“We made the dancers carry around heavy objects for an hour and a half,” Zephyr artistic director Michelle Kranicke told me, describing the preparation for Broken Time, the new 40-minute piece she’s created with associate director Emily Stein. She says the four dancers grew frustrated and then sad–one said she was furious at the two choreographers for making them do this, and even angrier when she realized her anger was their point....

The 2001 edition of the Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company’s annual marathon showcase of emerging talent features a slew of local fringe theater and performance companies and solo artists. The Abbie Fest was founded in 1989 to honor the late anarchist author of Woodstock Nation and to commemorate the anniversary of the 1969 Woodstock music festival. “Abbie Hoffman Died for Our Sins XIII” offers a steady flow of entertainment while seeking to foster a communal spirit among performers and audience (which may be enhanced by sleep deprivation)....

In their native China, Betty Xiang and Yang Wei were esteemed soloists with the National Shanghai Orchestra–she on the two-stringed, violinlike erhu, he on the lutelike pipa–but around six years ago, the couple decided to make a fresh start in America. They’ve adapted swiftly to Western idioms, playing alongside guitar, piano, violin, and even Western period instruments (for a collaboration with the Newberry Consort last winter); they’ve transcribed and performed both Bach and the Beatles....

Chef Lisa Futterman is not accustomed to doing one thing at a time. It’s Saturday morning at the Chopping Block, the Lincoln Park culinary shop where she teaches. As the students in her Rustic Italian class wander in (mostly young women, with a few husbands in tow), she peels and deveins a pile of shrimp, measures butter into a small white bowl, washes a stack of celery, and sucks down a spare peach, talking the whole time....

Poet Frank Varela writes smart and strong enough for the page but is also a captivating reader, able to jump into the voice of a character like Crazy Willie for a walk in the land of magic realism. In Varela’s poem “The Seven African Gods,” Willie waits at the entrance to Humboldt Park, falls into step with the author, and offers an explanation for how it came to be that “Puerto Ricans were banished / to Chicago....

I love singing here because it has such a friendly and warm atmosphere. There are always great musicians around. I once did a really goofy New Year’s Eve gig on a little tour train from Marquette to this lodge in the U.P. They hired me and some musicians to play in one of the cars. We didn’t have any electricity, didn’t have anything to sit on, and it was freezing. The train was bumpy and we were bouncing all around, and there I am singing at the top of my lungs–“Gonna Take a Sentimental Journey,” “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” “On the Atchison, Topeka & the Michigan-meea,” “Last Train to Clarksville....

Colette Marino fell in love with house music in 1988, after a fellow eighth grader played DJ at a dance at Pritzker Elementary in Wicker Park. By the time she was a sophomore at Lane Tech, she was a regular at local raves, and simply dancing at them was already old hat. She passed out flyers for party promoters, and at age 15 she even threw one of her own–at her parents’ house while they were out of town....

Now that we’re gearing up for some kind of war, the propaganda that fueled national sentiment during World War II has new resonance. World War II Posters: The Social Influences of Wartime Information, on view through January 26 at the Elmhurst Historical Museum, offers a look at 32 posters on loan from the Oklahoma Museum Association. Classic examples of graphic art with an agenda, the posters urge Americans to buy war bonds, grow victory gardens, and keep their mouths shut....

A golfer on a hot streak at a tournament gives off a messianic vibe. The gallery builds from hole to hole as spectators are swept up in the momentum and excitement, and the roar of the crowd as each putt drops calls out across the course to draw still more fans. Rather than sermons, loaves, and fishes, the golfer deals out great shots, birdies, and eagles, but these are manna from heaven for the golf fan there to see them....

To those of us who like our electronica charismatic and sexy, most “intelligent” dance music isn’t terribly exciting: narcotic repetition, moody soundscapes that transform in trifles, a focus on minutiae that begets impatience. Every once in a while, however, an act like Tennis comes along and blurs the genre lines enough to suck us in. Though Ben Edwards (aka Benge) and Douglas Benford (better known as Si-cut.db) have both established solo careers as musicians and DJs, they’ve received the most attention for this collaboration....

Word of Mouth Under the Influence The two solo shows now appearing at Second City could have been a final exam in Anatomy of Humor for the city’s thousands of students of improv-based comedy. OK, class, what bone connects to the funny bone? Ali Farahnakian’s Word of Mouth is not funny, while Megan Grano’s Under the Influence is. Explain the reasons why. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At first blush, Grano’s show (directed by Abby Sher) looks like a nightmare extension of this romance with the mirror: Enough about me, what do you think about me?...

You Got Engaged?!, Aardvark, at the Performance Loft. Having recently gotten engaged, I looked forward to this “farcical fairy tale.” In his program note, playwright Vincent Bruckert rhapsodizes about his own engagement, claiming that he’d “never spent such joyful time with friends or learned more valuable lessons from family.” Somehow, these feelings and lessons never made it onto the page. Instead we get 75 minutes of hard-core slapstick and the dramatic depth of “Valley Girl 2....

Santiago Papasquiaro, in the Mexican state of Durango, sits at the foot of the Sierra Madre, among tan hills covered by a threadbare blanket of brush. Most of its young men have gone to America, so in the desert afternoons the public squares are empty, except for a few shuffling pensioners shielding their eyes with baseball caps. Medina had been a fireman two years when he and his wife, Xochitl, took their four children to Durango to show them the family’s heritage....

This exhibit, the first in a series focusing on “women painters dealing with abstraction,” includes three paintings by Chicago-area native Caroline Peters–two of them airy, almost lyrical combinations of inspired lines and translucent paint smears. Double Brink centers on a wheellike shape, with charcoal lines for the spokes and washes of acrylic around the rim. The gentle hues and wet-on-wet mixes evoke the delicacy and fragility of a spiderweb. In The Whitest Feet the center is mostly white with very pale yellow, suggesting a kind of freedom: above are curvy black trellis lines that shelter but don’t limit the open space; to the right and below lurk large fields of red and gray....

BOB BROOKMEYER WITH THE DEPAUL UNIVERSITY JAZZ ENSEMBLE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bob Brookmeyer joined Gerry Mulligan’s quartet in 1954–replacing Chet Baker, the jazz world’s equivalent of a matinee idol, in one of its best-known combos. He moved on to play in a high-profile band led by Clark Terry, then joined the brand-new Thad Jones-Mel Lewis orchestra in 1966. And Brookmeyer’s valve trombone, a seldom seen horn with pistons like a trumpet instead of a movable slide, would distinguish him further even if he handled it only half as well: when he picked it up, no one of prominence had used it in jazz since Juan Tizol, who’d joined the Duke Ellington band in 1929....

OT Crew When it comes to per capita rap talent, Great Britain ranks somewhere between North Dakota and Yemen. Brit-rap has seemed moribund since the early 90s, when rave culture, as Simon Reynolds put it, “swallowed hip-hop whole.” The MC was largely relegated to a supporting role–his job was to hype the crowd. Recently, however, a new breed of rappers has jostled its way to the mike, adopting the swagger and thuggish vibe of American hip-hop....

Friday 4/18 – Thursday 4/24 “The results will be amazing, strange, weird, confusing, abstract, and definitely something you’ve never seen before,” says Dexter Bullard, artistic director of the Plasticene theater com-pany, of tonight’s improvisational jam, in which a dozen performers will cre-ate a piece using objects sprung on them at the start of the show. In the past Bullard’s used beanbag chairs, giant rolls of paper, PVC pipes, aquari-um gravel, and plastic drop cloths for inspiration in creating the group’s physical performance pieces....

Anthropomorphize this! The spring issue of the state-produced tourism magazine Illinois Now! describes the Shedd Aquarium’s training program for sharks as “the Harvard of fish schools.” It also claims that another fish, “the exhibition’s brightest star,” was adopted by the Shedd after “his previous owner left him in a bucket on the aquarium’s steps.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Nearly one-third of the judges, 126 of 401, in the Cook County Circuit Court system are now women,” writes Bethany Warner in Illinois Issues (March)....

On the morning of January 30, a 43-year-old inmate went to the infirmary at Dixon Correctional Center complaining of chest pain. When he returned to his housing unit, he told the other prisoners he’d been treated with Tylenol and Tums. That evening, he collapsed in the doorway of his cell. Holland, then 43, was diagnosed with esophageal varices, dilated blood vessels that can occur when the scar tissue of a damaged liver disrupts the flow of blood, which then backs up in the vein connecting the liver to the other abdominal organs....

Widely hailed in the late 90s as the harbinger of a new north-south fusion in American music, the 34-year-old saxophonist David Sanchez has refused to take the easy path. On his 1998 album, Obsesion (Columbia), he assembled love songs not just from his native Puerto Rico but from throughout Latin America, and played them atop strings and horns. Sounds like a recipe for treacle, but the sweetened arrangements have a lemony aftertaste, a little tart and provocative, that makes them hardly fit fare for smooth-jazz fans....