Posts

Chance Dance Fest Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bob Eisen’s dances have texts but no subtexts. They’re filled with a sense of purpose, but their busy surfaces reveal no clear aim. His most recent piece looks like a classic farce, with its four performers narrowly avoiding collisions as they slam in and out of the Link’s Hall closets, march from here to there, pause to touch a particular spot on the floor with their palms, write intently on a yellow pad, or change clothes (at one point Eisen dons a full-body snowmobile suit–pity the poor man if this weather holds)....

“While we [Chicago Public Schools] do get some very good teachers, it’s more luck than the result of any kind of focused effort,” says Janet Froetscher of the financial research and advisory committee, an arm of the civic committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, which hopes to change that. “A lot has happened here in the last couple of years, and it can be very exciting for a teacher here now, but we don’t do a good job of telling anyone why they should teach here, and then we don’t make it easy....

September is the kindest month. A month when electric bills are going down and gas bills have not yet begun to go up. A month when mosquitoes are dying off but butterflies are still with us. A time when migrant songbirds enliven every backyard and parkway and the last flowers of summer are in full and glorious bloom. The bobolinks that nest on the prairie have already left for Argentina, but a few savanna sparrows and eastern meadowlarks were still around....

For the Love of Christie But that doesn’t matter to Harry Young, the 44-year-old president of the Lou Christie International Fan Club. He’s been following the singer’s every move since 1977, when he began publishing Lightning Strikes, the club’s twice-a-year newsletter. Young has also penned detailed liner notes for five reissues of Christie’s recordings. Backstage after a 1982 concert at the Holiday Star Theatre in Merrillville, Christie pointed to his tall and studious-looking fan and said, “This guy knows me better than I do....

Toshio Shibata Given an open-ended commission from the MCA to create a body of work in America, why did Shibata select this charged subject? Quite simply, he explained at his show’s recent opening, dams were familiar from his work in Japan. The photographer both sidestepped and invited a political reading by explaining that he prefers not to “narrow” the significance of the images. And certainly some leeway should be given for translation from one culture to another....

This annual showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe began as part of the Bucktown Arts Fest; now it’s produced by the Curious Theatre Branch. Taking its name from surrealist painter Salvador Dali’s use of the term “rhinocerontic” (it means real big), the Rhino Fest, now in its 11th year, features shows by such local notables as Theater for the Age of Gold, the Billy Goat Experiment, Blair Thomas, Antonio Sacre (now based in LA, but returning for the festival), John Musial, Michael K....

The Housemaid Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Based on a true story, this wildly expressive 1960 film begins a welcome series of six rarely seen works by the extravagant and eccentric Korean director Kim Ki-young. The wife of a music teacher, coveting a larger home, begins to work long hours, and the couple hires a housemaid; the music teacher’s one-night stand with the maid disrupts his marriage and leads to ever-more-convoluted plot twists....

Music listings are compiled by LAURA KOPEN and RENALDO MIGALDI (classical, fairs and festivals) from information available Tuesday. We advise calling ahead for confirmation. Please send listings information, in-cluding a phone number for use by the public, to Reader Music Listings, 11 E. Illinois, Chicago 60611, or send a fax to 312-828-9926, or send E-mail to musiclistings@chicagoreader.com. TED ALIOTA & THE GROOVE MACHINE Benefit for the I & M Canal Restoration Fund....

WILD CHILD BUTLER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He’s been gigging all over the country since the 1950s, but blues harpist George “Wild Child” Butler hasn’t budged an inch from the style he learned growing up in rural Alabama–where, he says, he made his first harmonica out of an old tobacco can half filled with gravel. On last year’s Lickin’ Gravy (M.C.), a reissue of a 1976 recording previously released on Rooster in ’89, Butler’s singing swings from a ballsy bull roar to a lecherous gurgle, its rawness tempered only slightly by a throaty vibrato, and his cadences grind like a shake dancer’s hips; his lyrics (“I got to lick gravy / Your meat’s too high to buy”) and titles (“Funky Butt Lover”) likewise fall on the far side of discreet....

60 FT DOLLS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As part of an impressive explosion of Welsh rock music that’s also given us Super Furry Animals and Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, the 60 Ft Dolls amply demonstrate the relative value of geographic isolation. While indirectly a product of Great Britain’s fickle hit factory, on their full-length debut, The Big 3 (DGC), this power trio makes music wonderfully free of stale alt-rock signifiers, and it would be silly not to consider the band’s homeland–the perceived backwater of the UK–part of the reason....

BARBARA MANNING Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though it’s based on a simple pun, Barbara Manning’s 20-minute epic “The Arsonist Story,” which kicks off her new 1212 (Matador), is perhaps the strongest work yet from the San Francisco singer-songwriter. The theme–alienation–is one of Manning’s old favorites, but here she moves beyond introspection into storytelling, examining a youth gone wrong from several points of view, including that of his parents (hence the play on “arson” and “our son”)....

Chicago Opera Theater Both eras have passed, and now we’re suffering through the age of the director, as directors seek to impose their worldviews and ideas on classics that are frequently at odds with them. To Jean-Pierre Ponnelle all was revolution, to Patrice Chereau all is Marxism and the unfortunate by-products of capitalism, to David and Christopher Alden all is decadence. To make their points such directors twist the intent of composers and librettists beyond recognition and force singers to perform in ways that flatter neither their voices nor the music....

Jose Luis Cuevas: Mexican artist Jose Luis Cuevas has been well-known since the 1950s for his depictions of society’s outcasts; essays on his work describe his figures as “grotesque,” “shocking,” or “horrifying.” But this exhibition at Aldo Castillo Gallery, his first in Chicago, suggests that the disquiet or discomfort his works produce is due not so much to his distortions of the human figure as to the fact that they’re all looking at us: we move through the gallery followed by countless eyes....

Penn & Teller At 2:10 Soames, or a perfectly credible impostor, shows up–and though Teller is typically a debunker of this kind of thing, he writes, “Surely this is not a mere living person. He is either the specter of a nineteenth-century poet on his way to damnation or an actor putting the finishing touches on a great literary magic trick. Not to stare would be rude.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

INTO THE WOODS, Porchlight Theatre, at the Athenaeum Theatre. Exuberantly acted and beautifully sung, Porchlight’s latest foray into the oeuvre of Stephen Sondheim is nonetheless a disappointing follow-up to its superb revival of his Merrily We Roll Along. The subtlety and emotional honesty of that production give way here to a broad comic approach that seems inspired by the “Fractured Fairy Tales” of Rocky and Bullwinkle fame. The jokey style is fun at first, and cartoon fairy tales might seem apt models for Into the Woods since Sondheim and playwright James Lapine weave together the stories of Rapunzel, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and Jack the Giant Killer....

The Hart of London Jack Chambers’s 80-minute film The Hart of London (1970), being presented this Saturday by Kino-Eye Cinema at the Chicago Cultural Center, is hardly ever screened; in fact, when I polled eleven local critics, curators, filmmakers, and academics interested in experimental film, only three of them had even seen it. Some viewers consider it a masterpiece, some give it mixed reviews, and some are merely baffled. I fell into the third category when I first saw the film, finding it disorganized and confusing, but on each successive viewing I’ve loved it....

MICHELLE WILLSON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Michelle Willson’s voice sounded a bit too wounded and worldly for the jump ‘n’ jive boilerplate of Evil Gal Blues and So Emotional, her mid-90s releases on Bullseye Blues. But with her latest Bullseye disc, Tryin’ to Make a Little Love, the Bostonian finds a life after swing, showcasing originals and contributions from some of the classiest pop songwriters around, including Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham (the lovely country-gospel “Life Rolls On”), and Mac Rebennack and the late Doc Pomus (the brooding funk ballad “Responsibility”)....

Cristina Iglesias at Gallery 312, through December 17 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It is this paradox, created by a fusion of opposites–organic lyricism and man-made materials, invitation and rebuff–that’s the crux of Iglesias’s art. A Basque who lives near Madrid, she’s acquired an international reputation at 41; the present exhibit is an intelligently edited version of a show organized by and first presented at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City....

Donna Blue Lachman has made a career of playing strong women, women whose lives are held up as models, women who inspire cultlike veneration–like Frida Kahlo, who overcame a horribly disfiguring streetcar accident and an abusive marriage to Diego Rivera to become a great artist, and Rosa Luxemburg, who sacrificed everything, including her life, for the cause of socialism in pre-Weimar Germany. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Best known today for her vast collection of modern art, mostly housed in her palazzo in Venice, Guggenheim had her heroic moments....

Since I started working at home a few months ago, the down side of that particular American dream has hit me pretty hard: there is no such thing as time off. There are phones and computers just about anywhere I try to vacation, and that means telecommuting, baby. But last year my friends Douglas and Lisa, freelance writers living in New York, found just the place to really get their ya-yas out: Black Rock City, a temporary metropolis built annually on a dried-up prehistoric lake in the Black Rock Desert of northwestern Nevada, hundreds of miles away from E-mail access, in the shadow of a 40-foot stick man on fire....