Les Roka
Twice each evening during the Utah Arts Festival with a soundtrack that includes musical excerpts from Mozart to swing, four performers will act out a universally approachable timeless story of a boy and girl in romance, expressing love, loss, jealousy and joy. However, the quartet of performers will be dancing, flirting and adding comic gestures while atop … Read more
Music sometimes builds the most emotionally appropriate bridges, as we contemplate the fragile nature of our humanity. In the 1990s, Vedran Smailović, a cellist from Bosnia and Herzegovina who now lives in northern Ireland, played music among the ruins during the siege of Sarajevo in the Balkan War. His musical gesture inspired a solo work … Read more
Songwriters of every skill level, from beginner to professional, will have plenty of activities along with networking opportunities during the Intermountain Acoustic Music Association (IAMA) Day on June 28 at the 38th Utah Arts Festival. For the first time, IAMA’s songwriter academy, now in its 7th year, and the finals of the nationally juried Susanne … Read more
For this year’s Utah Arts Festival, The Intermountain Acoustic Music Association (IAMA) is bringing a large contingent of folk, bluegrass, Irish, Celtic and acoustic musicians along with a nationally juried songwriting competition and a two-day songwriter’s academy open to musicians from beginning to advanced. Many of the events will culminate on IAMA Day, scheduled for … Read more
Not just a re-engineered concept of a traditional do-it-yourself culture of arts and craft, the ‘maker’ movement has catapulted to new ways of seeing how art equals technology, even in lifting mundane consumer products to aesthetically mesmerizing possibilities. Thanks to members of Salt Lake City’s EnjiGo Makerspace Foundation, this year’s Utah Arts Festival’s patrons will … Read more
After a rousing success last year at its first turn as a Utah Arts Festival venue, The Leonardo museum returns with a new series of workshops at the Art Lab; free, public interactive in which participants can build simple musculoskeletal systems and observe digital painting and sculpting in animation, and five pairs of artists – … Read more
In explaining how the staff, board, venue coordinators, volunteers, sponsors, and, most certainly, the participating performers and artists of the 38th annual Utah Arts Festival (UAF) design the spaces of Library Square and Washington Square so that art fans can unite, the metaphors of magnets and oysters, as Doug Borwick, a long-time arts administrator explains … Read more
Note: This post is by Mark Alvarez, a Salt Lake City lawyer, immigration specialist for Telemundo Utah and host of the ‘Sin Rodeos’ radio show. He also was a member of the Salt Lake City Public Library board from 2009 to 2012. “Fizz! Boom! Read!” is the summer reading program for children in libraries across … Read more
Still in his twenties, Salt Lake City resident Ernesto Edwards made several trips to San Francisco and found his passion. In the city’s Mission District, the Berkeley Renaissance, one of the most vibrant offshoots of the Beat Movement, was gaining creative speed. Edwards, who had studied architecture at The University of Utah, met Robert Duncan, … Read more
One of Plan-B Theatre’s most distinctive strengths is to produce work that compacts so many compelling layers of insights, meanings, and epiphanies into narratives that quickly move within a frame often lasting no more than 70 or 80 minutes. With its latest edition of ‘And The Banned Played On,’ which played to a packed Jeanne … Read more