ART: We’re still arriving
From my childhood in Kansas City, Mo., to my time in Denver, I’ve lived in cow towns almost all my life.
By cow towns, I mean the real thing – cities with once-thriving stockyards that produced an unmistakable odor that would waft into downtown if the wind were right.
Today that term has come to signify communities that are backward culturally, and as a result most cities with a true cow-town history are desperate to shed that historical baggage.
That was certainly true in Denver, where it was only in 2001 that the Denver Art Museum finally established its Institute of Western American Art, belatedly acknowledging the significant if once-scorned artistic heritage of its own region.
At the same time, most real cow towns struggle with an inferiority complex, never quite able to believe that they might actually be sophisticated in many ways and have artistic assets of worth to offer the rest of the country.
In some ways, that is also true of Denver, where many people don’t take nearly as much pride as they should in their art museum, not realizing it has, for example, top collections of American Indian and Spanish colonial art that make other institutions jealous.
But equally worrisome, because it allows people to gloss over weaknesses and gaps, is a a tendency in some quarters to believe Denver has already arrived as a cultural mecca with a cosmopolitanism matching much larger urban centers.
This city needs to have a honest view of itself, understanding and valuing its cultural strengths, including its storied cow-town past, but also being willing to correct its deficiencies.
-Kyle MacMillan
MUSIC: A rich scene
Denver’s music scene has enough talented country acts to fill the entire National Western Complex with stilted, half-drunk choruses of “There’s a Tear in My Beer.”
But the Mile High City is better known as an exporter of ridiculously sweaty garage rock, finely tuned indie pop, lethal hardcore and metal acts and evocative music best labeled via descriptors such as “Gothic country,” “evangelical folk” and “Slavic-inspired balladeering.”
Doesn’t sound like a cow town to me. It doesn’t sound like Austin or Minneapolis, either.
Musicians from Denver are their own entities, and the varying scenes throughout the area never fail to impress.
Imagine showing up late and missing Munly & the Lee Lewis Harlots, whose Gothic, string-
fronted country will have you questioning your sanity and political/religious affiliations within minutes. It would be a mortal, musical sin.
Denver’s music scene is developing at a natural clip. While some locals get snatched by major labels, The Fray to Epic and Vaux to Atlantic, others still record in their basements and tour the Midwest with dreams of Merge, In the Red or Sub Pop – or the contentedness of releasing their own records. And soon it will be their time. Denver’s not the next Seattle, or even Portland for that matter. But one listen to bands like Porlolo, Call Sign Cobra, The Swayback, Woven Hand, Matson Jones, Dressy Bessy, The Omens, Red Cloud, DeVotchKa, Hot IQs, Nightingale, d. biddle or Planes Mistaken for Stars is all it takes to know that Denver is its own beast – building on a future, betting on a future, but also enjoying the present.
-Ricardo Baca
THEATER: Sets the stage
The brochure announcing Kent Thompson’s first season as Denver Center Theatre Company artistic dirctor reflects his 21st-century dream of “new vision; new voices”: A woman drawn in black ink climbs a ladder suspended above the Rocky Mountains at sunset. It is a bold, forward-looking image except for one thing … she’s wearing cowboy boots.
“Maybe that is perpetuating a stereotype, but what I see is a woman in cowboy boots,” said Thompson. “That’s different from a good ol’ boy or a cowhand wearing cowboy boots.”
That we are still asking whether Denver is a cow town seems more reflective of the city’s ongoing insecurity about our image than a question that deserves legitimate scrutiny. The metro area had 63 theaters that produced at least one play in 2004, generating $44.3 million in ticket revenues alone.
And Denver is helping to set the national cultural agenda. The city sent two major new works to New York last year, and there are more regional and world premieres being presented right now than at any time.
The DCTC, which has mounted 75 world premieres including “The Laramie Project” and “Quilters,” has announced a new-play festival that may one day rival Humana, and Curious is readying “The War Anthology” – an unprecedented collaboration of writers that includes three Pulitzer winners.
“But at the same time we cannot, and should not, deny our regional roots,” said Thompson, “and that includes the mountain experience and the Western experience, and, yes, that includes a cow-town past. The thing is we’re a lot more than that now.
“I certainly don’t perceive of Denver as a cow town at all, based on the work I’ve seen at other theaters here. It’s more sophisticated than I have seen in some other cities.”
Brice Sevy, Thompson’s new associate artistic director, first came to Denver in 1982, “and to me, the changes from then to now are staggering. At this point, I can’t believe the cow- town question is still being asked, honestly.”
-John Moore
