Ancient West Mexico: Art of the Unknown Past By Fred Camper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of the 262 ancient objects on view–there are also four modern works that show these cultures’ influence on 20th-century artists like Henry Moore and Diego Rivera–almost all are aesthetically superb, refined in form and detail in ways unfamiliar to most of us. Running concurrently is a show of some 60 objects from the same cultures at Douglas Dawson....
H.T. Chen & Dancers Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In one variation on multicultural approaches, Asian-American choreographer H.T. Chen uses modern dance to depict the experiences of Chinese immigrants to this country over the last 150 years, conducting research and interviews to obtain his material. (Chen was born in Shanghai and raised in Taiwan, then moved to New York, where his company is based, to attend Juilliard and New York University....
Lion in the Streets, Concrete Stage Company, at Profiles Theatre. Unrelenting in its pace and emotional intensity, Judith Thompson’s surreal nightmare about real and imagined demons in an unnamed Canadian city is a grueling workout. Concrete Stage director Jordan Atkins proves himself up to the task, giving the interactions between Isobel–the ghost of a murdered child–and the desperate souls she encounters a leonine ferocity. Backed by percussionist Joshua A. Pierce’s propulsive score on a bleak, graffiti-covered stage, the actors blaze through Isobel’s futile attempts to find comfort from misfits with stories almost as miserable as hers–a cancer patient who longs to die, a young rape victim who finds herself victimized once again, a woman with cerebral palsy whose frank accounts of her sexual escapades lead a shocked journalist to beat her senseless, a mother whose desperate self-humiliation cannot prevent her husband’s shameless infidelity....
Ev’ry Time I Feel the Spirit By Kelly Kleiman Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These two plays address the toll taken on the people whose lives highlighted civil rights injustices, people in conflict not only with a society that wouldn’t give them their due but with their own dreams of living free of their group identity. It wasn’t enough that Nathaniel Cole was a wonderful pianist and singer–he had to fit into the role assigned African-American musicians in midcentury America, assuming a comic title (“Nat King Cole,” like Old King Cole) and an unfaltering smile....
Hey, Faggot: You wanna have adventures–cheat on wife, have three-ways–but you’re uncomfortable having your adventures with anyone who’s had too many adventures of her own (a professional or a girl who’s “been around the block”). Isn’t that a bit of a double standard? Just because you’re in bed with a whore doesn’t mean you can’t “play the game safe.” You can protect yourself from professionals by refusing to pay. A pro usually asks for cash up front....
The PA announcer asked fans to direct their attention to the mound for the ceremonial first pitch, but it had to be one of the most widely ignored such ceremonies in baseball history. All eyes were directed toward the pitcher’s mound all right, but it was the mound in the Cubs’ bull pen, where Kerry Wood was warming up. After missing all of last season recovering from so-called Tommy John ligament-replacement surgery on his right elbow, Wood was returning to action....
GAZA STRIPPERS, DRAGONS 10/13, DOUBLE DOOR It takes Rick Sims a little longer to work up a full head of steam these days–his old band the Didjits put out seven records in as many years–but once he’s ready to blow, look out. Laced Candy (Man’s Ruin), the 1998 debut from Sims’s current quartet, the Gaza Strippers, was a frenzied four-on-the-floor gem, full of catchy tunes driven by Sims’s trademark speed-demon guitar....
Stubborn Stains The result is The Housekeeper’s Diary, a self-published collection of biting, ironic poems about “one working-class girl’s experiences” cleaning up after the rich. “I didn’t take the job to write a book of poems–I took it ’cause I needed the money,” says Alvarado. “But the things I experienced went too deep for me to ignore.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » She answered the ad and found herself talking to a headhunter who, as Alvarado puts it, “does nothing but place domestic staff in the homes of wealthy people....
By Michael Miner “The first week of this school year,” Cummings told me in a recent letter, “I received a call from Marshall’s principal, Donald Pittman, whose first words were ‘501.’ I asked him if he was selling jeans now. He said that 501 is the size of Marshall’s freshman class. They were expecting 250, but Keepin’ It Real caused such a sensation across the West Side that they registered twice as many freshmen as they expected....
Wrecking Ball Blues With the remaining buildings from the beloved market area looming behind them like ghosts, speaker after speaker battered the University of Illinois at Chicago. The school was practicing “ethnic cleansing”; it was a “rogue elephant,” a “destroyer of history.” And the signs kept going up. “Save Chicago’s Ellis Island”; “Heritage Is America.” One speaker called the gathered “the feisty core that refused to go away.” Pilsen activists warned that the university’s plans to redevelop Maxwell Street were intricately tied in with the city’s plans to do the same to Pilsen....
When choreographer Ginger Farley decided to make a dance about her car breaking down, she asked for a funky rock ‘n’ roll score from musical director Cameron Pfiffner. A jazz musician, he wasn’t too enthused–until he started getting into the sounds of power tools at his day job at a scenery shop. Now, for the raucous Autobody, the 58 Group musicians play power tools as they stroll among the dancers. Sounds dangerous to me, but then the kind of fluid collaboration that characterizes this troupe of seven dancers and seven musicians–it’s their raison d’etre–will always be a bit risky....
Aida Northlight Theatre Given these conditions, what makes a musical work is consistency of vision and purpose–which Dinah Was has and Aida doesn’t. Every aspect of Dinah Was clicks with every other aspect, giving it coherence and momentum. The live-wire performance of leading lady E. Faye Butler is bolstered by the intelligently integrated efforts of director David Petrarca, playwright Oliver Goldstick, musical supervisor Jason Robert Brown (who arranged the show’s score of classic jazz and pop tunes), choreographer George Faison, and designers Michael Yeargan (sets), Paul Tazewell (costumes), Robert Perry (lights), and Rob Milburn (sound)....
Alvin Youngblood Hart/Keb’ Mo’ Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Anyone intrigued by the trend of young African-American bluesmen returning to the music’s acoustic roots will probably want to check out both of these shows, which occur within days of each other at House of Blues. Alvin Youngblood Hart, a dreadlocked urban sophisticate out of Oakland, California, was already an aficionado of traditional blues artists like Robert Johnson before he graduated from high school....
Shower With Zhu Xu, Pu Cun Xin, Jiang Wu, He Zheng, Zhang Jin Hao, Lao Lin, and Lao Wu. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Editors who depend on studio ads aren’t our only cultural commissars. Chicago Tonight, for instance, doesn’t fit that category, yet its desire to genuflect toward southern California was certainly evident both times I appeared on the show. The first time was during the Oscar hoopla in 1994; the second was the day after Christmas two years later, when I agreed to appear only if I’d be allowed to speak not just about studio releases but about a couple of independent movies, one of them foreign: Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man and Andre Techine’s Thieves....
This festival of films and videos by black artists from around the world continues Friday through Sunday, August 27 through 29, at the Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson. Tickets are $7, $3 for Film Center members. For more information call 312-443-3737. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Roberto Bangura’s 1997 first feature captures the turmoil of adolescence and the social chaos of Britain in the early 70s....
CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It hasn’t been a good year for Chicago Symphony Orchestra maestro Daniel Barenboim. Hilary and Jackie, a semibiographical movie about his late wife and her sister, made him look like a two-timing cad; in early summer Britain’s Simon Rattle beat him out for the top post at the Berlin Philharmonic; only weeks later, the Tribune gave his entire tenure with the CSO a thumbs-down–and a chorus of readers briskly seconded it....
“The threat of gentrification on the supply of affordable housing and the expansion of Latino communities is exaggerated,” writes Pierre de Vise in a recent report, “Chicago’s Changing Housing Inventory, 1991 to 1995,” published by the City Club’s Committee on Population and Demographics. “If indeed the white gentry and working class Latinos are engaged in a zero sum game, there is no contest. Between 1991 and 1995, Chicago lost 86,600 whites and gained 112,800 Latinos…....
Friday 1/30 – Thursday 2/5 31 SATURDAY A drawing of a small, horizontal female stick figure and a large male stick figure on top of her, with the title Daddy Fucking Me scrawled across the page, is one of the items in Raised by Wolves: Photographs and Documents of Runaways, a multimedia exhibit assembled by San Francisco photographer Jim Goldberg. It was drawn by one of the many teens Goldberg befriended be-tween 1968 and 1993 while working on a book about young runaways in San Francisco and Los Angeles....
Dear Jack Helbig: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Let’s be fair, Jack. It wasn’t the production. Think about it. David Zak’s highly intelligent, imaginative directing? An energetic and creative cast? Joe Wade’s hauntingly moody set? None of the above, Jack. It wasn’t the play. You haven’t had much of an opportunity to see my work, grow familiar with some of the quirks of my writing....
GRAZYNA AUGUSCIK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Polish-born Grazyna Auguscik is a jazz rarity–a vocalist who, by dint of temperament and training, refuses to rely on mere sentimentality. Her lustrous voice is not overtly “warm”; she makes her passion obvious, but not in the obvious ways. She’s the musical equivalent of a distance runner, with a muscular, concentrated style and no excess fat or wasted movement....
