Earlier this week, Westword reported, “The River North Arts District is booting out actual artists: That’s the claim of a group of arts activists/residents who ramped up the fight against gentrification in the River North neighborhood by redecorating three iron slabs touting the RiNo Art District with flowers, crosses and other objects of mourning on Monday, August 14, 2017.”
“The Moth is a battle of narcissists,” says Morley McBride, standing at the front of a stage at Swallow Hill Music as it fills with a crowd eager to hear the stories of strangers. It’s the third Friday of July, which means McBride, a blonde in a black jumpsuit, is seeing to the final steps of preparing the monthly Story Slam event, a live offshoot of the ever-popular story-sharing podcast where Denverites tell and receive scores on their narratives of personal experiences. If you’ve ever wondered what the in-person get-togethers are like but haven’t yet managed to snag the in-demand tickets, here’s your answer:
David and Carrie Wintersteen dove into the stuff of parental nightmares when commissioning the play they’ll perform this weekend at Boulder’s Fringe Festival. Carrie Wintersteen describes Our Boy, the two person play the Fargo, North Dakota-based couple will present, as about “parents who just learning that their son is accused of sexual assault.”
Choreographer Patrick Mueller thought it was time for his Control Group Productions dance theater to pare things down and appeal to a broader base, but that’s just a piece of what Neverhome, an immersive, site-specific performance/walking tour inspired by currently converging themes of gentrification, migration and finding your way, is all about. Carrying your life on your back, after all, means cutting back.
Summer parties and elegant receptions — they’re all within reach whether you’re an artist or just a fan of them. Mix it up this week at these six events and openings.
Abstraction has been on a tear in the 21st century, and now there’s more proof of abstraction’s consistent appeal in contemporary art, in the form of three solos and a group show at Robischon Gallery.
Chances are good that you’ve noticed the street art in Denver. Chances are also pretty good that you’ve seen something that Pat Milbery helped create.
Write Our World: Crawford Elementary School highlights the experiences of persecution and triumph that brought immigrant and refugee families from all over the world — including Nepal and Bhutan to Somalia — to Crawford Elementary School in Aurora, where 95 percent of students are minorities and 75 percent are English learners.
The Black Cube Nomadic Museum is keeping Cortney Lane Stell more than busy in 2017. As director and chief curator of the Denver-based museum without walls, finding new avenues to explore as a curator comes easily to Stell. Case in point: the latest Black Cube project, Drive-In: Personal Space, an exhibit/performance she co-curated with Ruth Bruno of Colorado Creative Industries that will pop up for one night only in a vacant lot in RiNo on August 19.
The River North Arts District is booting out actual artists – that’s the claim of a group of arts activists who ramped up the fight against gentrification in the River North neighborhood by redecorating three iron slabs touting the RiNo Art District with flowers, crosses and other objects of mourning on Monday, August 14, 2017.
The High Plains Comedy Festival has announced its full schedule for its fifth edition.
The author Lorrie Moore once described a novel as a marriage, while short stories function more like brief affairs. Colorado has inspired many literary hookups, some passionate and some bleak. Here’s a list of short stories set in Colorado that you can easily read on your next lunch break.
The Denver improv scene is “more diverse than Portland, not as diverse as Queens,” explains Nick Trotter, Voodoo’s Director of Education. This is a low bar.
“In order to be a strong ecosystem where artists can thrive, we have to have a healthy amount of cross-pollination” says Libby Barbee, Arts in Society and Programming manager at RedLine. It’s that aim, along with a vested interest in socially- and community-engaged art, that anchors the 48 Hours Summit, a free and open-to-the-public August 11-12 series of talks, workshops, and visual and performance art related to the gallery’s annual theme, (dis)place.
Ron Campbell quit animating after fifty years in the trade to try his hand at painting. His subjects of choice: the characters he had once inked to life: the Smurfs, the Jetsons, Scooby Doo and especially the Beatles.
It’s hard to write about a play that’s so secret that even the actors haven’t seen the script until the lights go up onstage, but we thought we’d give a try, because Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour’s White Rabbit Red Rabbit seems to be worth the trouble. Censored and unable to leave his native country, Soleimanpour managed to send the script of his one-actor play out into the free world beyond Iran’s borders, where it’s graced numerous international stages since 2011, including a nine-month run last year in New York at the Westside Theatre,
First Friday is over and the crowds have left the streets, but the art must go on — and it will, at these six openings and events.
Taking advantage of the gallery’s floor plan, Michael Warren Contemporary is currently presenting solos by Kelton Osborn and Andrew Roberts-Gray that bookend a group show.
At least four hundred poets have descended on Denver, heads full of memorized verses, for the National Poetry Slam.For those who can’t distinguish a slam poem from a verbal fistfight or the recitation of iambic pentameter, or simply readers curious about what to expect, Westword got on the phone with Executive Director Suzi Q. Smith and her right-hand woman in planning the event, local poetry and art advocate Danielle Brooks, to demystify slam poetry.
Australian artist Craig Walsh, whose eerie and inspiring projections of human faces on trees are already an internet sensation, will bring his large-scale, site-specific installations to Colorado for the Breckenridge International Festival of the Arts.
From massive arts institutions to high-end commercial galleries and DIY spaces, Denver boasts an array of venues to check out first-rate art.
No one at the nineteenth International Aerial Dance Festival seems to be afraid of heights. At Frequent Flyers, the Boulder studio where dancers dangle from an arm wrapped in swathes of fabric or hang upside-down, practicing a swift unfurling movement that will drop them onto the thick blue mats below, everyone is committed to an art form you may not have known existed. Aerial dance, says festival founder Nancy Smith, is “anything anything that gets you off the ground dancing.” Imagine a cross between the soaring acrobatics of Cirque du Soleil, the Peter Pan flying on Broadway and the storytelling of modern dance, all requiring immense core and upper body strength. People don’t realize, Smith says, “how hard it actually is, since the aesthetic is effortlessness.”
