It’s hard to believe Shu Shubat and Ollie Seay’s troupe is 15 years old. Now, according to artistic director Shubat, the action-drumming group is returning to its roots. The first time I saw her and Seay perform, back in the late 80s as part of MoMing’s “Dance for $1.98” series, she played guitar, as I recall, while he and two other percussionists jumped around. Several years later the troupe moved into full-blown theatrical narratives with pieces like the “drum opera” Avalanch Ranch; at about that time Shubat and Bryn Magnus started working on Blood Lotus, which as originally conceived was supposed to have double-sided costumes, film projections, and drums lit from within by candles and shooting fire (via propane tanks)....

In April 1865, two decades before Jens Jensen began to make his mark on Chicago’s parklands, Scottish landscape gardener John Blair arrived from Rockford to create a horticultural display for Chicago’s Sanitary Fair, which raised money for wounded Union soldiers. The display, housed in a 370-foot-long structure at Michigan and Washington, included evergreens, shrubs, flowers, a stream, and a cedar bridge. After the exhibit’s successful debut–“Nature and art vie with each other, and each, surprisingly beautiful, lend their charms to the other’s beauty,” gushed the Chicago Times–Blair bought a home in Oak Park, and is believed to have planted on the adjacent lot what is now one of the oldest ginkgo trees in the United States....

Local Record Roundup Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » LONBERG-HOLM/ROEBKE/KOTCHE A Valentine for Fred Katz (Atavistic) Cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm is best known as a free improviser and abstract composer. But with this project–a tribute to the first great jazz cellist that was initially put together for the 2000 Empty Bottle jazz festival–he swings with an ornate lyricism. (Katz was an integral member of the gentle, highly stylized west-coast quintet led by Chico Hamilton in the 50s and a longtime collaborator of local word-jazz maestro Ken Nordine....

Wryly incisive throughout his career, perpetually perturbed singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III has never shied from loneliness and loss–and there’s plenty of both to go around on the new Last Man on Earth (Red House), which displays his keen sensitivity to the realities and fears of middle age. Wainwright turned 55 this year, and he’s become modern music’s answer to John Updike. He closes this short, sweet album with “Homeless,” a song that addresses his mother’s 1997 death: “When you were alive / I was never alone / Somewhere in the world / There was something called home....

“You’re trying to listen to each other,” artistic director Eduardo Vilaro tells his dancer and a pianist during a rehearsal. “Don’t. When we first started, the piece was really jagged. I liked that.” Vilaro’s comments are unusual but perhaps not surprising given that his new solo–Mujer Llorando (“Weeping Woman”)–was inspired by Picasso’s cubist painting of the same name. He tells composer-pianist Corbett Lunsford to “play independently” from the motions of dancer Kristin Mitchell–and she should try to forget about the music, he says....

Luna Negra artistic director Eduardo Vilaro says he played a sort of trick on the two dancers who performed Late…After Siesta, premiered during this year’s “Duets for My Valentine” show: he had them rehearse the dance very seriously. They were shocked when people laughed during the performance, but clearly Vilaro understood how to get the emotional ambiguity he wanted: he knew the dancers’ complete commitment to their roles would make the couple’s dysfunctional interactions both funny and horrifying....

NADJA SALERNO-SONNENBERG WITH SERGIO AND ODAIR ASSAD Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Roman-born violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg started out, back in 1981, she clashed with the stereotype of a female prodigy: instead of a demure young thing with a graceful, melodious instrumental voice, she was forceful and passionate, favoring a punkish getup onstage. Despite her technical brilliance, she was pigeonholed as a show-off; not every conductor would tolerate her swagger, and her detractors claimed that her flamboyance limited her repertoire....

“I go right here,” said Linda, pointing between two knuckles. Her whole hand was swollen. “Can I hit it myself?” Linda is a black 45-year-old heroin addict who’s been shooting up since she was 15. Scott is a white 35-year-old sociology professor on sabbatical from DePaul University. Last year he took phlebotomy training and learned to administer vaccinations and give shots to treat anaphylactic shock in preparation for a study on a hepatitis B vaccine, which is what led him to Linda....

Tanya Saracho’s world shifted in 2001 during an improv exercise with the members of Teatro Luna. “We were doing all these workshops about mothers for our second show, and I was working with Erika Martinez,” she says. “I would say, ‘My mother has the most beautiful hands–she has never worked.’ And Erika would say something like, ‘My mother has the roughest hands–she has worked every day of her life.’” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Lead Stories Thanks to an airport metal detector, an unidentified woman from Regina, Saskatchewan, discovered the source of the abdominal pains that had plagued her since she had stomach surgery in June. The detector beeped even though no metal could be found on her; X rays subsequently revealed that a 12-inch steel surgical retractor had been left inside her by the surgeon. (A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in January estimated that 1,500 items are left inside surgery patients in the U....

Every year Noble Fool Theatricals comes up with a scant story line for this Christmas program of songs, dances, and comedy sketches revolving around Gina Oswald, star of an over-the-top holiday special, and her long-suffering Zeitgeist Zingers. This time they’re trying to land a gig in Alaska, but the smooth crooner looking for a partner there is also considering Gina’s older, raunchier sister, Roxy. Patricia Musker–hilarious once again as the ambitious lounge singer with no consciousness of her own excesses–plays both roles, which requires some arguments to take place offstage and a couple of quick costume changes....

There were a lot of wedding bands on a lot of left hands at Las Vegas’s Tropicana Hotel. Thousands of married couples from dozens of states were strolling in and out of the hotel’s casino and convention center. They were saying hello to people they hadn’t seen since last year’s convention, comparing tans, and gathering in even-numbered clumps to gossip and catch up. Most of the couples in the hotel were holding hands or engaged in some form of PDA....

Local quartet Town and Country established a signature sound on their self-titled 1998 debut, weaving lulling, hypnotic patterns from entirely acoustic instrumentation: Ben Vida’s folksy fingerpicked guitar and laconic brass, Jim Dorling’s wheezing harmonium, and the double basses of Liz Payne and Josh Abrams. On two subsequent records they adorned their music with bells, celeste, piano, and mbira without changing its basic feel, but on their latest, C’mon–which comes out this week on Thrill Jockey–they’ve fundamentally transformed their sonic cross section simply by replacing one instrument with another....

One of my all-time favorites, this beautiful 12-minute short by Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep, The Glass Shield), made for French TV in 1995, is a jazz parable about locating common roots in contemporary Watts and one of those rare movies in which jazz forms directly influence film narrative. The slender plot involves a Good Samaritan and local griot (Ayuko Babu), who serves as poetic narrator, trying to raise money from his ghetto neighbors for a young mother who’s about to be evicted, and each person he goes to see registers like a separate solo in a 12-bar blues....

Last Saturday night 80-odd people gathered at the LaSalle Theatre on Irving Park near Cicero to watch Just Imagine (1930), a long-forgotten Hollywood musical set in the futuristic year of 1980. With elaborate art deco sets and sci-fi design, it plays like a Busby Berkeley remake of Metropolis starring the Ritz Brothers. The young lovers meet cute when the dashing J-21 pulls up alongside lovely LN-18 in his winged hovercraft. Sadly, the government marriage tribunal awards her to another man who’s better advantaged, so the hero lodges an appeal and tries to distinguish himself by piloting an experimental rocket ship to Mars....

Lake Michigan isn’t the only body of water around. The Northeastern Illinois Regional Water Trails Plan has mapped nearly 500 miles of often-forgotten canoe- and kayak-friendly waterways–and in the last two years, local governments have built 23 new launch sites. This weekend, 1,000 canoes will race 191/2 miles down the Des Plaines River in the 45th annual Des Plaines River Canoe Marathon, the most spectacular of eight events this month and next that will showcase the trails....

Friday 2/28 – Thursday 3/6 1 SATURDAY Black labor activists had a tough time during the civil rights movement, says Bob Bruno, cochair of the Chicago Center for Working Class Studies. While many fought for (and won) equal rights inside the union, “outside the workplace, organizations promoting civil rights saw the labor movement as being part of the problem.” How the Great Migration affected labor in Chicago–and vice versa–will be the focus of today’s conference, Labor’s History in the Black Metropolis....

The tenth annual Chicago Underground Film Festival continues Friday through Tuesday, August 29 through September 2, at Landmark’s Century Centre. Tickets are $9, festival passes $30 (for five screenings) and $100 (for all screenings). For more information call 866-468-3401. Films marked with an * are highly recommended. For Those About to Rock Shot on video and film over seven years, American filmmaker Vivek Bald’s absorbing examination of the Asian Underground movement in English rock in the 90s combines interview and performance footage of all the key players–Talvin Singh, Fun-Da-Mental, Cornershop, Joi, and Asian Dub Foundation....

The past creeps closer. “Is it an architectural gem?” asks architect Leonard Koroski, referring to Michelle Clark Middle School, at 5500 W. Harrison, a glass-walled modernist creation that has suffered from poor maintenance since being built in the early 1970s. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But it has a [thoughtful] plan with an interior courtyard, and we took the attitude of respecting it for its modernist tradition” (from the May issue of Focus, the newsletter of the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects)....

Send in the clowns–but keep the kids away. This three-week festival of clowning features adult-oriented shows by local and visiting artists, along with a late-night cabaret, a “clown jam,” and workshops. Running March 29 through April 15 and featuring two to three shows a night, it’s the first edition of what organizers hope will be an annual event. All performances take place at the Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division. Admission is $10 per show (except where noted otherwise below); a four-admission pass costs $30....