Arts & Culture

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.”

The summer group show at Space Gallery, with the provocative title Alternative Facts, is a clutch of four solos that unfold in the enormous gallery.

At the beginning of every month, Denver’s creative community front loads the calendar with an abundance of appealing events.

Denver new media-artist Kristin Stransky’s FabLink 3-D-printed dress required ten pounds of nylon fiber, more than 800 hours of 3-D printing time, and 150 to 200 hours of assembly and fabrication time to make. The dress was assembled from hundreds of tiny links, each link hooked to the others by twelve even tinier rings. Stransky says it takes twenty to thirty hours to print every fifty links and an hour to print fifty rings.

This weekend, six Colorado playwrights will see their words brought to life in staged readings at the Vintage Theatre’s first-ever New Play Festival. The intimate Aurora venue opened up submissions for the festival last December as a way to reach out to the Colorado writing community and also meet playwrights’ need to have their plays read as a step in the editing process.

Denver Arts & Venues and the Denver Commission on Cultural Affairs have announced the recipients of the 2017 IMAGINE 2020 fund, a city grant that gives up to $5,000 for new cultural programs.

The First Friday of August brings new sights and sounds to art districts all over Denver and beyond. Where will you end up? We have some suggestions.

When the new Velorama Festival descends on RiNo August 11 to 13, you’ll be able to U-lock your cruiser to new, hand-crafted bike racks. In line with the festival’s ties to the Colorado Classic bicycle race, the RiNo Arts District has sponsored the creation of five artisanal, mountain-evoking bike racks by contest winners Mitch Hoffman and Tim Omspach.

Longtime Colorado Springs sculptor and installationist Sean O’Meallie spent ten years in the ’80s and ’90s pitching gizmos and pull toys as a toy inventor, commuting to toy fairs in Manhattan with storyboards in hand. He and his New York-based business partner “never scored it big,” he says, but he did take something valuable away from the experience.

The Western: An Epic in Art and Film is truly epic, as well as full of gimmicks. But when the curators are so knowledgeable and the quality of the material is so high, even gimmicks can’t detract from a great show, and the ideal summer blockbuster for the Denver Art Museum.