public event showcasing Denver’s best architecture on Saturday, April 16, and Sunday, April 17. Though White’s responsibilities are many –…
A kid’s world stretched as far as you could safely pedal your Schwinn when I was growing up in southeast Denver. Within my own constellation was the Virginia Village Creamery, where all the neighborhood kids went in gaggles to stock up on penny candy, choosing from open jars of jawbreakers,…
FRI, 4/15 Fans of beer and quiet sunshine at Coors Field will have five straight days interrupted by the Colorado Rockies’ first extended home stand starting tonight at 6:35 p.m. against San Francisco. The Giants are without seven-time National League MVP Barry Bonds, who is without a functioning right knee…
THURS, 4/14 Adventurous gallery curator Simon Zalkind of the Mizel Center for Arts and Culture will throw Denver an aesthetic curveball tonight with Whispers of Contradiction, a site-specific, collaborative electronic-art installation created by multimedia artist Brian DeLevie of the University of Colorado at Denver and local quantum physicist D.S. Oakley…
FRI, 4/15 The seventeen-year- old Frequent Flyers aerial dance troupe will go bottoms-up tonight in Dairy Air, its spring production. “Everyone has some sort of desire to experience flight,” says the company’s artistic director, Nancy E. Smith. “This show continues the tradition, giving these amazing dancers a chance to flex…
Cydney Payton, director of Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art, has often said that one of the most important things an art show can do is to create controversy. The exhibit that’s there now, Will Boys Be Boys?, is not really controversial, but it does raise a lot of issues –…
Time flies, as the saying goes, but it’s still hard to believe that Space Gallery (765 Santa Fe Drive, 720-904-1088) is already celebrating five years in business. Apparently, though, it’s true: The current exhibit, Untold Riches, is being billed as the venue’s fifth-anniversary show. Organized by Space owner Michael Burnett,…
Balance. Rarely has Walker Fine Art come up with an exhibit as successful as Balance, which pairs recent abstract paintings by Denver artist Don Quade with abstract sculptures by Colorado Springs-based Bill Burgess. Quade was formerly at Fresh Art Gallery, but Walker picked him up when Fresh Art closed last…
The Denver Center Theatre Company is presenting a version of The Madwoman of Chaillot, updated as simply The Madwoman and set in contemporary New York rather than Paris. The play was written by an ailing Jean Giraudoux during World War II and was first released in 1945, after his death…
Cats. This company does as good a job with Cats as one can imagine. The dancing, choreographed by Stephen Bertles, who also directed, is seamless. The cast is lithe and graceful. They slither like snakes. They leap high and land without a sound. They’re wonderfully into character, batting at each…
