Over the past five years, Witching Hour has become an innovator within festival cultures. While many festivals are stops on a circuit of touring bands that parade spectacles for passive participants, Witching Hour, like the Englert’s Mission Creek Festival, has created a different tonality, celebrating the arts as an expression of community. But its core […]
Witching Hour 2020
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Who owns indigenous music? Psychedelic duo Heavy Color collaborate across cultures to make ‘world music’ less parasitic
Heavy Color, a beat-driven psychedelic music duo founded by Ben Cohen and Sam Woldenberg, makes “world music” by way of Toledo, Ohio. These composer-producers are very careful to distance themselves from that problematic term — world music often treats music made by people outside of a European or American context as exotic culture ripe for […]
Posted inCommunity/News
‘Nothing is real until it happens’: Stacey Walker on being a ‘foot soldier’ for racial justice reform
A month out from the 2020 Witching Hour festival, presenter Stacey Walker isn’t exactly sure what he will say to attendees. But that’s not for lack of something to say. “As a Black man, as an elected official, as a person who has been involved in racial justice politics for my entire life, I know […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Witching Hour hosting virtual fest featuring Danez Smith, Stacey Walker, Black Belt Eagle Scout and more
The arrival of COVID-19 in Iowa on March 8 spelled disaster for the 2020 Mission Creek Festival, which was set to take place in downtown Iowa City April 1-4. But the Englert Theatre had time to adapt their other annual festival, Witching Hour, for a pandemic world. The 2020 Witching Hour Festival, presented by the […]
