A nyone who’s jumped on a bed or plunged off a high-dive platform or had an airborne dream understands the wish to fly. But unlike most of us, choreographer Elizabeth Streb believes that wish can come true–and sets out to prove it. Recipient of a 1997 MacArthur “genius” grant, the choreographer puts the performers in her amazing company, Streb, in motion using trampolines, bungee cords, wires hanging from the ceiling, and a “flying machine” that suspends the dancer on a rotating arm; her performers fill the air with their grunts and yells, and mikes pick up the sounds of their bodies hitting various surfaces....

Ten Years on a Hot Tin Roof: A Free Associates Retrospective William Luce, author of biographical plays about the likes of Emily Dickinson and John Barrymore, penned this one-woman show about the gothic novelist. Liz Cloud stars in the Free Associates’ production. “Susan Gaspar’s direction and . . . Cloud’s performance emphasize the practical facts of Brontë’s isolation . . . to set off their picture of a lonely, passionate woman who might well welcome company....

Chaim Potok’s 1967 novel, published the same year as the Six-Day War, deals in part with the rifts among Jews over Zionism. And Aaron Posner’s adaptation–developed in collaboration with Potok and presented by Steppenwolf’s youth-oriented Arts Exchange program–provides an impassioned overview of those issues. But Posner focuses more on Brooklyn in the 1940s and the friendship between Danny Saunders, a Hasidic student with a firebrand rabbi for a father, and the Orthodox but more worldly Reuven Malter....

If you passed the rear entrance to the Harold Washington Library Center on one of several days in May 2003 you might have seen a group of people, including Nancy Watrous, forming what she calls “a conga line for carrying films to car trunks.” They’d volunteered to move the library’s collection of more than 5,000 16-millimeter films to a warehouse on LaSalle Street, the first home of the Chicago Film Archives....

Rock, Pop, etc. DARK STAR ORCHESTRA 18 & over. Sun 12/29, 8:30 PM, the Vic, 3145 N. Sheffield. 773-472-0449 or 312-559-1212. VAL MINDEL & EMILY MILLER Free concert and holiday sing-along. Sun 12/22, 2 PM, Millennium Park, 55 N. Michigan. 312-742-7529. POINT BREAKERS, ALL NATURAL, HALL OF FAME, USUAL SUSPECTZ, IOMOS, DJ TIMBUCK2 perform at “The Grand Finale” open mike hosted by Malik Yusef. Sat 12/21, 7 PM, Promontory Point Park, 5491 S....

The Goat or Who Is Sylvia? Ancient peoples used to sacrifice their livestock–and sometimes their firstborn–to stimulate fertility. Edward Albee’s The Play About the Baby and The Goat or Who Is Sylvia? revolve around the slaughter of an animal or an infant, but the murders in these plays are meant to help the characters–and the audience–confront emotional sterility and spiritual emptiness. Both works enact rituals of death and rebirth in which comfortable marriages are exposed as shams and the partners are forced to reinvent their lives....

On Saturday, February 24, I went to see Dan Izzo’s play, Cubicle Rats, which came so highly recommended by your theater critic Brian Nemtusak [Section Two, February 23]. Mr. Nemtusak commented on both the “virtuoso performers” and Izzo’s talent. However, he neglected to mention the nature of the humor that peppered the entire production, and it would have been much better for me had I known what I was about to be subjected to....

And You Sang to Me, Bailiwick Repertory. Steve Lovett’s unambitious but amusing play relies on two familiar ideas: opposites attract, and weddings bring out an envious desire for emotional connection. He works so hard to prove the first, in fact, that we begin to suspect the play grew out of a writing exercise: put two people who wouldn’t normally get along in a room together. A critic and an artist struggle to keep their fizzling 14-year relationship alive, an uptight antiques dealer is angered and aroused by a handsome young man he sees as a country hick, and a serious art lover and his jingle-writer buddy consider becoming more than just friends....

This festival of films and videos by black artists from around the world runs Friday, August 1, through Thursday, August 14, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State. Tickets are $8, $4 for Film Center members, and $3 for SAIC students. For further information, call 312-846-2800. Films marked with an * are highly recommended; unless otherwise noted, all films will be projected in 35-millimeter. Following is the schedule through August 7; a complete schedule is available online at www....

Films by Chris Welsby Born in England in 1948, Welsby grew up mostly in rural areas; his family had a large garden with trees and a stream when he was very young, he told me, and when he was about ten they moved to the southern coast, where “all of a sudden there were river estuaries to explore.” Welsby began building boats and eventually raced sailboats. (Later he saw “the task of sailing from A to B, which you can only do by working with the winds and tides, as a metaphor for a film....

Vote for me and I’ll do what the Pope says. That’s apparently how some Catholic church authorities expect politicians of their faith to campaign, judging from a U.S. Catholic report (April). A January 16 Vatican document, “Doctrinal Note of Some Questions Regarding the Participation of Catholics in Political Life,” calls on all Catholics “to respect and protect the rights of the human embryo, safeguard the family, protect children, oppose attempts to legally equate cohabitation or homosexual unions with marriage, promote religious freedom, work against ‘modern forms of slavery’ including drug addiction and prostitution, work for economic justice, and promote peace....

Presented by Facets Cinematheque and the French Cultural Services in Chicago, the seventh annual Festival of New French Cinema runs Friday through Thursday, Gerard Bitton and Michel Munz’s spirited romp (2002) stars Jean-Pierre Darroussin as an unsuccessful salesman of beauty products who alienates his long-suffering wife (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) with his spending. The couple agree to separate as the husband’s boss develops a passion for the wife; then the husband wins 10 million euros in the lottery and, eager to conceal it from the divorce lawyer, maintains a workingman’s facade while furtively living it up....

On New Year’s Day, shortly before noon, Kathy Schubert’s bicycle slid across the metal grating on the LaSalle Street bridge and she crashed to the ground. Ever since, she’s been trying to force the city to pave over or fill in the gratings on its major bridges. She’s passionate about a lot of things related to biking. She helped form the Chicago Cycling Club, and she offers biking advice on two Web sites, one of which is devoted to carrying a dog on a bike....

By Robert Heuer “You look like you should be running this place,” remarked one cell mate, a convicted burglar. “What you in for?” The two-and-a-half-week trial, in the spring of 1997, provided a first-ever glimpse at the inner workings of the powerful ISTHA. Prosecutors called 20 witnesses, including top officials from the Du Page County Republican Party. But their testimony was often confusing and sometimes contradictory. Most of the witnesses danced around the fact that awarding contracts to the politically connected is normal tollway business....

Presented by IsraFest Foundation, Inc., the Israel Film Festival runs Saturday through Thursday, April 28 through May 3, at Landmark’s Century Centre, 2828 N. Clark. Tickets for most programs are $9, $6 for seniors; weekday shows before 6 PM are $6. Festival passes, good for five screenings, not including special events, are $35. For more information call 773-248-7744 or 877-966-5566. Films marked with a 4 are highly recommended. Clean Sweep...

Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and 20th-Century Mexican Art The problem of audience lies at the heart of one of modernism’s essential contradictions. Artists convinced that representations had power and consequences sought to destroy old ways of thinking by rearranging the visual world, hoping to be part of a new world built by workers and peasants for workers and peasants. They needed to speak directly to the public. In the words of a 1922 manifesto published by a coalition of technical workers, painters, and sculptors in Mexico City: “We repudiate so-called easel art and all such art which springs from ultra-intellectual circles, for it is essentially aristocratic....

Every time I come here I’m reminded of the time I had one of my greatest brain movements. A brain movement is what happens when you enter the ladies’ loo after having consumed several pints and get a great idea. There are many places all over the city where I have brain movements. Anyway, we’re here one weekend sitting having the old pints and I go to the washroom and I have a brain movement....

The 14th annual Polish Film Festival in America, produced by the Society for Arts, continues Friday, November 15, through Saturday, November 30. Screenings are at the Society for Arts, 1112 N. Milwaukee. Tickets are $7; passes, available for $40 (five screenings) and $80 (twelve screenings), are good for all programs. For more information call 773-486-9612. The schedule for November 15 through 21 follows; a complete schedule through November 30 is available on-line at www....

ARRIVALS 1/31, FIRESIDE BOWL On its second album, Exsenator Orange (Thick), this south-side quartet serves up cold meat-and-potatoes Chicago punk. Singer-guitarists Isaac Thotz and Dave Merriman spit out melodies a good deal more complex than the saccharine hooks of whatever pop punkers are hot on MTV this week. But the Arrivals lack the precision and attention to detail of their forebears Naked Raygun (or even the Smoking Popes), so their instrumental attack quickly subsides into a dull buzz-ing throb....

The only disappointing part of this hour-long show is hearing the words “the end.” Barrel of Monkeys–a high-energy troupe of adults–adapts short, often absurd stories written by Chicago Public School students for the stage. The songs and sketches are inventive and enthusiastically presented, and the company members draw on a wide range of performance styles. Every sketch is enhanced by Jonathan Mastro’s music direction, and even after four years as director, Halena Kays keeps finding creative ways to showcase her ensemble members’ talents....