Mordine & Company Dance Theatre However, dance improvisation is not as easy as dancers would like it to be. There are material restrictions: the dancers usually have to see each other, for example, but are naturally always changing direction. Such fundamental choreographic devices as moving in unison are impossible. There’s also an element of physical danger: if musicians make mistakes, the usual consequence is only an ugly sound, but if dancers make mistakes they can get hurt....

martin.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I recently returned from a trip to Russia and came away marveling at the subways in Saint Petersburg and Moscow. I could wax rhapsodic for pages about how great the subways there are–aesthetically beautiful, functional, practical, and cheap (less than 40 cents a ride). But all you need to know is this: I would be embarrassed to take a Russian on the CTA....

By Jeffrey Felshman Schaffer’s specialty is the physiology of rhinoceros reproduction, and no one in the world knows more about it than she does. She’s written or cowritten close to 100 professional articles on the subject. She’s given numerous presentations, ranging from “Overview of Procedures and Results of Semen Collection From Ambulatory Rhinoceroses” (at the Milwaukee zoo in 1988) to “Gross Anatomy of Reproductive Structures and Their Ultrasonographic Images in the Rhinoceros” (at the First International Symposium on Physiology and Ethology of Wild and Zoo Animals, in Berlin in 1996)....

JULIANA HATFIELD 10/2, double door I’ve had it in for Juliana Hatfield since 1993, when a roommate put “My Sister” on infinite repeat for about a week. Hatfield’s awed squeaking about how cool said sibling was for taking her to an early Del Fuegos gig sounded more like the beginning of the end than any platinum Nirvana record ever did. Still, I have to admit that the former Blake Baby’s long-awaited fourth solo album, Bed (Zoe), with its wise songs about celebrity, narcissism, trendiness, and secret affairs in other time zones, shows a self-awareness (I draw the line at “maturity”) that indicates she’s in it for the long haul....

THE INVISIBLE PEOPLE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Falling somewhere between leisure suits and the song “Feelings” in the popular imagination, mime is an art we can no longer see for the cliches–walking against the wind, pushing imaginary walls, and other such bad copies of Marcel Marceau. It takes performers as original as Gregg Goldston and C. Nicholas Johnson, the brains behind the Ohio-based Goldston Mime Foundation, to reveal just how elegant, intelligent, and engaging this stigmatized form can be....

Not that many decades ago high art and kitsch were thought of as irreconcilable opposites. Now, however, it almost seems as if art imitating kitsch were the norm among young artists. The less interesting work in this vein simply replicates the superficial effects of mass-culture objects, but the best of it, dating back at least to pop art but also including the panel paintings of young New Yorker Lisa Krivacka, manages to negotiate a subtle balance between distance and belief....

What is up with those little umbrellas in exotic drinks? Who started it and why? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No, no, the SDSAB informed me, the tiki is the carved idol. Lest you get the wrong idea, the tiki cult isn’t some weird Santeria thing involving goat sacrifice but a retro appreciation of the tiki bar, also known as a Polynesian bar, which specializes in island decor, exotic cuisine, and tropical drinks topped with cocktail parasols and other fancy paraphernalia....

30 Frames a Second: The WTO in Seattle If I had to review Rustin Thomp-son’s video documentary 30 Frames a Second: The WTO in Seattle in only three words, I’d say it’s honest, energizing agitprop. Some readers may regard this as an oxymoron, but it’s one account of the Seattle events I’ve been waiting for, receiving its world premiere at the Chicago Underground Film Festival this Sunday at 1:30 PM. Yet the information it has to convey is almost entirely of the you-are-there variety–there’s no genuine analysis....

By Michael Miner Last week Coffey struck gold mining the discontent in Schiller’s ward. He began his August 12 column: “State law prohibits convicted felony sex offenders from loitering within 500 feet of a school or school property. But that law is consistently ignored and unenforced in the case of two schools in the Uptown neighborhood of Ald. Helen Shiller’s 46th Ward, which is home to an uncommonly high proportion of paroled sex offenders…”...

AIR Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve never had much use for 70s kitsch, but somehow Air–the French duo of Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoit Dunckel–has appropriated some of the era’s most forgettable elements and put them back to work without resorting to revivalism. Although its debut album, Moon Safari (Source), is something of a letdown after the string of marvelous instrumental singles compiled on last year’s EP Premiers Symptomes, it delivers a frothy dose of undeniable soft-focus pop pleasure....

There’s a big wave out there, and we just saw the first speck of foam. Chicago attorney Larry Zanger reports in the October Chicago Computer Guide that a Michigan grocery store has filed what may be the first year 2000 lawsuit, “claiming it incurred substantial losses because its [computerized] cash registers froze whenever a customer used a credit card expiring after 1999.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rx: One big white-bread pill....

Cabaret By Albert Williams Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One thing’s for sure: this isn’t your mother’s Cabaret. Or Harold Prince’s or Bob Fosse’s, though it couldn’t exist without them. Thirty seasons after it first played Chicago–also at the Shubert, in the fall of 1968–this brilliant musical-theater landmark has been radically reworked. The provocative result–dark, stark, spare, unabashedly sexual yet almost never erotic–is the creation of an imaginative, risk-taking British director, Sam Mendes, working in collaboration with choreographer and codirector Rob Marshall, musical supervisor Patrick Vaccariello, and the show’s authors, playwright Joe Masteroff and songwriters John Kander and Fred Ebb....

Talking Pictures: Scott MacDonald on Cinema 16 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » During its penultimate season I was lucky enough to be a member of the groundbreaking New York film society Cinema 16, where I got my first taste of Robert Bresson and Jacques Rivette. Run by Amos and Marcia Vogel between 1946 and 1963, Cinema 16 was special because it presented all kinds of “marginal” works that no one else was showing at the time....

degnen.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not having any sources at the Sun-Times–or the Reader for that matter–I don’t know what exactly went down. Nor do I particularly care. But what I do know is that reporters switch beats all the time–some even of their own choosing. It has happened everywhere, even at the Reader. Since Frank Youngwerth no longer is subjecting readers to his pedestrian writing in Spot Check, is it fair for us to assume that he has been demoted?...

By Cheever Griffin He’s a big man, six foot three maybe, with a soft frame and an even softer smile. His gray hair, dyed a sort of dull chestnut, lies neatly combed over his fleshy face, which is dominated by large, almost bulging blue-gray eyes. It is the eyes, suddenly distant and deep, that announce where he has gone. Lester Perry is a 60-year-old sick ex-con who, unless his fortunes change dramatically, will live out the rest of his days in a step-away-from-the-street flophouse....

To the editors, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » However, you don’t have to break the traffic laws to do this. I frequently ride with the Evanston Bicycle Club in the city and suburbs, and we always obey traffic lights, signal our turns, and ride with the traffic, not against it. The main reason that I obey traffic laws is for my own survival. Car drivers expect to see other cars, but they don’t expect to see bicycles....

Friday 6/25 – Thursday 7/1 Synchronized swimming, first popularized in 40s movies by Esther Williams, received an infusion of attitude when Aerosmith incorporated it into its set at the 1997 Billboard Music Awards. Tonight 25 swimmers from Wright College’s Center for Lifelong Learning will show off their moves in a water ballet called Gone Fishin’. It’s at 7 at the Wright College north campus pool, 4300 N. Narragansett. Tickets are $3; call 773-481-8812....

CHRONIC AND MORE: FILMS BY JENNIFER REEVES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chronic, the longest film on this program of six of Jennifer Reeves’s seven completed films, is a highly personal, somewhat autobiographical 38-minute meditation on “the suicidal mind.” Near the beginning multiple images from a moving car echo an earlier film about suicide, Stan Brakhage’s Anticipation of the Night, in their depiction of an alienating daily world; Chronic also ends with a shot that recalls the immolation that ends Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly....

Digging for Gold Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The stretch of Devon near its intersection with Western is ground zero for Chicago’s sizable Indian population. Among the restaurants, bakeries, butcher shops, and fabric and electronics stores that line the sidewalks is an abundance of video stores, most of which also sell music from India. The one with the largest variety is Bombay Video (2634 W....

By Ben Joravsky The play opens in 1959, when Dinah’s already a star. But for her sisters the story begins in Alabama, where their parents, Alice and Ollie Jones, were raised. “Dinah was the only one of us born in Alabama,” says Dukes. “That was in 1924. Her real name is Ruthie Lee Jones. She was named after our grandfather Rufus.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Dukes was born, in 1944, Ruth was 20....