If You Go What: Boulder Arts Week When: March 28-April 6 Where: Venues throughout Boulder Info: A full calendar of more than 100 Boulder Arts Week events is available at boulderartsweek.org

On the surface, the cutting-edge dancers of 3rd Law Dance/Theater and the 18th century music of Johann Sebastian Bach seem to have little in common.

But for Boulder Bach Festival music director and violinist Zachary Carrettin and 3rd Law artistic director Katie Elliott, the synthesis of their artistic forms resulted in something beautiful neither could have created alone: the show “The Obstinate Pearl,” which runs March 28-29 at The Dairy Center for the Arts to kick off the inaugural Boulder Arts Week, March 28-April 6.

“We really struck the pot of gold in this first collaboration with Boulder Bach Festival and 3rd Law. This is world-class artistically,” says Carrettin, who believes “The Obstinate Pearl” perfectly represents Art Week’s spirit of celebration and collaboration. In fact, his violin performance was sculpted and inspired by 3rd Law’s dancers, and 3rd Law took choreographic inspiration from the historical background of Bach’s music and even the movement of Carrettin’s body as he plays.

“My physicality gets translated into choreography, and their choreography gets translated into the way I play this ancient music,” he says. “All the greatest art happens when people communicate their ideas with one another and their ideas are transformed.”

That same communication and inspiration will be happening on a larger scale throughout Boulder Arts Week, which includes more than 100 events and activities.

“(Boulder Arts Week) is an event that’s going to build a lot of community, both within the arts community and between the arts community and the rest of Boulder,” says project manager Emily Harrison. “It’s about encouraging arts and art organizations to work together … and it’s about filling the major need of awareness of the arts in Boulder.”

Boulder is consistently ranked nationally as an arts destination, most recently as high as eighth in the United States by the Community Foundation’s Trends Report, and the organizers of the inaugural Boulder Arts Week hope to set a tradition of spotlighting the amount and quality of local artists once a year.

“The arts tend to get short shrift in this community. The city spends a lot more on open space, for instance, than it does on the arts,” says Anna Salim, Boulder Arts Week steering committee member and event director for Downtown Boulder Inc.

Downtown Boulder is participating in Boulder Arts Week through its Banner Project, which enlisted 66 local students to produce 51 light-pole banners currently hanging along the Pearl Street Mall and will award a prize for the banner voted People’s Choice. Other visual-arts events include Artists@Work, a series of hands-on demonstrations at Studio 1510; exhibits at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and the CU Art Museum, and two evenings of “Imagine Community!: Art at the Armory” April 3-4.

The NoBo Arts District’s “First Friday” on April 4 will feature special crossover events with visual artists, musicians and even poets, while eTown Hall will host its second annual “Handmade Songs,” a concert of 20 high school songwriters, on April 3.

“The number of activities and events speaks for itself,” Salim says. “Boulder Arts Week is not producing these events. Many were being produced anyway and are simply being included. The sheer number of things going on anyway is striking.”

Most alluring on the Arts Week calendar to organizer Harrison is art happening in unexpected venues, such as the Ptarmigan String Quartet performing at McGuckin Hardware on April 5.

“There’s definitely a hope that people will, whether they plan to or not, encounter art that week,” Harrison says. “The hope is that they are somewhat inspired to integrate the arts into their own lives (and) to support the arts or engage with the arts.”

In terms of support, the community can ensure the continuation of Boulder Arts Week in 2015 by participating in a fundraiser on April 2 at the Boulder Theater that features musician Janet Feder, as well as the premiere of the short film “The Boulder Tattoo Project.”

“To bring all these artists together for one week of activities is an explosion all at once of what’s happening in Boulder all the time,” says Joanna Rotkin, founder and artistic director of TinHOUSE Experimental Dance Theater. Rotkin’s “The Great Green,” winner of the Encore Award at the 2013 Boulder International Fringe Festival, will be performed March 29 at madelife as part of the “Fringe-y Double Feature.” (madelife is a 6,000-square-foot black-box theater, sound studio, collaborative workspace, gallery and store at 2000 21st St.)

“I love this idea of cross-pollinating the arts,” Rotkin says. “It feels like sharing, which is to me why I do art in the first place.”