Arts & Events

By Matthew Gulick Last weekend, Bare Bones Theatre Collective put on Town Crier Speaks Festival XVI, a series of student-written and student-directed one-act plays. This year’s festival ran the emotional gamut. From criticisms of religious tradition to a comedic dramatization of soda brand rivalry, from the AIDS epidemic to comatose loved ones, Town Crier alternated between heavy subject matter and lighthearted puns. Entirely student-driven, The Bare Bones Theatre Collective produces two festivals a year, Town Crier in the fall and Plays Against Humanity in the spring. The collective also supports...

By Brynn Svenningsen “This song is about being falsely accused of something and a long time later getting revenge,” singer Travis Barker said as he grabbed his guitar and started to play an original folk song. Barker, a member of the band Elk & Boar,  gathered along with many other Tacoma artisans and musicians on Oct. 4 at Kaleidoscope, the opening party for Tacoma Arts Month. Tacoma Arts Month is an event that focuses on highlighting the art culture in Tacoma and getting the community involved in it. The event...

By Brynn Svenningsen Remember how Bill Nye made you interested in science when you were a kid? Surely any of you science majors can give him some credit.  Well it’s time to forget about Bill Nye as he was, because in David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg’s new documentary “Bill Nye: The Science Guy,” there is a new Bill to be discovered. The film will be opening the 12th annual Tacoma Film Festival this year. “Bill Nye” focuses on Nye’s movement from a children’s television host to an activist against global...

By Arcelia Salado Alvarado Zhi Lin’s name is in the entryway for the exhibit at the Tacoma Art Museum. Painted in broad strokes, the bright Chinese characters are fitting for a man who is trying to shine the spotlight on people who were left anonymous for so long. “Between 1865 and 1869, thousands of Chinese migrants toiled at a grueling pace and in perilous working conditions to help construct America’s first Transcontinental Railroad,” Stanford’s Chinese Railroad Workers in North America said. Anywhere between 50 to 1,200 immigrants may have died...

By Matthew Gulick There is a place where residents across the South Sound travel for recreational fear. You’ve probably passed it countless times northbound on I-5; perhaps you, like me, just used it as a landmark to know you’re about 25 minutes out from the University when caught in rush-hour traffic. That’s right, for the month of October, Wild Waves presents “Fright Fest,” where the theme park gets a “SPOOKTACULAR makeover” providing souls of all ages with a fright-filled evening of fun for the whole family. A visit to Fright...

By: Evan Welsh The music rang from every angle of a full Schneebeck hall. Instrumentally, everything was covered, from string and wind ensembles to EWI and intonation pipes. The styles ranged from classical to Broadway to jazz and beyond. Genre and location shifted with each new piece performed. Even with a program, each transition from song to song excited and surprised. Collage was more an experience than a concert. Collage is a concert that is formatted to transition seamlessly from piece to piece, meaning the last note of one song...

The latest Stephen King movie adaptation, It, broke records and inspired memes to become one of the biggest phenomena in horror movies in history. With the largest horror movie opening weekend of all time, Pennywise the clown danced his way into the lives of people across the country, horror fans or not. For a while It was inescapable. Did the movie live up to the hype or is America just terrified of clowns due to witnessing what happens when one holds the highest office in the land? Spoilers ahead.        ...

Oscar Vázquez, hailing from Uruapan, in Michoacan, Mexico described himself as the kind of person who used to steal candy from his grandma and give it to boys. That same grandmother considers being to be gay “an abomination”. Oscar came out when he was sixteen; the next day he awoke to his uncle building him a room about a hundred feet away from the house. This was one of the primary motivators in his decision to leave Mexico.   Last week was Welcoming Week in the United States, and from...

By Evan Welsh Even without the microphone, N. Scott Momaday’s voice would’ve reached every corner of Schneebeck Concert Hall. You wouldn’t expect such strength and confidence in a voice from a man in his eighties who mostly is bound to a wheelchair, but Dr. Momaday is a storyteller and the voice is paramount in the conservation of his people's oral tradition and identity. Scott Momaday is a Native American author, poet and playwright of Kiowa heritage. Much of his writing focuses on his Kiowa culture and identity. His first novel,...