Ballet Nouveau Colorado "Carry On" featuring Paper Bird

Last night I was talking to the well-known Denver painter Matt O'Neill in a bar, (big surprise), and he said, "You know, inspiration is like a plant, sometimes you gotta water it."

He was lamenting the sense of fragmentation both of us feel in Denver's visual art scene. I admit, that in my twenty first year in town, there have been long stretches where that revelatory rain just don't fall. And it's funny how often you run into refugees from Denver in New York at the Whitney or MOMA. Tonight, though, I think I may have simply been looking in the wrong direction.

I've often wished I were at certain cultural cornerstones; you know, like San Francisco when Ginsberg first read "Howl," or at the premier of "Einstein on the Beach," (yes, I'm a huge Philip Glass fan), or maybe the opening of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," or Horton Foote's "Texas Town."

These last two are particularly relevant, considering Garrett Ammon and Dawn Fay's regionalist aesthetic in "Carry On," the newest production from Ballet Nouveau Colorado. This gorgeous collaboration with the local and much lauded band Paper Bird drops an auger into the dry Denver ground and drills an enormous oasis for the heavy hearts of artists of any kind. The energy and love that all of the performers bring to the stage cracked even the hard crabby shell that sits over my own whiskey-soaked skeptical soul. That is to say, I really do want to like what I see when I go to a local play, band, dance performance, reading, whatever. And usually I can find something to admire. But this I loved without reservation. You walk out feeling like you just saw something shift in terms of what's possible, creatively, in Colorado. I suppose I ought to have waited around to say "thank you" to the troupe and the band, but as you know, I'm shy.

Every good thing said about "Carry On" is true. I'm telling everyone I know to see the damn thing while they can. It might even make you want to go home and blog.