Whether touring the vast Midwestern countryside or breathtaking European cities, Canadian folk band Elliott BROOD has one interest at heart: antique shopping. In the past, the trio has gathered vintage...

March 25, 1911. In a New York City factory near Washington Square, poor immigrant workers, mostly young Jewish and Italian women, laboriously stitched garments. The wages were miniscule, the hours were...

Alan MacVey is the director of the Division of Performing Arts and the head of the Theater Department, and he teaches Art of Theatre and Directing I at the University of Iowa. We spoke with him about his...

Strutting comfortably in high-heeled shoes is an obstacle in itself. The task becomes even more daunting when wearing Indian-style saris — long fabrics embellished with artistic prints — and walking...

Lonnie Dupre has ventured into some less-than-hospitable locales. The vast Siberian expanse, the Arctic tundra, and the pristine mountains of Greenland all know his footfall. Polar bears, temperatures...

Thrust into a world of artistic change, Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore narrowly escaped the tumultuous downtown New York City arts scene of the early ’80s. But out of the chaos, they created a jewel,...

A combination of hanging and standing heavy antique doors surrounds a group of 15 dancers. Throughout the piece, the dancers build and tear down the structures. “[The doors] are all really old and have...

John Waters is not a typical filmmaker. In his 47 years in directing, he has cast porn stars, taught in prisons, pushed Johnny Depp out of his teen-idol image, and brought the pencil-thin mustache worldwide...

While passing through Baltimore last week, DeVotchKa’s frontman Nick Urata visited poet Edgar Allan Poe’s home. As a child, he was terrified by Poe’s short story “The Black Cat,” in which a man...

As a child, Julie Hanson began her life as a poet by jumping on her grandmother’s bed. Or more precisely, immediately afterwards, when her grandmother, upset about the noise, burst into the room and...

A strong selection of writers will descend on Iowa City this weekend, along with the numerous musical acts, for the annual Mission Creek Festival. Literature has played an important role in each of the...

Halfway through watching the play Ameriville, a play about Hurricane Katrina, people in a New Orleans audience walked out of the theater, only to return a few minutes later. The audience members didn’t...