Posted on Thursday, 22nd September 2011 by Aidan Bayly
In celebration of its multiple screenings of “Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest” over the next two weeks, the Dairy Center for the Arts will be hosting Quest, a full-fledged dance party, this Saturday night. The party will include three rooms of local DJs spinning, drink and concessions deals, and gogo dancers during a late-night extravaganza that the Dairy hopes will attract a diverse crowd.
The event will directly follow a viewing of “Beats Rhymes & Life” — a documentary directed by actor Michael Rapaport about the seminal hip-hop group that many believe bridged the gap between the old and new schools of the genre — and is open for all-ages.
“We want people to have a more full experience than just a movie,” said Glenn Webb, cinema manager for the 
Dairy Center and the Boedecker Theater.
“We still have to compete with the Netflix experience,” Webb noted as one of the reasons he feels a fuller moviegoing experience is essential to the continued success of the Boe.
“It’s also about building community,” Webb said. “And so we decided that a dance party would be just the thing.”
Webb said that he hadn’t seen “Beats” before programming it at the Boe, but that thanks to the film’s impressive word-of-mouth reputation and glowing critical reception, he felt it would be a good fit for the theater.
“We are trying to widen our audience and serve more of a cross-section of Boulder,” Webb continued. “We want to avoid the danger of showing only ‘cinephile movies’ to cinephiles. Part of the mission of the Boedecker and the Dairy is to reach out to as large and diverse of an audience as possible.”
Webb cited the Boe’s recent screening of another rockumentary, “Last Fast Ride: The Life, Love and Death of a Punk Goddess,” which, like “Beats,” deals with a unique underground music scene as viewed through a particular group or, in this case, musician.
Adding that the Boe intends to hold a mini-festival of music-oriented films in the near future, Webb said that showing films like “Beats” and “Last Ride” is only the beginning in the facility’s attempt at reaching out to more audience members of all ages and niche interests.
“We plan on trying to diversify in that direction,” Webb said. Hence his enlisting members of the local dance and hip-hop scene for the Quest dance party. Patricio Illanes, aka DJ Fabreeze, works with Radio 1190′s hip-hop program, Basementalism (Saturdays, 4-7 p.m.), and will be spinning at the party.
“I’ve seen the movie, and it’s fantastic,” said Illanes, a business alum of the University of Colorado. “It’s one part a film made strictly for hip-hop audiences, but also a throwback to classic films about other kinds of bands. I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen another hip-hop movie made about one specific band before.”
Illanes continued that his passion for a Tribe Called Quest stems largely from the group’s having been part of the period of hip-hop in which such projects, along with the likes of Wu-Tang Clan and De La Soul, were first starting to break into the mainstream. To Illanes, because hip-hop was still considered a fresh and new genre of music, radio stations, MTV, et al were still presenting the very best of what the burgeoning scene had to offer before it was co-opted by the very same mainstream.
“A Tribe Called Quest represented a really pivotal part of the hip-hop community that shaped how the music is today,” Illanes said.
Having spun at the Fox Theater in the past and around town at various other venues and house parties, Illanes concluded, “I’m curious to see what kind of audience will come out. I had some friends who saw ‘Beats Rhymes & Life’ in Denver, and they said they could really feel the vibe throughout the theater. It sounds like a really fun time.”
Tags: Called Quest, Quest, Tribe Called, Tribe Called Quest
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