Arts & Culture

After viewing this year’s punk-infused Met Gala celebration, makeup artist and fashion-show producer Katelyn Simkins found herself inspired. Fashion Feast is the result of the artist’s creative insights: a night of runway walks, live performances and fundraising for Colorado’s hungry. Local clothing and accessories by Rachel Marie Hurst, 50 Dresses…

Can you spin a plate on your fingertips? Are you the best tap-dancing burlesque performer on the scene? Maybe you’ve got the ukulele chops of Tiny Tim. Whatever your strange and unusual skill, the Sounds on 29th Live Gong Show wants you. Tonight, 3 Kings Tavern will host its own…

Gifts have become such an essential part of the holiday season that in the midst of the shopping frenzy, few people stop to think about the implications of buying local versus buying from a global corporation. But Evan Weissman, founder of the “civic health club” Warm Cookies of the Revolution,…

Mother-daughter relationships are not new territory for writer Amy Tan, who first explored the subject in her debut novel, The Joy Luck Club. But in her latest book, The Valley of Amazement, she finds fresh ways to explore this ever-changing landscape. Chronicling the lives of a Chinese-American mother and daughter…

If you haven’t yet had the pleasure of meeting Rick Griffith — he calls himself design director, but we prefer “letterpress king” — you can get to know the typographer behind the hair at tonight’s MATTER’s 14th Annual Print Sale and Party, which the King and his posse are throwing…

Don’t expect a traditional poetry reading at Robert Rutherford’s release party for Dragging Out the Old Cheer, his first poetry collection. The former member of Rabbit is a Sphere and Everything Absent or Distorted is approaching his poetry much the same way he approached his music. “There’s going to be…

A generation of comedy nerds has grown up with Mystery Science Theater and DVD commentaries for their favorite films, so it makes sense that a live version of the same would become wildly popular decades later. And there’s probably no one better than Doug Benson — host of Doug Loves…

The story of how evangelical Americans sparked a venomous wave of fundamentalist religious thought and anti-gay sentiment and legislation in Uganda is one of this country’s sorrier chapters. And it was especially poignant for film director Roger Ross Williams, who is not only gay, but was raised in the black…

You stop at the bar for a drink and two people begin to dance around you, spinning stellar choreography with light feet and a beautiful twist, under the sky-high rafters of a re-purposed foundry that’s an urban experiment in itself. That’s what will happen tonight at Choreography and Cocktails, a…

It’s funny how we can pass a landmark day after day and never really know anything about it. That’s true of the stately Colorado Governor’s Residence, built in 1908 as the Boettcher Mansion and handed over to the state in 1959: Rush-hour traffic blows by the elegant hilltop home in…

When Charles Packard of the Aurora Fox Arts Center first arrived in Denver, he noticed that everyone was from somewhere else. That observation inspired his search for shows about rural towns that offer a glimpse of small-town American culture, shows that could potentially remind an audience of their roots. He…

With Screw Tooth, Adam Stone doesn’t do theater like anyone else. It’s almost as if he were a step ahead of your expectations, off and running to the next thing before anyone gets a chance to catch up. And even when he takes a baby step — as he will…

Denver’s modern public-art program has been growing since 1988, when it was established under Federico Peña’s watch; over the passing years, the swelling collection has come to include more than 350 works by artists of stature both local and national. And their evidence is everywhere, from civic installations in parks,…

Cleo Parker Robinson Dance’s multicultural, multigenerational Granny Dances to a Holiday Drum has been upending The Nutcracker and getting whole families in the audience to dance in their seats for more than twenty years now, and there’s a reason for that. “It’s different from a traditional holiday dance concert because…

“Being Santa in the year 2013 is probably not as much fun as it was way back when every child was happy with a train and a doll and a ball,” muses Winnie Wenglewick of Denver’s Dangerous Theatre. “Now kids need to have things like PlayStations and Nintendos and iPhones…

Although it began twenty years ago as just another NPR Christmas tale, David Sedaris’s The SantaLand Diaries has become a celebrated holiday institution. Chronicling the true story of Sedaris’s time working as an elf at Macy’s, the story carries a tone of extreme cynicism and hilarious tragedy. “I think what…