Wildhorse Cinema & Arts this month plans to host a doodle day, a dress-up contest and a night of live music with Camille DiTrani as the local theater and arts complex charts a new path.

“What you’ll see from Wildhorse is more activities around movies, more community gatherings and more ways to engage with one another,” said Dagny McKinley, executive director of Undiscovered Earth, the organization that purchased the movie theater in February.

“We realize that you can have a movie experience from home where you’re sitting and watching things by yourself, but what is special about Steamboat is when the community comes together for a shared reason, and that is what we’re hoping to create at Wildhorse,” added McKinley.

The local cinema continues to offer new movie releases, but this month plans to start offering more  community-oriented events.

That effort starts 4-9 p.m. Wednesday when the venue, at 655 Marketplace Plaza, will offer the first of those events — Doodle Day — as part of Social Prescribing Day.

Doodle Day is a unique community event that offers an open, creative space where people can drop in and doodle.

“March 19 is National Social Prescribing Day, which is a whole focus around medicine shifting from just dispensing pills to looking at more organic ways of healing,” McKinley said. “We wanted to offer this Doodle Day so you could come in and just let your mind relax, come together with some other people in the community, and spend five or 10 minutes, or even a couple of hours, just doodling, and letting everything in your body just calm down.”

McKinley noted that arts help with mental health, whether it is moving during dance, which increases serotonin and dopamine levels in participants, or doodling, which has been shown to relax the mind and calm the nervous system.

“We know that the arts are a tool in helping with mental health,” she said.

For Undiscovered Earth, the event also marks a new direction for the longtime movie cinema that is hoping to become a community arts hub.

The cinema continues to show new releases, as it looks for ways to generate more community engagement and expands its role with performing arts and visual arts offerings. The group has added a stage to Take5, a former screening room that has been transformed to a speakeasy that will host its first live music performance when Camille DiTrani & Friends plays jazz at the opening at 7 p.m. March 27.

McKinley said Wildhorse will also work to blend community events with several upcoming movie releases with hopes of creating excitement at the Wildhorse.

Those events will include a princess and prince dress-up contest from 4 -9 p.m. Friday that will coincide with the premiere of the new Disney live action musical “Snow White.” She is also hoping to have an event for the movie “Becoming Led Zeppelin,” which also opens Friday — but she expects the reception to fall some time after Friday’s Steamboat Springs premiere.

Wildhorse is also offering many other arts, performance and community events as it explores its role in the community. Sensory-friendly screenings of movies for children once a month are planned, and McKinley seeks community input for other events or uses for the space.

Her hope is that in upcoming months, residents of Steamboat Springs will see community-minded events bloom at the new arts center that promises to blend art, movies and community outreach.

“We just hosted the Keep Routt Wild photography contest and were able show a reel of all the photographs in one of the theaters on the big screen. Then we had a private reception in our new speakeasy that was amazing, and we’ve had auditions for ‘The Sound of Music’ with the Steamboat Springs Actors Studio,” McKinley said. “It’s just been a fun way to see how the community wants to use the space in different ways — and we’re always open to working with people and making their events work for them.”