The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver did everything just right on Thursday night when it reopened the Holiday Theater as a performing-arts space with a carefully curated program that fully respected the historic theater’s neighborhood, cultural history and creative potential.

And it didn’t hurt that, after two hours of grassroots dance, poetry, jazz and theater, the evening ended with a surprise appearance by Denver’s own Nathaniel Rateliffe, who sang his current radio hit, “It’s All Right.”

“This is great for this space to be used for the MCA,” said Rateliffe, who has been there for his adopted state of Colorado time and time again since the pandemic, including fundraising efforts for the Colorado music community and Marshall fire victims. Last month, it was announced that the beloved singer-songwriter will collaborate on a year-long, new-music project with the Colorado Symphony.

“I love being part of our arts community,” he told those gathered. “I am excited to see this place grow as a new event space.”

MCA Denver at the Holiday is a new 400-seat, cross-cultural hub for local arts that will host lectures, live music, films and all manner of performances at the century-old storefront theater located at 32nd Avenue and Clay Street in Denver’s Northside.

It’s fairly unprecedented (and fairly brilliant) for a museum to proactively respond to the unique existential challenges of life in 2022 by opening a performing-arts venue as a satellite opportunity to attract and engage with new audiences. Opening MCA Denver at the Holiday is a bold move and a sure indication that traditional cultural institutions like museums cannot continue to operate within the concentrated confines of the same four walls and hope to survive and thrive.

“At our core, we are a museum that embraces creative experimentation and bringing people together to share in meaningful experiences,” MCA Denver Director Nora Burnett said. “Moving into the Holiday is a major milestone in our journey and will ensure that we will continue to connect with new audiences, work with even more artists and create even more dynamic and thought-provoking programming year-round.”

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This game-changer was all made possible by a landmark arrangement between MCA Denver and the Denver Cultural Property Trust, which was recently formed by museum board member Mark Falcone to save vulnerable Denver landmarks from developers by making them available to organizations that support the city’s creative workforce — and setting them up with stabilizing, long-term leases at far below market rates.

The Trust bought the 14,000-square-foot property, which also houses artist studio spaces and 15 rental housing units, from the Highlands Church last August for $5.1 million — about $400,000 below the listed price. In March, the Trust received a $1 million Community Revitalization Grant from the state of Colorado specifically to subsidize the reopening of the Holiday with MCA Denver as its tenant.

The building has a rich history since it first went up as an apartment building in 1914. The 5,000-square-foot theater, which takes up about a third of the property, was added in 1926 and opened as the Egyptian Theater as part of a wave of excitement following the discovery of King Tut’s tomb in 1922. In 1953, the theater was renovated and reopened as the Holiday, with all traces of its original Egyptian Revival design covered over with plaster or boarded up. The original Holiday marquee endures to this day.

The Holiday was the first cinema in Colorado to present Spanish language films, and it did so through the ’80s. It was home to a Peruvian restaurant until 2009, then became the Highlands Church in 2012. When the church relocated in 2020, it again made the property vulnerable to developers. The $5.1 million paid by the Trust was more than double the $2.4 million Pastor Mark Tidd had paid just nine years before. But the space required little work for the museum after a 2013 renovation by the church made it look pretty much as it does today.

Thursday’s reopening lineup gave audiences a pretty representative taste of what to expect from MCA Denver’s upcoming programming at the Holiday. The big news on that front came when Director of Programs Sarah Kate Baie announced that the museum’s popular and now 18-year-old Mixed Taste summer lecture series will move to the Holiday, still in partnership with the Denver Center’s off-beat Off-Center programming wing, and with local writer and poet Brenton Z Weyi as co-curator. The fun weekly series, which pairs two seemingly unrelated topics for creative conversations, has been staged since 2017 at the Denver Center’s Seawell Ballroom.

Weyi, who performed a real-time audience participation poem as part of Thursday’s program, recently produced a long-form podcast episode with the NPR station in Boston on how Congo’s freedom was won and hope was lost in 1960, the year 17 African nations declared their independence from the colonial West.

Grupo Tláloc Danza Azteca opened things up with a conch-infused sage-burning ceremony before breaking into a percussive dance celebrating the traditions of their indigenous ancestors.

Colorado Poet Laureate Bobby LeFebre, assisted by Su Teatro’s Valarie Castillo, read from LeFebre’s 2019 zeitgeist play “Northside,” which pointedly and comically skewers gentrification in the very same neighborhood that is home to the Holiday.

The theater is located right across the street from North High School, whose student jazz band contributed three funky tunes, followed by University of Colorado graduate Eleanor Perry Smith, who sometimes sings her lyrical poetry a capella. The final scheduled performance was by Cleo Parker Robinson Dance, whose co-founder, Tom Robinson, died on Monday. Burnett called for a moment of silence after quoting the dance company’s Director of Booking Mary Hart as saying: “Our dancers will be dancing a piece that is filled with joy, which is a reminder that even in this time of sorrow, there is light, and there is life.”

Programming at the Holiday began in earnest the very next night with a sold-out concert featuring Chicano Batman and Los Mocochetes. This Tuesday, Grammy Award-winning guitarist Bill Frisell, a graduate of Denver East High School, will bring his Bill Frisell Trio to the Holiday along with bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer Rudy Royston.

This rollout has been so carefully considered and thoughtfully prepared, you could fully believe Burnett on Thursday when she said, “We are committed to being the best neighbors we can be and to finding ways to continually honor the history of this theater and neighborhood.”

At a time of rapid change, when much of Denver’s cultural past is being scraped as fast as bulldozers can scrape, it’s almost unheard of that any readaptation of any beloved, century-old building in Denver could be carried out without a whiff of grumbling. This one seems to be accompanied by nothing but grateful cheers.

Score one for Old Denver. And New Denver.

John Moore is the Denver Gazette’s Senior Arts Journalist. Reach him at [email protected]