Billy Siegenfeld, artistic director of the ten-year-old Jump Rhythm Jazz Project, makes the point that you gotta go down to go up. During a rehearsal he asks his dancers to dig their feet into the floor–“Dig down into your roots,” he says. And he bemoans the fact that so many dancers are trained to lift their weight, pulling up thighs, chests, and heads in a way that interferes with the body’s natural polyrhythms....

Huge, fuzzy streaks of color traverse five-foot-high sheets of paper in Rosemarie Fiore’s seven “Good-Time Mix Machine: Scrambler Drawing” pieces at Bodybuilder & Sportsman. But for all their bold, colorful beauty they’re strangely unemotional, perhaps because Fiore made them using an amusement park ride, the Scrambler, installed in a warehouse for the purpose. She fastened a sprayer at the bottom of one of the Scrambler’s rotating seats and placed a huge sheet of paper under the ride; these pieces are cut from that sheet....

Facets Cinematheque says this Ulrich Seidl documentary about three Austrian models “invades the personal space of these public women,” but it’s more that their personalities invade our public space: the film’s primary image is of them primping for the camera as if it were a mirror. As he made clear with the recent release of his first drama, Dog Days, Seidl doesn’t differentiate between documentary and fiction: in both he seeks out nonactors and gets them to improvise their parts, believing that their fictionalization is more revealing than any objective record....

Polish Movie Springtime, a festival of contemporary Polish films presented by the Society for Arts, runs Friday, March 16, through Sunday, March 25. Screenings will be at the Copernicus Center, 5216 W. Lawrence, and the Society for Arts, 1112 N. Milwaukee. Tickets are $9. For more information call 773-486-9612. SATURDAY, MARCH 17 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Love and Basketball SUNDAY, MARCH 18...

Sammy Dee and fellow producer/DJ Zip are Pantytec, the German duo whose Perlon label has been behind some of the best club records of the past couple years. Perlon specializes in “microhouse,” a style (its name coined by the Wire, natch) that combines the minimalist crinkle-crackle of artists like Oval and the voluptuous warmth of Chicago house in a spacious, slinky sound that’s both severe and inviting. Three of Pantytec’s tracks made it onto last year’s superb Superlongevity, a mixed double-CD label showcase: “You Are So 99,” loaded with cut-up vocal phrases and frisky snare a la Herbert or Todd Edwards; “Instant Orient,” which floats bits of what sounds like thumb piano, water-glass tones run through a phaser, and an abbreviated female moan past a deep foregrounded bass groove; and the aptly titled “Doubledip Uuh…,” whose liquefied low end and male and female moans give context to the catchphrase “Dip-dip-dip-dip-diiiip....

You’re looking at a blurry photo scanned onto a Web site. A boy is standing next to a tall, bearded man. The kid wears giant eyeglasses, like welder’s goggles, and a Pittsburgh Steelers jacket. He’s grinning like there’s no place else he’d rather be. The man is sitting, leaning toward the youngster, and smiling in a practiced way. He’s wearing a western-style plaid shirt with a wide collar and, just maybe, pearl-finish buttons....

Top Ten Albums of 2000 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 2 JASON MORAN Facing Left (Blue Note) There are many reasons to love the second album by pianist Jason Moran–the most obvious of which is that he’s a technically dazzling player. But he’s also a flexible one: though he covers a vast amount of territory, none of his odd choices ever seems like a stretch....

The Shape of Things *** (A must-see) Directed and written by Neil LaBute With Rachel Weisz, Paul Rudd, Frederick Weller, and Gretchen Mol. LaBute’s previous film, Possession, offered two tender love stories, one in the past and one in the present, both framed by a love of literature. The Shape of Things–initially written as a play during a break in the production of Possession, its dialectical opposite in every respect–offers one brutal tale about art framed by two interlocking failed-love stories....

In 1992, at age 22, the Swiss-born Emmanuel Pahud was appointed principal flutist of the Berlin Philharmonic, a coveted post that rarely goes to such a youngster. He was already well-known in France–he’d trained at the Paris Conservatory in the nimble, light-toned style suitable for the music of the impressionists as well as Les Six. (Mathieu Dufour, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s principal flute, was a fellow torchbearer.) But performing Mahler and Richard Strauss with this quintessentially Germanic orchestra, Pahud developed a heavier intonation and learned to make dramatic gestures....

Saxophonists who play two horns show up as often as the crosstown bus, but usually the second sax is the soprano. It’s rarer to find a reedist adept at the music’s traditional mainstays, tenor and alto, and rarer still to find a saxist who can swing with authority on both. Maybe it was a 50s thing: baseball had its greatest switch-hitter, Mickey Mantle, and jazz listeners could thrill to the exploits of both Sonny Stitt and Frank Wess....

An original Max Ernst vanished from the hospital where I worked in the summer of 1999. I hadn’t examined it closely before it disappeared, but I remembered a silver painted wood frame around a small abstract with a red circle in its center and the unmistakable signature in the lower-right corner. I’m not sure what shocked me most: the fact that a valuable work of art had hung for years in an ailing institution, its theft, or the lack of reaction when I reported its disappearance....

Bailiwick Repertory and the Lesbian Theatre Initiative have teamed up to present the first edition of what they hope will be an annual multidisciplinary lesbian-centered fest showcasing drama, stage combat, poetry, comedy, and music by artists from around the country as well as Chicago. The event runs through May 4 at the Bailiwick Arts Center, 1229 W. Belmont. Individual ticket prices are shown below; a festival pass costs $50. In addition to the shows, the festival sponsors workshops on performance techniques taught by Cin Salach and Bev Spangler Saturdays at noon; admission to these is $10 or “pay what you can” at the door....

Paul McComas founded Rock Against Depression in 1995, hoping “to both honor the work and legacy of Kurt Cobain and educate his young fans about how to avoid his outcome.” A writer, performance artist, and musician, McComas and his band–which had until then specialized in punk originals and covers of old X songs–learned a bunch of Nirvana tunes, rechristened themselves “Lithium,” and booked a midwest tour of community centers and other all-ages venues at which McComas planned to talk to the crowd about depression and suicide in between their renditions of “Rape Me” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit....

Giuseppi Verdi’s A Masked Ball is based on a real historical event far removed from its New England setting, says Babs Lieberman of the Lyric Opera lecture corps. “The event was the assassination of Sweden’s King Gustavus III in 1792 at a masked ball that took place at the Stockholm Opera House, which he had built.” Besides being an opera fan (not alone grounds for regicide), Gustavus had riled his nobles by reducing their power....

“I’ve always wanted to write about the wine world,” says Sharon Evans. “It’s usually presented as a bunch of snobs, and I know it’s not.” Before she and her husband, John Ragir, founded Live Bait Theater in 1987, Evans worked for two years as a sommelier, a job she fell into while performing monologues around town and waiting tables at the Paradise Cafe in Lakeview. One day the restaurant’s sommelier told her he was leaving and suggested she take his place....

This second feature by Jia Zhang-ke (Pickpocket), which made the rounds of a few festivals in 2000 and has been very hard to see ever since (this is its first Chicago screening), is one of the most impressive Chinese films I’ve ever seen. Its theme is the great theme of Chinese cinema, the discovery of history, which links such otherwise disparate masterpieces as The Blue Kite, Blush, Actress, The Puppet Master, and A Brighter Summer Day....

Tenor saxophonist George Adams died in 1992, and reclusive Norwegian tenor and soprano player Jan Garbarek rarely makes albums or tours anymore. So of the three tenor saxists who emerged in the 70s to spin distinct styles out of the legacy of John Coltrane, only Billy Harper still has any sort of a presence. But what a presence it is: he’s a Texas-born tornado given to intense but lyrical improvisations. Chicagoans have had more chances than most to hear Harper, at least since the late 90s, when trumpeter Malachi Thompson started bringing him in from New York for major engagements....

Chicago’s 23rd annual lesbian and gay film festival continues Friday through Thursday, November 5 through 11. Unless otherwise noted, screenings are $9 at Landmark’s Century Centre, $7 at Chicago Filmmakers, and $6 for all matinees (until 5 PM). Advance tickets can be purchased from 10 to 6 weekdays and noon to 5 Saturday at Chicago Filmmakers, 5243 N. Clark, or anytime at www.reelingfilmfestival.org; same-day tickets are available only at the venue box office 30 minutes prior to first screening of the day....

Sometimes innovations are so thoroughly absorbed into an art that the innovator fades into the background, but 15 years after John Cassavetes died, he’s achieved near-mythic status. Few people forget their first Cassavetes film; his work confuses and confounds, but even those who don’t like it can find it difficult to shake off. Recently the Criterion Collection released a lavish box of eight DVDs collecting five of the director’s features: Shadows (1959), Faces (1968), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), and Opening Night (1977)....

NO!art and the Aesthetics of Doom NO!art was raw, aggressive, even “ugly”; by contrast Rauschenberg and Lichtenstein, critic Harold Rosenberg wrote in 1974, were “housetrained kittens.” Haunted by the Holocaust in the past and fear of the bomb in the present, these artists sought to jar viewers out of complacency. Only one of the three founders is alive today. Boris Lurie was exhibiting in co-op galleries on East Tenth Street, he told me, when artists Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher approached him because they liked his work....