A jury award-winner at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s Crimson Gold offers a revealing look at contemporary Tehran through the day-to-day life of a suspiciously impassive pizza-delivery man named Hussein (Hussein Emadeddin), who rides through the streets of the city on his motor scooter as if…
Before every performance of their Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, members of the Chicago-based theater troupe The Neo-Futurists make name tags for audience members. This gesture might seem welcoming — if said badges didn’t brand recipients with labels like “Dog Breath.” Still, in the context of such…
Thursday, June 24 Boulder’s Mariposa Collective will soar this weekend with Moon Stories, a challenging medley of multi-disciplinary performances spotlighting five diverse local female artists (and, for good measure, a couple of visiting guest choreographers) in a series of vignettes and previews of full-length works. Participating are puppeteer Betsy Tobin,…
For weavers, introspection comes with the territory. In its simplest form, the repetitive act of weaving cloth, driving threads together into an artful entanglement of warp and weft, is something like time itself: slow, steady, drifting, building. The weaver moves deliberately, thinking all the time, perhaps dreaming. And even in…
Karen Moore is a walking fashion statement, the keeper of a personal style so strong that she’s managed to shape it into a local retail temple of rich, delicious, quirky interior design. And when her business, DjUNA, a two-story tribute to shabby chic and modern vintage style, first hit Cherry…
SAT, 6/26 Think you’ve got what it takes to be Colorado’s greatest all-around competitor? Then sign up for this weekend’s first-ever GAAC (Greatest All-Around Competition), an amateur sporting contest featuring seven different events. “We are searching for the greatest competitor in Colorado, and the funny thing is, the first words…
SAT, 6/26 Polly Letofsky was walking on a “barren highway through a tiny town in northern Australia” when a senior citizen flashed her. As Letofsky tells it, an “eighty-year-old, kind of big woman” hailed her by name and then told her in a heavy Aussie accent that she’d survived a…
TUES, 6/29 For better or worse, nineteenth-century composer Richard Wagner regarded himself as the most German of men. Classified as an anarchist, socialist, proto-fascist, nationalist, vegetarian and anti-Semite, among other things, Wagner was a stern man whose name has appeared in connection with almost every major trend in German history…
I think it’s exciting to watch the Denver Art Museum’s new Frederic C. Hamilton Building rise out of the ground, as it has been doing over the past few months just south of West 13th Avenue along the vacated axis of Acoma Street. Currently, the Daniel Libeskind-designed structure is merely…
Earlier this season, Cordell Taylor Gallery and Ron Judish Fine Art merged into the new +Zeile/Judish Gallery (2350 Lawrence Street, 303-296-0927), and everyone must have known that some of the artists they each represented would have to go. There were just too many of them. Owner Ivar Zeile, partner Ron…
Abstractions on Paper. The current show at the city’s coziest little art shop, the Emil Nelson Gallery, is a fascinating group endeavor put together by director Hugo Anderson. The exhibit combines historic and contemporary works in the forms of watercolors, prints, drawings and photos by more than two dozen artists…
Again and again, Cirque du Soleil’s Varekai puts you in that state of enjoyment where you’re not even capable of thought; you’re just watching, breath suspended, wanting what you’re seeing to go on forever. Everything one associates with Cirque du Soleil is here — the artful settings and costumes, the…
I used to evoke a lot of laughter and derision from erudite friends and from my writing students by telling them about my passion for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but there was a lot more to the show than met the eye. The ghouls, monsters and vampires Buffy faced almost…
Alarms & Excursions. Alarms & Excursions is minor Michael Frayn, a series of comic finger pieces, but it can’t help bearing the master’s stamp. A group of eight playlets examines the role of technology in our lives and its impact on human communication. In the first, a friendly dinner is…
Getting stranded at snowbound O’Hare for the night is one thing. You call home, maybe knock back a couple of martinis, then grab a blanket. A century ago, being quarantined at Ellis Island for eight months because you were, say, a part-time anarchist from Campobasso with a big mustache and…
You might think that with the technological advances in moviemaking since 1956, this new version of Around the World in 80 Days would at least look better than its predecessor did. You could not be faulted for believing you’d be wowed by the Rube Goldberg gadgets of inventor Phileas Fogg,…
So let’s get this straight: You’re a much-loved comedian who just did a low-budget, multi-award-winning film with an acclaimed up-and-coming director. In recent years, thanks in part to your work with the younger, edgier filmmaking set, you’re starting to be taken seriously as an actor. You even managed to score…
The notoriously plotless musical comedy Head became an object of cult worship almost from the moment of its release, in 1968; with each passing year, it amuses people even more as a telling artifact of ’60s pop culture. What less could we expect of a movie that stars the made-for-TV…
Robert Lecher says he was born in Spain and grew up in a small town of 5,000 somewhere in the Nebraska heartland before eventually landing here in Denver as a traveling “I Love Dancing Country” workshop instructor. “But my mind,” he notes, “has always been in Hollywood and New York.”…
Thursday, June 17 There’s nothing quite like the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, four days of music, workshops and audience camaraderie at the top of the world, headlined by a seemingly endless roster of acoustic-music performers so delicious that it’s a sensual pleasure just to name them all. We won’t, but their…
The term “striptease” was once a feminist’s four-letter word. But the sass and sauce of the strip have been reclaimed by a younger generation that finds empowerment in the seductive art of burlesque. Among those diving into the rhinestone-encrusted revolution is burlesque betty Michelle Baldwin. The Denver native was originally…
TUES, 6/22 Watch out, Denverites: A new beast has roared into town. The Predator Ridge exhibit, modeled after the Samburu National Reserve in Kenya, opens today at the Denver Zoo. The eight-acre display, which comprises fourteen species of mammals, birds and reptiles, will house over fifty animals, including lions, spotted…
