Dairy Arts Center

Mimesis Documentary Festival: Opening Night: To Use a Mountain
2026-08-11 19:00 - 20:30 (America/Denver) | Dairy Arts Center, Walnut Street, Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
TICKETS
Six rural communities are marked as candidates for an unthinkable fate: their land, a burial ground for 77,000 tons of nuclear waste. Against the impassive logic of government analysis and archives, a people’s history of resistance and stewardship emerges through a visceral journey across the landscapes, ecologies, and personal histories of the candidate sites.
This screening will be followed by a conversation with Casey Carter in-person.
Doors open at 6 PM with a catered reception (included with the cost of admission).

To Use a Mountain

Physics, geology, and democracy collide across the expansive American interior, in a series of vignettes from six candidate sites for a sacrificial nuclear dumping ground.

Mimesis Documentary Festival: Terminus
2026-08-12 13:00 - 14:30 | Boedecker Theater, Walnut Street, Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
TICKETS
Far from loved ones, people push external borders and stretch internal boundaries seeking safe havens – willingly or warily. Meanwhile, fantasies of return and tensions between here and there linger. Traversing the perpetual crossroads of nightmares and daydreams, home becomes a space of knowing and not knowing.

Mimesis Documentary Festival: Engaged to Wait, Waiting to Engage
2026-08-12 16:00 - 17:30 | Boedecker Theater, Walnut Street, Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
TICKETS
An incarcerated crew fights fires for 70¢ an hour. A housebound mother struggles against the celebration of matrescent martyrdom. Observing and reenacting daily routines where human potential is bought and sold, these projects document their own production in contested terrain, confronting the exploitations of capitalist culture on the clock.

Mimesis Documentary Festival: Tended Bonds
2026-08-12 20:00 - 21:30 | Boedecker Theater, Walnut Street, Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
TICKETS
A daughter’s father. A mother’s sons. Across time and space, the nuanced contours of grief are mapped between generations. From the intimate to the systemic, the films in this program explore meaning-making in the wake of loss and the paths of remembrance that loved ones create to sustain communities.

Mimesis Documentary Festival: Anarchist Calisthenics
2026-08-13 10:00 - 11:30 | Boedecker Theater, Walnut Street, Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
TICKETS
Structures of resistance are powered by the hopeful who inhabit them, like individual fibres of a muscle, contributing their strength to a collective resilience. Radical, expansive inclusion facilitates collaboration, imagining the future as a restored whole, with a history and home emancipated from colonial display.

Mimesis Documentary Festival: Right Here
2026-08-13 13:00 - 14:30 | Boedecker Theater, Walnut Street, Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
TICKETS
When distances are measured in time and oceans, we cannot simply quantify the gaps. Separated bodies are marooned and shipwrecked, waiting to be found. To be so far causes the heroes of these tales to set sail, testing the potential of presence through deep reminiscing, craving a specific flavor of happiness, and fearful of missing the yet to be met. When we visit memories like places, overdosing on nostalgia becomes a way of life.

Mimesis Documentary Festival: Terra
2026-08-13 16:00 - 17:30 | Boedecker Theater, Walnut Street, Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
TICKETS
An exploration of Colombia’s geographies, peoples, and stories through the material and imperceptible intersections of the Spanish word “tierra” – land, soil, ground, and territory. From geological formations to coca-growing regions, unequal land distribution to mass graves, and Indigenous rituals to land re-appropriation efforts, Terra interweaves some of Colombia’s most pressing issues in a montage of images that illustrate the poetic and sensuous possibilities of human-soil relationships.

Mimesis Documentary Festival: Conversation
2026-08-14 10:00 - 11:00 | Boedecker Theater, Walnut Street, Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
TICKETS

Mimesis Documentary Festival: 17 Feet Deep
2026-08-14 13:00 - 14:30 | Boedecker Theater, Walnut Street, Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
TICKETS
Fragments, movements, and radical unselfing coalesce in a collective treatise on the poetry of charged spaces. A hazy screen marks a violence that cannot be traced. Felled trees drift along a bayou tributary, in search of a disappearing home. Childhood excursions are revisited, unearthing obscured truths from spring-fed rivers and snow-capped mountains. Strained desire and brute force commingle in the cramped quarters of a hostile hostel.

Mimesis Documentary Festival: Mickey
2026-08-14 16:00 - 17:30 | Boedecker Theater, Walnut Street, Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
TICKETS
Mickey spent the last ten years exploring her transition process within the conservative context of Sinaloa, Mexico. Through digital archives, artistic reenactments, and deeply personal encounters, the film moves between tenderness and rage, transforming memory into an act of freedom. An exploration of self-perception and a n

Off the Page Exhibition Opening Reception
2026-08-14 17:00 - 20:00 | Dairy Arts Center, Walnut Street, Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
Opening Reception: Off the Page: Language as Material
Friday, August 14, 5–8 PM
Free and Open to the Public
Join us for the opening reception of Off the Page: Language as Material, a group exhibition exploring how contemporary artists engage with language, literature, media, and storytelling. Through photography, sculpture, installation, textiles, and mixed media, the exhibition examines language as both subject and material, asking how words shape our identities, transmit knowledge, and connect us to one another.
Meet the exhibiting artists, experience the exhibition across the Dairy’s gallery spaces, and enjoy an evening celebrating the power of language, creative expression, and the stories that bind communities together.
Participating artists include Mariel Reed, Nathan Storey Freeman, Bug, Josh Hughes, Dagny Rayn Chika, Dawn Siebel, Leona Lazar, Sarah Tenney, Samuel Austin, Lisa Berley, Jacqueline Moulton, Austin Baskett, and Russell Schnell.

Tapestry Theatre Company: Disney's Finding Nemo Jr. | Aug. 14-16
2026-08-14 18:00 - 19:00 | Grace Gamm Theatre, Walnut Street, Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
TICKETS
Dive into adventure with Tapestry Theatre’s production of Disney’s Finding Nemo Jr. This all-abilities performance brings Nemo, Marlin, Dory, and their ocean friends to life in a heartwarming story of courage, friendship, and finding your way home.
Enjoy a joyful, inclusive theatrical experience featuring a talented cast and a beloved Disney score, perfect for audiences of all ages.

The Last Call Comedy Show (Sober)
2026-08-14 20:00 - 21:30 | Gordon Gamm Theater, Walnut Street, Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
TICKETS
Most comedy shows encourage drinking. This one is what happens after people stop.
Join us for The Last Call Comedy Show, a night of hilarious stand-up featuring some of Colorado’s funniest sober comedians. This is a sober comedy event, proving you don’t need alcohol or drugs to have a great night out.
Whether you’re in recovery, sober-curious, or just looking for a comedy show with a different vibe, this event brings together community, connection, and big laughs.
Expect a night of raw, unfiltered comedy from some of the best sober comics in Colorado.
Headliner: Ben Roy is a nationally touring stand-up comedian, writer, and actor based in Denver. He is the creator and star of the TruTV sitcom Those Who Can’t, and has appeared on Comedy Central Presents as well as numerous comedy festivals and clubs across the country.
Known for his high-energy style and brutally honest storytelling, Ben blends sharp observations with chaotic life experiences that leave audiences laughing from start to finish. Whether he’s talking about parenting, bad decisions, or the absurdity of modern life, Ben brings a raw, fearless perspective that has made him a favorite in the Denver comedy scene and beyond.
Featuring: Andy Lopez, Katherine Clancy

Mimesis Documentary Festival: We Survived By Accident
2026-08-14 20:00 - 21:30 | Boedecker Theater, Walnut Street, Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
TICKETS
A program of shorts by Dana Kavelina
Animation becomes a practice of resurrection in Dana Kavelina’s cinema, where collage, stop-motion, and archival fragments reanimate forgotten histories. People speak from mass graves and coal mines of the Donbas, rising to haunt us anew. Dolls begin to move, photographs flicker, and buried voices return to relay histories erased by official narratives. Negotiating grief and utopia, Dana Kavelina’s films imagine remembrance not as a fixed record of the past but as an ongoing act of repair. In these reanimated half-worlds, the dead remain present, asking us to carry their stories toward a more just future.
Program:
Mark Tulip, who spoke with flowers (2018, 15′)
Letter to a Turtledove (2020, 21’)
it cannot be that nothing can be returned (2022, excerpt – 15′)
Grey Earth (2026, 32′)

Mimesis Documentary Festival: The Return Current
2026-08-15 13:00 - 14:30 | Boedecker Theater, Walnut Street, Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
TICKETS
The past persists in trembling images, unsettled ground, restless bodies, and repeated gestures. From a devastating street protest to a cryonics facility, these projects deny demands for resolution. They dwell instead in limbo between reversal and return, the solid and the spectral, preservation and decay, embracing absences that continue to shape the present.

Mimesis Documentary Festival: Holding Together
2026-08-15 16:00 - 17:30 | Boedecker Theater, Walnut Street, Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
TICKETS
Small-gauge tactility reveals interlocking patterns of landscape, activism, and everyday life, highlighting how meaning emerges through relationships. Energies of the George Floyd Uprising, Anishinaabe Seven Fires Prophecy, and Dakota 38+2 Memorial Ride are transmitted through the intimate conversations and kinetic montage of Surrendur. Bay Area Sampler Quilt makes an in-camera mosaic to mimic the form of a cherished social ritual. Images are joined into forms at once fragile and enduring. They offer a way of seeing community not as a destination, but as something continually woven into being.

CatVideoFest 2026
2026-08-15 19:30 - 20:45 | Gordon Gamm Theater, Walnut Street, Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
TICKETS
Oscilloscope Laboratories presents a compilation of the latest and best cat videos culled from countless hours of unique submissions and sourced animations, music videos, and classic internet powerhouses. Each year, across the country, local theaters partner with nearby cat-focused charities, animal welfare associations and shelters alike — a portion of ticket proceeds from every show goes directly to local cats in need. Runtime, approx. 70 min. Treat as G rated.

Mimesis Documentary Festival: Self-Driving (And Other Romances)
2026-08-15 20:00 - 21:30 | Boedecker Theater, Walnut Street, Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
TICKETS
A speed ramp between quotidian rhythms and accelerating consumerism materializes in the endless mirror of lakes and rivers, the windshield of a city bus, and the ever-expanding physical infrastructure of cloud computing. Superimposing tradition and transformation, layers of space and time transmute water into data at the velocities of slow-growth lichen and break-neck scrolling.

Mimesis Documentary Festival: Sheltering
2026-08-16 10:00 - 11:30 | Boedecker Theater, Walnut Street, Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
TICKETS
Carefully constructed walls fall to the irresistible forces of storm and fire. In the aftermath, we see one another more clearly. Lines of connection grow between broken hearts, charting routes of restoration and solidarity. Humanity blooms beautiful through mutual aid and the endurance to keep showing up, radiating the love that appears when we shelter and hold.

Mimesis Documentary Festival: Success Rate
2026-08-16 13:00 - 14:30 | Boedecker Theater, Walnut Street, Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
TICKETS
Triumphs fade, future tribulations loom large. Disappointment looks inevitable, but navigating by desire, you persevere. Each attempt sets its own pace, each a new opportunity for the same old mistakes. It becomes clear that some people will never learn. Vulnerable, you try again. Ending is not a failure, and what remains will be enough.

Mimesis Documentary Festival: Your Tongue In My Cheek
2026-08-16 16:00 - 17:30 | Boedecker Theater, Walnut Street, Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
TICKETS
Languages are carried beyond words, in a glance, a game, or a ritual. Through a disintegrating tongue and a capella songs, we think about the nature of communicating and try to narrate ourselves back to life. Cinema becomes a space to understand survival, selfhood, and alterity. Here, storytelling is an act of relation, and an image speaks the patient language of care.

Mimesis Documentary Festival: Particulate Matter
2026-08-16 20:00 - 21:30 | Boedecker Theater, Walnut Street, Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
TICKETS
Microscopic manifestations of extraction and unchecked experimentation are breadcrumbs that lead us into the void. Examining the granular boundaries of environmental disaster, these projects capture atomic mementoes, outrage, and kinship through silver halides and Bayer arrays.

How to Watch a Movie Part VI - Thinking About Film Critically: Theory and Beyond
2026-08-17 18:00 - 20:00 | Dairy Arts Center, Walnut Street, Boulder, CO, 80302, United States

Exploring Book-ness Workshop
2026-08-18 17:00 - 20:00 | McMahon Gallery, Walnut Street, Boulder, Colorado, 80302, United States
TICKETS
Surrounded by the artworks in Off the Page exhibition, participants are invited to explore the many possibilities of what a book can be with Bohemia Boulder.
From ancient scrolls to contemporary artist books, this hands-on workshop examines the book as both a vessel for ideas and an artistic medium in its own right. Together, we’ll challenge conventional notions of “book-ness.”
Does a book need pages? Does it need words? Does it even need to be legible? How can we stretch these boundaries to create a book that speaks in our own unique voice?
Participants will learn several folded book structures, experiment with a variety of materials, tools, and mark-making techniques, and explore the relationship between concept and material. Through playful experimentation and reflection, you’ll create a one-of-a-kind book inspired by your own process, experiences, and imagination—using truly “off the page” approaches.
No prior experience is necessary. All materials will be provided.

Ask E. Jean | Aug. 19 - 23
2026-08-19 16:30 - 18:00 | Boedecker Theater, Walnut Street, Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
TICKETS
ASK E. JEAN is the thrilling story of E. Jean Carroll’s life, from her early days as Miss Cheerleader USA to her rise as a trailblazing journalist, author, and beloved advice columnist. Carroll broke barriers as the first female editor at Esquire, Playboy, and Outside, helping to redefine women’s roles in media with her sharp wit and fearless voice. In recent years, she reignited public discourse by standing up to power, becoming the only woman to beat Donald Trump twice in court, and sparking a national conversation about truth, accountability, and resilience. This film is a portrait of an indomitable woman who proved it’s never too late to reclaim your voice, rewrite your story, and change the world. (Ivy Meeropol, 2026, USA, 1:31, NR)

Freehub Presents Film Festival
2026-08-19 19:00 - 20:30 | Grace Gamm Theatre, Walnut Street, Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
TICKETS
Freehub PRESENTS is an annual mountain bike film festival and community-driven event series that showcases unreleased short films from some of the best filmmakers and riders. This multi-stop film festival honors top and emerging filmmakers, riders, leaders, and storytellers who will shape the sport for generations to come. Supported by SRAM, Maxxis, evo, Leatt, and Orbea.

Unidentified | Aug. 19 - 23
2026-08-19 19:00 - 20:30 | Boedecker Theater, Walnut Street, Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
TICKETS
Sparked by the discovery of the lifeless body of a teenage girl in the desert; When no one claims the body, Noelle Al Saffan, a newly divorced, true crime aficionado who recently lost a child of her own, gets obsessively involved. Despite a ticking clock that seemingly guarantees the girl’s senseless death will be discarded as a cold case, Noelle is determined to identify the body and uncover the truth. She slowly unravels a mystery entangled within a traditional society in transition, where women are learning to create more space for themselves and to take control of their own destinies. (Haifaa Al-Mansour, 2025, Saudi Arabia, 1:39, PG-13)

American Crossroads Theater: Murder For Two | Aug. 20 - 29
2026-08-20 19:30 - 21:00 | Grace Gamm Theatre, Walnut Street, Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
TICKETS
One piano. Two actors. Thirteen suspects. Endless possibilities for laughter.
A great American novelist is dead, and everyone at his surprise birthday party is a suspect. In this fast-paced, hilarious musical whodunit, one actor plays the detective racing to crack the case while the other plays every single suspect—and both pound the keys of a single piano all night long. It’s part murder mystery, part madcap vaudeville, and 100% a tour-de-force of comic timing and showmanship.
A perennial crowd-pleaser that’s wowed audiences off-Broadway and beyond, Murder for Two is the kind of show that reminds you why live theater is irreplaceable. Bring a friend, bring your detective instincts, and prepare to laugh until the final reveal.

Leviticus | Aug 21
2026-08-21 20:30 - 22:00 | Boedecker Theater, Walnut Street, Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
TICKETS
Two teenage boys must escape a violent entity that takes the form of the person they desire most – each other. (Adrian Chiarella, 2025, Australia, 1:28, R)

Oracle Performance Ensemble: Resilience | Aug. 22 - 23
2026-08-22 19:00 - 20:30 | Gordon Gamm Theater, Walnut Street, Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
TICKETS
OPE began in 2005 with the desire to perform our art.
A fusion of contemporary dance and colorguard. Since then, we have produced multiple performances throughout the Colorado community, involving hundreds of performers, whose inherent desire is to perform.
Oracle Performance Ensemble invites you to an inspiring evening of Color Guard and Dance at the beautiful Dairy ARTS Center in Boulder, CO.
Coming back for another amazing season, OPE is proud to present
– Resilience—
“The ability of substance or object to spring back into shape- elasticity”
A stunning celebration of movement in artistry. Nine creatively unique pieces set by our talented team of choreographers, and our special guest choreographer Michael James!
