Don’t be fooled by the “Girls Volleyball Team” sign on the windshield. Inside the Worland Warriors bus one finds a keg, a card table, beds for overnight excursions, various Denver/Boulder art paraphernalia, and local musicians conversing on couches: this isn’t a sing-a-long ride to State Finals, it’s a road trip through Colorado’s most edgy, electric scenes with the picturesque view of Highway 36 en route.
The bus (as well as several other charter buses) functions as the primary program of The Basics Fund, a non-profit founded last year by Colorado native and CU graduate, Dustin Huth. The Basics Fund specializes in raising health insurance money for young artists as well as providing promotional opportunities for their work. A donation of $25 gets a passenger from Boulder to an art or music event in Denver (or from Denver to Boulder) and back, free to party as hard as one is motivated, with certainty that the bus driver (often Huth, himself) is licensed and sober.
The bus, a former Greyhound with a revamped interior that looks something like a bohemian bordello collided with an art studio, provides access to a full schedule of events that includes First Fridays at the Santa Fe Art District, Final Friday exhibits at the Denver Art Museum, shows at the Fillmore and elsewhere.
What began for Huth as perhaps a 40-foot long impulse-purchase to replace a lease with a vehicle for a Kerouac-esque summer of traveling and working with playwright, Jonson Kuhn, has now become a chosen medium of expression. Huth explains The Basics Fund as, “Action on life, a sort of experiment in relational aesthetics, an interactive performance piece,” adding that the bus is “A corridor, a vessel, a container, an audience.” In a sense, the audience is itself the artistic object. Passengers Beware: conversations and activities on the bus are subject to prospective re-tellings of the “gritty, diesel, blue-collar” variety in literary or visual form. Just ask Huth, a writer, musician and all-around creative-dabbler, and he’ll narrate a scroll’s worth of stories about what happens when the “art heads” meet the “bluegrass heads” meet the “indie rock heads.”
Not content with simply mingling the diverse crowds that hop aboard, Huth’s future plans for the program include expansion with more buses, energy conversion to bio-diesel, a mobile poetry reading series, and what he mysteriously refers to as a “reinvention of the parade,” or an endless tag-team of buses crossing the country in search of art and adventure. After almost one year of rolling from poetry slam to after party, from gallery opening to concert, a project that began with a tour of first-ever featured artists, Jonson Kuhn and Eliza Boote, The Basics Fund has established itself as a unique, mixed-media, six-wheeler link between the communities of Denver and Boulder.
For more information about The Basics Fund or to contact Dustin Huth, visit www.thebasicsfund.org
