The Green Box Arts Festival is gearing up for its 17th season in Green Mountain Falls.
The annual festival bills itself as "a multi-week, multi-disciplinary cornucopia of arts performances, exhibitions, classes, camps, conversations and parties."
It's known for drawing international talent, including a public opening of Green Mountain Falls Skyspace by James Turrell in 2022, which continues to draw tourists to the small hamlet west of Colorado Springs.
This year's headlining performance event features the Colorado Ballet. Other attractions include visual arts, music and yoga. The festival runs for two weeks, from June 27 - July 12. Tickets go on sale Monday.
KRCC’s Kendra Carr spoke with Green Box Arts Festival Executive Director Scott Levy about this year's event. They first talked about how the festival might be just a little bit out of the… well, box.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Green Box Arts Festival's Scott Levy: A lot of people hear the word Arts Festival and think that there are going to be a bunch of vendors and booths with art for sale. That's not us. We present over 100 events over the two and a half week period from dance to film, to new art installations and everything in between.
KRCC's Kendra Carr: With it lasting two weeks, how does that work?
Levy: Well, Colorado Ballet is our headlining performing arts group, and they will give seven performances. People have the opportunity to come for a day, a weekend, or consider coming for the entire two weeks of the festival and really designing the festival experience for themselves. Potentially take yoga at 9:00 a.m. or go for a hike, take a class in the afternoon, see a concert or a dance performance in the evening and round out the rest of the day with the natural beauty of Green Mountain Falls.
Carr: This isn’t just an art festival for artists, but it's also an art festival for the community to participate in a wide variety of art.
Levy: These artists are able to practice their craft in a very intimate environment. Our largest performance space holds 180 people. So to have world-class dance companies like Colorado Ballet this summer, or American Ballet Theater in the past, perform for an audience of 180 people is a very different scenario for a lot of these groups. [We also] operate in the belief that there's no backstage, there's no artifice between artists and audience. As soon as a performance is over, the dancers you just watched are walking down the street to the next thing with you, the audience.
Carr: Should people sign up ahead of time for events or can people just show up?
Levy: It's a little bit of both. We thrive in intimate experiences and because the ticket prices for our events are either free or very low cost, things sell out rather quickly. So we advise that people register or buy tickets in advance. Tickets for this Summer's Green Box Arts Festival will go live on May 19th. Yes, you can always decide to just come to Green Mountain Falls for the day. We have 15 art installations available for view all the time, all year round. So even if you're not able to get into the event that you really wanted to see, there's still plenty of activity every day during the Green Box Arts Festival.
Carr: Health and wellness is also a pretty big part of the festival. Can you talk to me about how that's evolved and why that's important for the Green Box Arts Festival?
Levy: Yeah. Well first of all, our health and wellness program really has expanded over the last few years. It started with the festival offering yoga classes exclusively. We've now expanded that to hikes and fitness classes and Zumba in the Green Mountain Falls pool. There's such an important natural element to Green Mountain Falls. There's an extensive hiking trail system that was important to us. But also, the arts in general can be such a tool for wellness and mindfulness and health benefits. To combine the core area of health through fitness and other activities with the power that the arts can provide in terms of wellness and wellbeing makes it a really good fit.
Carr: What's most exciting about this year's festival compared to previous years?
Levy: Somewhat organically, we have the majority of artists this summer from Colorado. As we look forward to next summer, the summer of 2026, and [the desire to] highlight the semiquincentennial of America, it really was nice that we were able to find a way to have so many visual and performing artists that were either from Colorado or live in Colorado.
Also, Colorado Ballet…coming not just to perform repertoire from their already existing work, but they're actually arriving two weeks before the festival begins, and they have commissioned a choreographer to build a new work for the company, which will be premiered during the festival.
And then we're unveiling four new art installations this summer. The biggest is a Skynet by Patrick Shern of Poetic Kinetics. Poetic Kinetics is a world renowned design firm and their studio is located here in Black Forest. Patrick and his team are installing and creating a 6,000 square foot Skynet over Gazebo Lake in the center of Green Mountain Falls that will be up from mid-June through the end of October. [The floating kinetic sculpture] is going to undulate in the sky and be reflected by the water of the lake below. It's really going to be astounding.
