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Independent Iowa News, Culture & Events – music, government, listings, theatre, film, and local perspective
Humans, although we each can only ever have our own experience, also have the ability to experience moments together.
Moments mediated by the arts touch us differently in different situations.
If you are a devotee of the arts who has ever wondered how the sausage of your favorite festivals, seasons and programs gets made, the opening salvo of the 2018 Witching Hour festival shed a little light on the subject.
According to attorney Shawn Sebastian, there are three main factors for why the economy is failing American workers. 1) The dismantling of unions and collective bargaining power for workers. 2) The increased power and consolidation of companies that control our lives and our wages. 3) The dismantling and undermining of public goods.
Janelle James, one of the featured comedians for the 2018 Witching Hour festival, performs at 9:30 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 14 at the Englert Theatre (tickets $15-55), opening for fellow Illinois-to-New York transplant Liza Treygar.
Now in its fourth year, Witching Hour, the festival dedicated to exploring the unknown and engaging the imagination, returns this year on October 12 and 13, 2018.
On March 4, 2018, after following around Richard Spencer and his alt-right entourage for months, Serena Tarr found herself in Michigan for the Foundation for the Marketplace of Ideas conference, organized by Kyle Bristow, the white nationalist attorney who used to sue colleges that rejected requests for Spencer to speak. But due to public pressure and possibly death threats, Bristow backed out at the last minute, and the “conference” was relocated to a house in Ann Arbor. Tarr followed.
Puddles Pity Party, the enigmatic, reticent 6’8” clown best known for his cover of Lorde’s “Royals” and his appearance on America’s Got Talent (season 12), recently offered a rare interview for Little Village. Puddles explains that he is taciturn because there is “too much talking in the world today.” “I always seem to say the wrong thing anyway,” he wrote. “I notice the less I talk, the more I hear.”
Richard Meyers landed on New York City’s Lower East Side in late 1966. Within a few years he had reinvented himself as Richard Hell and transitioned from poetry to punk rock. This blending of art forms was not unusual among the residents of the city’s dilapidated downtown neighborhoods, a topic that he and writer, photographer and actress Lisa Jane Persky will discuss during Making a Scene: A Conversation About Downtown New York City, a free event that I will moderate at the Englert Theatre during the Witching Hour Festival.
Iowa City’s Witching Hour festival, now in its fourth year, announced schedule details today. With them, tickets to many individual shows on the schedule go on sale. As always, all events at the Iowa City Public Library will be free and open to the public.
The fourth annual Witching Hour festival, co-presented by Little Village and the Englert Theatre, made its first line-up announcement today. The festival, which runs Oct. 12-13 this year, centers on celebrating new work and exploring the creative process. For 2018, Witching Hour will feature groundbreaking writers, musicians and comedians from across a variety of genres.
Excited already for this year’s Witching Hour, sight unseen? Specially priced early bird tickets are now available for the 2018 Witching Hour festival. If you already know that you don’t want to miss whatever’s on tap for this year, snag your passes now for only $40.
Little Village covers Iowa music, theatre, dining, nightlife, community news and the arts. Free copies of the print edition are available in Ames, Cedar Falls, Cedar Rapids, Des Moines, Iowa City, Waterloo, the Quad Cities and many rural communities in between.
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