From personal experience as an erstwhile artist, I can tell you that life drawing can be such a pain. For one thing, the professional pool isn’t very deep, and no matter how good the model is, you’ll get tired of her particular variety of au naturel stretch, sprawl or repose…
More than a few participants in Create Denver Week, which took place earlier this month, came away giddy with the power of networking and collaboration. And many had the same question: “Why can’t it always be like this?” The answer is that it can. Transplanted Chicagoan Sandra Fettingis was already…
Ten years ago, both the comedy club and the resident ensemble Bovine Metropolis kicked off their careers by moving into the old Changing Scene theater space, a quaint upstairs location at 1527 ½ Champa Street, and staging something called The Confession Stand. “It was the very first sketch show performed…
There’s no shop-till-you-drop affair more time-honored in the metro area than the annual Ladies Only Sample Tour, which began several years ago in Historic Downtown Littleton and spread more recently to fellow Original Shopping Districts member neighborhoods. It’s a sweet idea, wherein local independent merchants band together to offer free…
Denver is a town that likes the arts but doesn’t always acknowledge art from the fringe. Still, Patrick Mueller and his Packing House Center for the Arts are drawing ever closer to solidifying the elusive goal of becoming a major venue for avant-garde performance with Stop. Crawl. Walk. Run., a…
Anyone who’s ever had any question about whether immigrants are taking our jobs would do well to step into an immigrant’s shoes, at least in the metaphorical sense. Just such a learning experience can be found in the pages of Jean Kwok’s semi-autobiographical novel, Girl in Translation, the sharp-eyed tale…
No time for an exotic vacation? Let the world come to you: World Threads II, Preserving Fiber Traditions, which opened a week ago at the TACtile Textile Arts Center, features an amazingly diverse marketplace of traditional fair-trade textiles, basketry and beadwork from around the globe — covering double the territory…
Tracy Weil is “knee deep in tomatoes,” which is a good thing for you. Why? Because before they plant their own urban beds, Weil and Heirloom tomato Farms partner Carolyne Janssen are throwing a two-day Heirloom Tomato Plant Sale at weilworks, 3611 Chestnut Place, which will overflow with more than…
What to do when Cinco de Mayo lands on a Wednesday? Warm up for the weekend parties and street action with an authentic touch of high culture. The Colorado Symphony Orchestra’s annual Cinco de Mayo Celebration Concert will ring to the rafters of Boettcher Concert Hall tonight, with help from…
Denver knows designer (and Westword MasterMind) Mona Lucero for her Highland boutique, unique wearables and edgy fashion shows. But not everyone knows that her first love was fine art — though it shows in her singular design work and flair for smart dressing. “I originally got my B.A. in fine…
The members of headRush like to call themselves a “psycho-politico spoken-word theater crew,” and perhaps that’s the most apt description of this Bay Area performance group. The young and fiery multilingual collaborative ensemble turns current issues topsy-turvy with an onslaught of poetry, rap, slapstick, pop music and absurdist traditions that…
Sometimes, notes Julie Rada of the Lida Project, “just telling the plot doesn’t sell the show.” Such is the case with Lida’s newest production, Mouse in a Jar, a work by young playwright Martyna Majok. On the surface, it’s the horrible story of a vaguely Eastern European illegal immigrant with…
The fortieth anniversary of Earth Day, as we know it, arrives today at the hopeful end of a full-circle journey that began in 1970 with the support of back-to-nature advocates and a residual ´60s hippie ethos before sinking into a lower profile in the ´80s and ´90s. But a resurgence…
Last year’s inaugural public vegetable demonstration garden, planted in Civic Center Park by Transition Denver, was such a success (not to mention a Westword Best of Denver recipient) that the concept should spread like, well, a weed. Under the aegis of the Grow Local Colorado Campaign and Denver Parks and…
The Denver Filmmaker’s Co-op, a loose aggregation headed up by local indie auteurs Scott Banning, Jessica Lance and Johnny Morehouse, is ready to put the group’s name up in lights — sort of — by kicking off its hopeful Open Aperture Series, featuring a juried program of film and video…
The first question most folks ask when they hear about Johnny Cupcakes is the obvious one. What is he? A baker? Some kind of drag queen? But, no, the legendary indie huckster makes T-shirts that he sells out of actual bakery cases in a store, a string of stores, all…
The Tony Award-winning Broadway musical In the Heights works on the simplest of levels: Great music, dancing to match, and an uncomplicated story that follows likably human characters through three days of life in New York City’s Dominican haven of Washington Heights. It all adds up to a classic show…
There are these two guys, you see, named Gustave and Nhar. One of them is Belgian, and one of them is mute. And then…well, as noted by TimeOut New York, “you just had to be there.” The creations of traveling New York neo-vaudevillians Harrington and Kauffman, appearing for a three-night…
Boulder herbalist Brigitte Mars, a professional champion of natural remedies for forty years, knows – by default – a lot about how to perk up your sex life without popping a bunch of pills. So it’s simply about time that she put all that wisdom down in a book. “People…
If you’ve ever seen Office Space, you already know that “flair” refers to the use of pinback buttons (the more the better) as a way to express yourself. But who knew that the actual button-making process could be so much fun? All it takes is a pin-sized message or recycled…
A musical based on a Fellini film is, right off the bat, a bit of a risk, but if Nine, Rob Marshall’s attempt to bring back the charisma of his previous film musical, Chicago, had anything going for it, it was the amazing cast and plethora of beautiful, sexy women,…
The grand passage of Denver history past and present, so well preserved in the city’s buildings, is the theme of this year’s Doors Open Denver, dubbed an architectural paean to Adaptive Reuse: Buildings With a Second Life. The sixth annual lookie-loo tourfest that features dozens of buildings both historic and…
