Saturday: Boulet Brothers’ Dragula: Season 5 Tour at Fillmore Silver Spring

Unless you’re a Ministry devotee, you may not realize every day is Halloween. Unless you’re a drag aficionado over the age of 30, you may not realize there’s an entire drag ecosystem outside of RuPaul’s World of Wonder. If the Venn diagram of your interests of all things spooky and all things drag has a lot of overlap, boy, do we have a show to tell you about! The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula has been existing outside the mainstreamification of drag since premiering in 2016. With five seasons of the main show, and two spinoffs—currently streaming, first on YouTube, then Amazon Prime and Netflix, now Shudder—the most recent cast is taking the show on the road for a summer tour. Lucky for them, and you, one stop includes the Fillmore Silver Spring, a venue with excellent air-conditioning. (It gets hot in tiny clubs and it gets really hot in intricate costumes!) Also, this live show is all ages, so if you are pals with a drag fan too young for clubs, this is an excellent opportunity for some spooky, in-person drag exposure. Related, if you are a Ru diehard and can’t envision yourself supporting non-Ru queens, this tour is produced by Obsessed, the same folks that produce the Trixie and Kayta, Monét X Change, Bob the Drag Queen, Sasha Velour, Adore Delano, Ginger Minj, Miz Cracker, and other Drag Race alum road shows. Once again, every day is Halloween. Embrace the season. Boulet  Brothers’ Dragula: Season 5 Tour stars at 8 p.m. on May 25 at Fillmore Silver Spring, 8656 Colesville Rd., Silver Spring. livenation.com $46–$101. —Brandon Wetherbee

Starts Tuesday: DanceAfrica DC 2024 at Dance Place

The 37th annual DanceAfrica DC festival offers a mix of outdoor and indoor, free and ticketed events, including the promise of “live performances, an African market buzzing with excitement, and captivating oral histories.” This year’s theme is “Both Sides of the Water: A Celebration of African and Native American Culture.” Organized by dance nonprofit Dance Place, many of the festival’s events are located at the organization’s headquarters in Northeast or at the adjacent Arts Park. Griot Mama Sylvia Soumah, founder of D.C.’s Coyaba Dance Theater, presides over the festival. Friday, May 31, and Saturday, June 1, form the high point of festival activity, with free outdoor performances, and a fete or two. Dance Master Classes, which require registration, run Tuesday to Saturday. Full performance lineup and scheduling details are available online, as are marketplace and food vendor information. DanceAfrica DC 2024 runs May 28 through June 1 at Dance Place, 3225 8th St. NE. danceplace.org. —Allison R. Shely

Ongoing: Franz Jantzen at Hemphill Artworks

Franz Jantzen has been a fixture in D.C.’s photography community for decades, from his work as the Supreme Court’s photographer and collections manager, as a freelance darkroom printer for the Library of Congress, and as visual artist documenting such locales as the C&O Canal and a county fair. But with his latest exhibition at Hemphill Artworks, Jantzen delves headlong into a new realm: abstraction. He begins with high-resolution digital images of paving stones in Pompeii or ancient architecture in the Sicilian town of Cefalù, then modifies their colors digitally, usually producing sequences of works that offer variations on a theme. Jantzen’s current approach is an extension of previous projects in which he’s taken overlapping images of a subject and then digitally stitched the pieces together. But in his new work, the object he documents is no longer the destination; rather, it’s a starting point for an intensely personal, and often obscure, journey of the mind. In one six-piece series, for instance, Jantzen traces his pacifist Mennonite ancestors’ movements from the 1880s to the 1930s. Beginning in Russia, one portion of the group ended up in central Asia and while another, which included Jantzen’s direct forebears, settled in Beatrice, Nebraska. Jantzen narrates their progress in a handout written in almost Biblical prose, and he turns his initial paving-stone image into divergent, impressionistic works. One suggests flames licking in the darkness, another suggests a haystack in the sun, while a third evokes a verdant field under wide-open skies. Works from other series suggest everything from pastel-hued watercolors to Paul Cézanne-inspired proto-cubism to boldly colored LeRoy Nieman expressionism; look closely at some pieces and you’ll notice portions of works that possess the appealing granularity of an early 20th-century autochrome photograph or the unsteady swoops of exposures made as the camera moves. For elemental simplicity, though, it’s hard to top “Blue Crepe Moon,” which depicts a pleasing, cerulean blue orb against a black background, with a texture that is somehow at once liquidy and lacy. The Franz Jantzen exhibit runs through June 29 at Hemphill Artworks, 434 K St. NW. Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. hemphillfinearts.com. Free. —Louis Jacobson

Ongoing: Frames Between the Pain at Leica Store D.C.

In a vacuum, Terry La Rue’s black-and-white photography comes off as creepy: an arachnid climbing over a half-submerged marble head; a praying mantis crawling across a pale mask; a man floating on his back, looking half dead; a black bird in the sky, looking as if it’s neither flying nor gliding; a hard-to-read image that could pass for a screaming gargoyle. But La Rue’s work definitely doesn’t exist in a vacuum; he has a rare and debilitating condition called complex regional pain syndrome. In his statement, La Rue, who’s based in Seattle, says he uses photography both as a distraction from his pain and as a way to externalize his experiences through art. This explains La Rue’s attention to creepy crawlies, to spindly branches that suggest neurological dendrites, and to a figure on a sidewalk being buffeted by a towering shower of water—water that, in La Rue’s portrayal, has the consistency of shattered glass. La Rue also experiments with Daliesque imagery, emphasizing the morbid over the absurd, as in the image of an eyeball surrounded by what looks like a freeze-framed milk drop, or a melting clock face that evokes pain-wracked distortion rather than the mysteries of the unconscious. Ironically, one of La Rue’s finest images doesn’t have an obvious connection to his physical condition: It’s a streetscape in which a pedestrian is seen, unexpectedly, reflected upside down in a mirrored overhang. Frames Between the Pain: Terry La Rue is up through mid-August at Leica Store D.C., 977 F St. NW. Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Sunday, noon to 5 p.m. leicacamerausa.com. Free. —Louis Jacobson

Ongoing: Potomac River Shen Series and Forward: A Group Exhibition at Union Station

For most people living in and around the District, Union Station is more likely to be a means to reaching a destination than a destination in and of itself. But now, art lovers have two reasons to visit the train station: dual installations of local artists’ work as part of the Art at Amtrak program. One installation features the work of 22 mostly self-taught local artists partnered with Art Enables, an art gallery and program supporting artists with disabilities. The installation at Union Station features a series of 30 pieces, set in six thematic groups, that cover the windows near Gate G and Gate L. Above the station’s lounge is the second installation, Potomac River Shen Series by Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann. Represented by Morton Fine Art, the artist had work that recently appeared at Gallery B in Bethesda as part of the Creating in Abstraction show. Like many of her works, the Potomac River Shen Series draws on traditional Chinese landscape painting to explore “the tension between what is artificial and what is natural” and what constitutes a landscape. Tzu-Lan Mann’s three murals were originally painted on paper and then sized up to span the lobby between Gates A through L using digital techniques. Both installations will remain on display through the end of fall 2024 at Union Station, 50 Massachusetts Ave. NE. amtrak.com.  —Allison R. Shely