“Chicago is in my opinion one of the best African-American arts communities in the country,” says Jackie Taylor, artistic director of the Black Ensemble Theater, in the January issue of the Joyce Foundation’s “Work in Progress.” “We’ve been very free to create and explore here, because we don’t have the kind of expense or critic involvement they have in New York. So we’ve been able to take risks, and our theater survives and thrives....

Compagnie Marie Chouinard Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Perhaps most dancers and choreographers fetishize the body, but Canadian Marie Chouinard’s approach is radically fetishistic, whether she’s painting breasts blue or attaching nails to the body of the half-human creature in L’apres-midi d’un faune (seen here in 1995, the last time her company was in Chicago). The 11 dances in “Les solos 1978-1998,” a retrospective of her solo works performed by company members, all make the body strange and thereby magical; by extension human consciousness also comes to seem bizarre....

By Ben Joravsky She certainly didn’t think she had to worry about unpaid bills. “All those years I was paying the mortgage,” she says. “I paid it off in the early part of 1996. I’ve never been behind. I never got a notice of any kind.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But the form letter, from a mortgage company in Park Ridge, changed all that....

KURT WESTERBERG Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The youngish academic composer Kurt Westerberg is something of a throwback among his peers. In a field that’s leaning heavily toward eclecticism, he’s got a predilection for abstraction–a mode of expression regarded as radical around the turn of the century, popular with the intellectual elite at mid-century, and a bit passe now. It doesn’t seem to have hindered Westerberg, a professor at DePaul since 1986 and a busy accompanist at new-music venues around town....

Given the familiarity and even, at times, predictability of the elements on view here–a multiracial high school from hell in Queens, a siege staged by six alienated students after a favorite teacher is fired, a wounded cop (Forest Whitaker) held hostage–this is mainly lively and compelling stuff, thanks to fresh, well-defined characters and the writing and direction of Craig Bolotin, who’s worked on everything from Ridley Scott’s Black Rain to Desperately Seeking Susan to TV’s Miami Vice....

MARIA MULDAUR Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On her new album, Southland of the Heart (Telarc), Maria Muldaur turns up the heat on the swampy, sultry Americana she explored with 1996’s Fanning the Flames–and you’ll get no complaints from this corner. Muldaur remains a well-traveled musical vagabond and a wonderful tour guide. She traverses the territory from jazz to bluegrass, from southern gospel churches to Smoky Mountain shanties, and she seems as comfy on Tin Pan Alley as in a south-side Chicago blues club–her sinuous honey-vinegar voice is her open-ended ticket....

MARIAN McPARTLAND & JUDY ROBERTS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That this concert won’t air on McPartland’s long-running NPR program, Piano Jazz, means that it will include little (if any) of the delightful and informative banter in which McPartland engages her radio guests. But this rare event will feature the Grande Dame of American Jazz and a rather swell dame of Chicago piano performing together on two Baldwins, in the evening’s third and final act (after each has played unaccompanied for about half an hour)....

MARTHA LORIN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sitting pretty somewhere between jazz and cabaret, Martha Lorin enjoys the casual swing of the former and the dramatic license of the latter. She’s loosely structured her often affecting fourth album, Come Walk With Me (Southport), around a dedication to her daughter, who grew up fatherless after Lorin’s husband was shot down in Vietnam. In the liner notes she writes that she chose the songs to illustrate the range of experiences she’s had since his death–and that she tried to write the title track in her husband’s voice, imagining it as a letter from a father to his child....

Neo-Futurists’ Tenth Anniversary Benefit Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The beauty of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, and the reason it’s survived for so long, is that the show is designed to be a living entity, changing week by week. I’m not just talking about routine shifts in the cast or variations in the performance–every week new short plays are written and rotated in, and older, less successful ones are rotated out....

PAUL BURCH/LONESOME BOB Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Although BR5-49 is the only alternative outfit in Nashville that machine honchos will give the time of day, Music City’s underground country scene has amazing depth. And the 1996 compilation Nashville: The Other Side of the Alley–on Chicago’s Bloodshot label–has turned out to be a prophetic guide to the cream of that crop. Three of the comp’s top acts, all of which subsequently released albums on Chicago’s Checkered Past label, make a rare local appearance this weekend....

Nuclear Family And with new drywall came a new sense of artistic courage. For despite the extraordinary skill on display in White Trash Wedding, a show so well crafted that only the overused comparison to a gem is appropriate, Factory didn’t seem to be aiming much higher than the groin. The company remained, in the words of Factory member Sean Abley, the House of Screaming Equals Funny. But with his new play Nuclear Family, Abley has rocketed his company into the stratosphere of serious theater, and has done so without sacrificing the juvenile excess that has made Factory’s best work so intoxicating....

Hey, Faggot: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Do not label me “bitter”–that’s too easy. What I need from you is an answer to a simple question. I know that not even Dan Savage can turn back time. I mean, if Cher can’t, you can’t–but I ask you, Dan, is there any way you can unsleep with someone? Is it possible to reverse the process?...

Hey, Faggot: Were you just “tidying up” when you came across your boyfriend’s mondo-disgusto scrapbook or were you… snooping? I suspect the latter, as I doubt your boyfriend–however proud he is of those semen stains–would leave his scrapbook sitting on a coffee table in the living room, in plain view on his nightstand, or next to the toilet for his dump-taking guests to flip through. So before I offer you my analysis of your boyfriend’s peculiar hobby, I want to upbraid you for snooping....

Is business taking the “show” out of your “show business”? If you’re a Chicago theater, chances are you struggle to keep the bottom line from thwarting your artistic aspirations. But has your moral compass gone south anyway? Find out if your theater’s survival is worth any sacrifice with this handy quiz! Each question is based on a real situation faced by a local theater or organization in 1997. C. After a token occupancy, sell your first building to the highest bidder, who will tear it down and replace it with condominiums....

Four years ago five Chicago police staged a narcotics raid at an apartment building near the University of Chicago. Seventeen minutes after the raid began, two officers were wounded and the tenant of one of the apartments was dead. Honor, however, may be another matter. At about 2:15 PM, Dignan, Peck, Tyler, and Woullard proceeded directly to Richard’s front door while Officer Wise approached the rear. All five officers carried radios, but only Dignan’s could communicate outside the team....

JILL DAWSON 8/4, ABBEY PUB Here’s something you don’t see every day: in the liner notes to her debut CD, First Time Around, local singer-songwriter Dawson thanks Andersen Consulting and Oprah Winfrey. After seeing an Oprah segment about “living one’s dreams,” her bio elaborates, Dawson gave up the corporate life and turned to music like she’d always wanted. A corny story, yes, and musically she colors inside the lines like a good little girl, but as a mature woman with a bit of experience in moving between worlds she brings a different inflection to the usual tales of hope mildly fulfilled or mildly denied....

By Michael Miner The Tribune hedged its bets by nominating Kamin twice: for a prize in criticism but also in explanatory journalism. The heart of each entry was the lakefront series. Pulitzer administrator Seymour Topping says that when the Pulitzer juries met in New York in early March, jurors from both criticism and explanatory had the same complaint. “They said, ‘This is a very, very worthy entry, but it doesn’t fit neatly into either category....

WILLIE PICKENS TRIO WITH NICHOLAS PAYTON & KURT ELLING Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This year’s “Jazz Christmas” concert by Willie Pickens will be the Chicago pianist’s fourth, but his new album, A Jazz Christmas (Southport), is his first foray into the minefield of holiday theme recordings. Like the upcoming gig, the record features young trumpet star Nicholas Payton, along with Pickens regulars Larry Gray on bass and Robert Shy on drums, in a rough-and-tumble take on the usual repertoire, from the fast, flamenco-tinged “Little Drummer Boy” to the speeding modernist harmonies Pickens plucks from “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen....

ART ENSEMBLE OF CHICAGO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Christened in 1967, the flagship of the AACM this year sailed into its fourth decade, albeit with fewer scheduled departures: no longer the primary occupation of its members, the AEC reassembles but several times each year, and by my reckoning, it has played its hometown only twice this decade. When reedists Roscoe Mitchell and Joseph Jarman, trumpeter Lester Bowie, and bassist Malachi Favors first formed the Art Ensemble–“of Chicago” came soon after, courtesy of a Paris concert promoter–I doubt they expected to be together in 1997, but the full-force percussion of drummer Famoudou Don Moye, who joined in 1969, transformed the music and undoubtedly helped insure the band’s longevity....

Bandwagon Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Four guys in Raleigh form a band and go on the road in a saga that takes great pains to avoid the mockumentary approach–in fact, writer-director John Schultz’s biggest concession to that overdone mode is to insert the titles of the fictional band’s songs against a black background between shots of Kevin Corrigan, Lee Holmes, Matthew Hennessey, and Steve Parlavecchio working out the numbers....