Granfalloon takes place across multiple weeks at multiple venues around the IU Campus, Bloomington, and Indianapolis. Below is a schedule of everything that’s going on during the festival. Please note that, while most festival events are free, some are ticketed.
Watch this space! More info and details to be announced over the coming weeks!
Event Begins @ 8:30pm, 21+
Blockhouse Bar - 205 S College Avenue, Bloomington, IN
Free event!
A Granfalloon-inspired take on the Blockhouse Bar's weekly "Honky Tonk Tuesday" that will celebrate festival headliner Mavis Staples and other legends of the genre. Hosted in partnership with Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center.
Performances @ 7:30pm
Gayle Karch Cook Center - 750 E Kirkwood Ave, Bloomington, IN
Free event!
Come experience a live stage reading of Cat's Cradle by IU Theatre.
Event Begins @ 9pm, 21+
The Back Door - 207 S College Avenue, Bloomington, IN
Free event!
A Vonnegut-themed dance performance in partnership with the Midland City Arts Festival.
Performances @ 7pm, 21+
The Orbit Room - 107 N College Ave, Bloomington, IN
Free event!
The Granfalloon Festival is excited to partner with Cosmic Songwriter for a June showcase featuring local songwriters.
Performances @ 9pm, 18+
The Bishop Bar - 123 S Walnut St., Bloomington, IN
Free event!
Come experience a cabaret-style performance by IU Musical Theatre!
Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is an outrageous and savagely funny fantasy about people, their pleasures, pains and perversions, a penetrating satire on insanity – a millionaire's private lunacy. Featuring an infectious score by the Oscar- and Tony-winning team of Alan Menken and Howard Ashman (Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, Little Shop of Horrors), God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is a legendary collaboration between one of America's greatest novelists and the songwriting team behind some of the greatest hits of all time.
Performance @ 7pm & 9:30pm (2 shows!)
The Orbit Room - 107 N College Ave, Bloomington, IN
Free event! Food/Drink purchase required. RSVP recommended.
With BCMC, Cooper Crain and Bill MacKay unite to create Foreign Smokes: provocalogues, equal parts east Africa, deep space, rock’s dreamy lyrical interior, soloed multi-track, remix, raga, new age fugue state, field recording, blues and beyond – gossamer-light avant-garde noir flowing into fire-and-icy jams, collecting bright shades and warm stretches of infinity drawn through the buzzy overdrive of this side of life’s strange and sunny days.
Performance @ 8pm
Buskirk-Chumley Theater - 114 E Kirkwood Avenue, Bloomington, IN
With the 2014 formation of I’m With Her, singer/songwriters Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O’Donovan, and Sara Watkins introduced an essential new force into the world of folk music: a close-knit alliance of highly esteemed musicians, each graced with a deep understanding of folk tradition and unbridled passion for expanding its possibilities.
On their long-awaited sophomore LP Wild and Clear and Blue, I’m With Her now bring their luminous harmonies to a soul-searching body of work about reaching into the past, navigating a chaotic present, and bravely moving forward into the unknown.
Performances @ 10am-4pm
Courthouse Square - 100 W Kirkwood Ave, Bloomington, IN
Free event!
Enjoy performances by community groups at the southeast corner of the Monroe County Courthouse while you peruse the Bloomington Handmade Market. Full lineup to be annouced soon!
Performance @ 4pm
200 E Kirkwood Avenue, Bloomington, IN
Free event!
The Granfalloon Main Stage Concert will take place outdoors on East Kirkwood Avenue and feature musical performances by Mavis Staples, Thee Sacred Souls, Murder by Death, and Tortilla Jackson.
Event Begins @ 10pm, 21+
The Back Door - 207 S College Avenue, Bloomington, IN
Free event!
Come by the bar to sip a drink, hang on the patio, and dance!!
Gameplay + Reception @ 4-6pm, Talk @ 6pm
Lilly Library - 1200 E 7th Street, Bloomington, IN
Free Event!
Kurt Vonnegut's GHQ: The Lost Board Game
Join us for a talk + Q&A with game designer, Geoffrey Engelstein, at the Lilly Library.
Geoff Engelstein is an award-winning table-top game designer and educator. His game titles include Space Cadets, The Expanse, and the Super Skill Pinball series, and book titles include Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design, Achievement Relocked, and The Universe Explained with a Cookie. Podcast credits include the long-running GameTek series on The Dice Tower, and Ludology. He is also on the faculty of the NYU Game Center.
Film @ 6:30pm, Q&A with Ellen Jovin and Brandt Johnson to follow
Buskirk-Chumley Theater - 114 E Kirkwood Avenue, Bloomington, IN
One fall day in 2018, Ellen Jovin set up a folding table on a Manhattan sidewalk with a sign that said “Grammar Table.” Right away, passersby began excitedly asking questions, telling stories, and filing complaints.
What happened next is the stuff of grammar legend.
Ellen and her filmmaker husband, Brandt Johnson, took the table on the road, visiting all 50 US states as Brandt shot the grammar action. People from every imaginable background visited the table to share a laugh, settle disputes, and talk about their grammar insecurities. These conversations took place in small towns and big cities, by bookstores and coffee shops, on beaches and mountainsides.
But this story transcends grammar. It’s the story of an epic quest to bring us all closer together. In a time of social and political division, the Grammar Table is a place of unity and connection. The conversations at the table help answer the question “How can we all get along?”
Come for the grammar. Stay for the humanity.
This is an event hosted by Indiana University’s Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences, through the generosity of the Culbertson Fund.
Q&A with Brandt and Ellen to follow the film.
Discussion @ 6:30-8pm, 21+
Morgenstern Books - 849 S Auto Mall Rd, Bloomington, IN
Free Event!
Join Indiana Humanities and IU Arts & Humanities Council for a thoughtful discussion of Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. The event will start with a panel of experts diving into the key ideas of the novel and then open up to a conversation with the audience.
Discussion @ 6:30-8pm, 21+
Heartwork Brewing - 1703 N College Ave, Bloomington, IN
Free Event! RSVPs Required.
Join Monroe County Public Library and Granfalloon for the May edition of Books On Tap. It's the book club with a twist! Enjoy fantastic drinks, a comfortable atmosphere, and a great discussion on a variety of compelling books. This month, we’ll be celebrating the upcoming Granfalloon by reading One! Hundred! Deamons! by Lynda Barry.
Event @ 7pm
Buskirk-Chumley Theater - 114 E Kirkwood Avenue, Bloomington, IN
Free Event!
Lynda Barry has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator and teacher and found they are very much alike. The New York Times has described Barry as "among this country’s greatest conjoiners of words and images, known for plumbing all kinds of touchy subjects in cartoons, comic strips and novels, both graphic and illustrated." She earned a degree from Evergreen State College during its early experimental period (1974-78), studying with painter and writing teacher Marilyn Frasca. Frasca’s questions about the nature of images and the role they play in day-to-day living have guided Barry’s work ever since.
In 1979 while pursuing a career as a painter, Barry began drawing a weekly comic strip incorporating stories considered to be incompatible with comics at the time. Stories, as Barry puts it, “that had a lot of trouble in them.” Widely credited with expanding the literary, thematic and emotional range of American comics, Barry’s seminal comic strip, Ernie Pook’s Comeek, ran in alternative newspapers across North America for thirty years.
Barry has authored 21 books, worked as a commentator for NPR, and had a regular monthly feature in Esquire, Mother Jones Magazine, Mademoiselle, and Salon. She created an album-length spoken word collection of stories called The Lynda Barry Experience, and was a frequent guest on the Late Show with David Letterman. She adapted her first novel, The Good Times are Killing Me, into a long running off-Broadway play which won the Washington State Governor's Award, and has since been published by Samuel French and performed throughout North America. Her book One! Hundred! Demons! was chosen as the Freshman all-read title at Stanford University. Her novel Cruddy was called “a work of terrible beauty” by the New York Times, and has been translated into French, Italian, German, Catalan and Hebrew. Her book, Making Comics, was awarded the 2020 Eisner Award for Best Comics-Related Book + Best Publication Design. Her books Come Over, Come Over, My Perfect Life, and It's So Magic, feature the poignant story of sisters Maybonne and Marlys and the agonies of adolescence in a world that contains as much humor as it does hardship. In 2024 Come Over, Come Over was nominated for Le Fauve D’angoulême Prix du Patrimoine. This prize honors an older work that has been republished.
Lynda Barry’s “Writing the Unthinkable” workshop—especially designed for non-writers—was the subject of a New York Times Magazine article and is the basis for her award-winning books What It Is. She is Professor in Interdisciplinary Creativity at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Chazen Family Distinguished Chair in Art. At UWM she has also led writing workshops for the public, and hosted a ‘Seeing-Eye’-themed series of popular public talks with guests Ryan Knighton, blind writer and writing teacher; Ivan Brunetti and Chris Ware, legendary contemporary cartoonists; Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons; and Dan Chaon, acclaimed novelist and short story writer. She is also the 2023 Lois and Willard Mackey Chair in Creative Writing at Beloit College.
Barry has received numerous awards and honors for her work, among them two William Eisner awards, the American Library Association’s Alex Award, the Wisconsin Library Association’s RR Donnelly Award, the Washington State Governor’s Award, the Holtz Center for Science & Technology Outreach Fellowship, The Museum of Wisconsin Arts Lifetime Achievement Award, and the 2017 Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Cartoonists Society. She also received an Honorary Doctor of Arts degree from Philadelphia University of Art in 2015, and was inducted into the Cartoonist’s Hall of Fame in 2016. In 2019 Lynda Barry was honored as a MacArthur Fellow (also known as the Genius Grant). The MacArthur Foundation website says: “Exuberant and generous as a teacher, Barry is removing the barriers that usually prevent people from writing and drawing and enabling artists and non-artists alike to take creative risks.” In 2020 she received the 2019 NCS Reuben Award for Cartoonist of the Year, and in 2021 Oregon State University presented her with the Stone Award for Literary Achievement.
Event @ 5pm
Gayle Karch Cook Center - 750 E Kirkwood Ave, Bloomington, IN
Free Event!
Join us for an artist talk with sculptor Keith L. Andrews and a celebration of his Kurt Vonnegut Altar at the Gayle Karch Cook Center.
Panels @ 1-2pm, Readings @ 7pm
Gayle Karch Cook Center - 750 E Kirkwood Ave, Bloomington, IN
Free Events!
Panelists, authors, and more details to be announced soon! Learn more about the IU Writers' Conference here.
Talk + Discussion @ 12pm
Gayle Karch Cook Center, 750 E Kirkwood Avenue, Bloomington, IN
Free event!
A free and fun way to bookend the festival! Join us for an enlightening talk by scholar Christina Jarvis about Vonnegut’s novel, Cat's Cradle, followed by an open conversation about the novel. Hosted in partnership with the IU Writers' Conference.
Screening @ 7pm
Indie to Indy Screening: IU Cinema and Indianapolis' Kan-Kan Cinema present this screening as part of the Granfalloon Film Series. The film will screen in both locations simultaneously and include a live audience-to-audience component prior to the start of the film.
Screenings are free but ticketed at both locations. You can reserve tickets through the links below.
IU Cinema - 1213 E 7th Street, Bloomington, IN
Reserve IU Cinema Tickets Here
Kan-Kan Cinema - 1258 Windsor Street, Indianapolis, IN
Screening @ 8pm, 21+
The Back Door - 207 S College Ave, Bloomington, IN
Cicada Cinema presents Break the Game as part of the Granfalloon Film Series. A Q&A with filmmaker Jane Wagner and D_Gurl will follow the screening. Dr. Xan Smith will introduce the film and moderate the Q&A.
This event is free and open to the public. More info can be found on the Cicada Cinema webpage.
Screening @ 6:30pm
Lee Norvelle Theatre and Drama Center -275 N. Eagleson Ave. Bloomington, IN
Presented by Jamie Foxx, THUNDER SOUL follows the extraordinary alumni from Houston’s storied Kashmere High School Stage Band, who return home after 35 years to play a tribute concert for the 92-year-old “Prof,” their beloved band leader who broke the color barrier and transformed the school’s struggling jazz band into a world-class funk powerhouse in the early 1970s.
This event is free and open to the public, presented in partnership with the IU Black Film Center & Archive.
Screening @ 7pm
Indie to Indy Screening: IU Cinema and Indianapolis' Kan-Kan Cinema present this screening as part of the Granfalloon Film Series. The film will screen in both locations simultaneously.
Screenings are free but ticketed at both locations. You can reserve tickets through the links below.
IU Cinema - 1213 E 7th Street, Bloomington, IN
Reserve IU Cinema Tickets Here
Kan-Kan Cinema - 1258 Windsor Street, Indianapolis, IN
Screening @ 7pm
Backspace Gallery - 112 W 6th St., Bloomington, IN
Cicada Cinema presents Fail Safe as part of the Granfalloon Film Series.
This event is free and open to the public. More info can be found on the Cicada Cinema webpage.
Screening @ 9pm
Bryan Park (outdoors) - 1001 S Henderson Street, Bloomington, IN
Bloomington Parks and Recreation presents Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs as part of the Granfalloon Film Series and the Movies in the Park Series.
This event is free and open to the public. More info can be found on the Parks and Recreation webpage.
Screening @ 7pm
Indie to Indy Screening: IU Cinema and Indianapolis' Kan-Kan Cinema present this screening as part of the Granfalloon Film Series. The film will screen in both locations simultaneously and include a live audience-to-audience component prior to the start of the film.
Screenings are free but ticketed at both locations. You can reserve tickets through the links below.
IU Cinema - 1213 E 7th Street, Bloomington, IN
Reserve IU Cinema Tickets Here
Kan-Kan Cinema - 1258 Windsor Street, Indianapolis, IN
Screening @ 9pm
Butler Park (outdoors) - 812 W 9th Street, Bloomington, IN
Cicada Cinema presents Cloak & Dagger as part of the Granfalloon Film Series.
This event is free and open to the public. More info can be found on the Cicada Cinema webpage.
The 100 Suite is open Monday-Friday from 12-4pm
Gayle Karch Cook Center - 750 E Kirkwood Avenue, Bloomington, IN
Free Exhibition!
The Kurt Vonnegut Altar was designed and executed by Keith L. Andrews while living in Guatemala with the assistance of local artisans and assistants. In December, the altar travelled from Andrews' home in Tallahassee, Florida to live at the Gayle Karch Cook Center for Public Arts & Humanities.
All the quality resin figures were cast from clay figures that were hand sculpted and painted by Andrews. In addition, there are 14 laser-etched and hand-painted acrylic plaques and half a dozen objects that were hand-crafted in other materials.
April 3 | 4-7pm
Fine Arts Plaza
June 6-8 | (times tbd)
Soma (Hole 1: The Atom Bomb), MCPL (Hole 2: Hoenikker Family), Buskirk-Chumley Theater (Hole 3: San Lorenzo), Waldron Center (Hole 4: Ice-9); Courthouse (Hole 5: Book of Bokonon)
Download your own scorecard, map, and zine here.
The Vonnegolf project is centered around a 5-hole "Cat's Cradle"-themed miniature golf course and a series of Kurt Vonnegut-related humanities programming. In the same way that Kurt Vonnegut used satire to deal with existential issues of science, religion and war, Vonnegolf uses the whimsical game of mini golf to provide a context for critical discussions and approachable conversations with humanities scholars.
The course was built by a group of IU Eskenazi School Comprehensive Design students through an 8-week design/build studio taught by Maxwell Fertik. In the studio, the students collaborated on research, development and fabrication for a real-world client.
Vonnegolf and related programming are free to the public, and each hole will be strategically placed at locations where programming is happening to ensure that festival-goers of all ages get to play.
Event @ 4-7pm
Lilly Library - 1200 E 7th Street, Bloomington, IN
Free Event!
Stop by the Lilly Library during the April First Thursdays Festival and see a curated pop-up exhibition of archives related to Kurt Vonnegut's 1963 novel Cat's Cradle.
The Lilly Library is home to a number of special collections related to Kurt Vonnegut, including many of his papers and letters. You can learn more about the archive here.
Process Gallery is open Monday-Friday from 12-4pm
Gayle Karch Cook Center - 750 E Kirkwood Avenue, Bloomington, IN
Free Exhibition!
The exhibition will showcase works by local artists in communication with the themes and ideas of the Granfalloon festival. This year’s festival will take place April – June 2025 and will align with the Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 novel Cat's Cradle. More info coming shortly!
Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library - 543 Indiana Ave, Indianapolis, IN
The Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library in Indianapolis, in partnership with the Granfalloon Festival, is pleased to bring you this exhibition based on Kurt Vonnegut's 1963 novel Cat's Cradle.
In the late 1940s, Kurt Vonnegut worked in public relations for General Electric in Schenectady, New York. While living and working there, he met the scientist Irving Langmuir, who, in an attempt to impress author H.G. Wells, came up with the concept of water with the ability to freeze solid at room temperature. Vonnegut was stunned, he thought “what would happen if idiots got ahold of that?”
He began a short story, and then a novel. The book was released in 1963 to little fanfare, but after a few years it became an “underground success”, which fellow hoosier author Dan Wakefield referred to as “meaning the publisher never told the public much about it, but that a lot of people who read it urged it upon their friends as an experience not to be missed.”
And that’s what Cat’s Cradle was and is, an “experience not to be missed!” Kurt tackles his usual topics of human folly, loneliness, humankind’s inability to be kind, and above all else, laughing in the face of all of it. And we’ve created an exhibit to tell you all about it!
Event @ 5-7pm
IU Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 416 N Indiana Ave, Bloomington, IN
Free Event!
Join us for an evening of arts, ideas, community, and culture with the IU Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. More information coming soon!
Event @ 5-8pm
Gayle Karch Cook Center, 750 E Kirkwood Ave, Bloomington, IN
A full list of participating galleries and venues can be found here.
Free Event!
Stop by the Gayle Karch Cook Center during the June Gallery Walk! This month’s highlights will include an Granfalloon-inspired exhibition, the Kurt Vonnegut Altar, and a talk with sculptor Keith L. Andrews.
Market from 10am – 4pm
Courthouse Square - 100 W Kirkwood Ave, Bloomington, IN
Free event!
Bloomington Handmade Market is Bloomington's best indie craft show experience featuring independent makers from across the Midwest. The Summer Fair will be held in conjunction with the Granfalloon on June 7th from 10am-4pm on and around the Courthouse Square in downtown Bloomington.
