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Add the esotericism of modern dance to the obscurity of rituals from another culture and you get a sense of the mystery inherent in this troupe’s work. Founders Salia Sanou and Seydou Boro are both natives of the West African country of Burkina Faso, where they’re now based, but they’ve worked in France, notably at the National Center of Choreography in Montpellier. And the evening-length work they’re showing here, Figninto, intriguingly combines the expressiveness of modern dance with the exuberance and athleticism of African dance....

This two-month showcase of Chicago sketch comedy features more than 30 local ensembles–some well established, some new to the scene–representing a remarkable range of styles and viewpoints, with two or three groups sharing the bill at each performance according to the schedule below. Participating troupes include Stir-Friday Night!, Annoyance Productions, Weaselicious, Brick, ÁSalsation!, GayCo Productions, the WNEP Theater, and many others; the festival is presented by Posin’ at the Bar. Sketch Fest runs through March 2 at the Theatre Building, 1225 W....

THE MATICS 8/10, UNDERGROUND LOUNGE Let me get this part out of the way: the Matics’ debut, Ignition–the first non-Pezzati release by Jettison Music, the label run by former Naked Raygun front man Jeff Pezzati–is a tightly focused, dead-on tuneful tornado of punk charging across the plains. But the cover letter that came with it goes a long way in explaining why neither the Matics nor Pezzati’s own current band, the Bomb, nor any of the less direct followers of Naked Raygun have half the hair on their balls that Raygun did circa 1985....

Sybilization, at the Playground. Why would you turn an intermediate-level improv class into a full-length show and charge admission? True, the seats will probably be filled by the performers’ friends, family, and coworkers, but I’m not sure who else would want to see this evening of labored comedy. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A variation on the Harold, the Sybil is a solo improvisation method created by performer Andy Eninger, and it’s no surprise that he excels at it....

By Ben Joravsky Politicians have known about this problem since 1990, when Joanne Alter, then a candidate for Cook County clerk, wrote about it in a study. In 1998 Cook County clerk David Orr, an independent Democrat who lives in Rogers Park, finally decided to address the problem by updating the county’s vote-counting technology. He says he had two choices. He could either buy a high-tech optical-scan system, which allows voters to feed special paper ballots into a reader that counts their votes....

TOBIAS DELIUS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On two albums so far, the Amsterdam-based tenor saxophonist Tobias Delius has shown a preference for presenting his quartet’s repertoire in two- and three-song medleys. But he doesn’t seem to be doing it to make the material go down easier. As in other Dutch groups, such as the ICP Orchestra and the Clusone Trio–which both feature Han Bennink, also the drummer in Delius’s band–the practice of splicing and skipping around from tune to tune is an essential characteristic of the music....

I’d like to tell you about a city where people don’t attack things they don’t understand or argue about things before they’ve found out the facts. A city where people respect people simply because they’re people and don’t take advantage of each other just because they can. But since it doesn’t exist, I’m going to tell you about Santa Fe, New Mexico, and what happened there on March 17. I passed the turnoff to my house, and I kept going....

Barbra Streisand put a brand on Funny Girl that makes the Fanny Brice role daunting for any other performer. Heidi Kettenring, who has the job in the Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire production that opened this week, isn’t letting that rain on her parade. Though the influence of the diva is unmistakable, Kettenring, a more spontaneous actor than Streisand, with a voice that’s brassier on the high notes, grabs the part and lays claim to it within her first few minutes onstage....

Friday 10/17 – Thursday 10/23 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “It was kind of a no-brainer,” says artist and promoter Myke Adams about this weekend’s Camp CHGO festival of music, film, and art. “A lot of bands are going to be on tour and headed to New York for [the CMJ music conference] next week, and we decided to put together an event for bands that need a show in Chicago and could hang out here for the weekend....

If foxy young Weezer fans are going to keep whining about the psychic cost of casual sex, the least we eavesdropping elders should demand is plenty of chewy melodrama and big guitars. On Cursive’s fourth full-length, The Ugly Organ (Saddle Creek), front man Tim Kasher skimps on neither. Writing with a blogger’s mix of exhibitionism and solipsism, Kasher parlayed his failed marriage into a concept album, Domestica, in 2000; he allays any suspicions that the experience resolved the issue with Organ’s opening lines: “And now, we proudly present / Songs perverse and songs of lament / A couple of hymns of confession / And songs that recognize our sick obsessions....

Now Again (New West) is the first new Flatlanders release in three decades–and you could argue that in some ways it’s really the group’s debut. Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely, and Butch Hancock met in Lubbock, Texas, cut the Flatlanders’ first album in Nashville in 1972, and then settled in Austin. That record, originally released in a limited run on eight-track tape, quickly became a prized flea-market find–it wasn’t widely available in the States until 1990, when Rounder reissued it as More a Legend Than a Band....

This touring program of films drawn from the New York and London versions of the Human Rights Film Festival runs Friday through Thursday, May 9 through 15. Screenings will be at Facets Cinematheque. Tickets are $7, $5 for members; for more information call 773-281-4114. Films marked with an * are highly recommended. AUGUST Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Avi Mograbi’s 2002 video flirts with self-indulgence while using black humor to portray Israel in a state of schizophrenic collapse on the eve of the current intifada....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I hadn’t been feeling well all that Saturday morning. I sat sullen as a vulture and shivering because my nearly naked breast, where golden feathers once grew, was now covered with only sparse gray down. When the doorbell rang, I swiveled a bit, just enough to see a red-haired woman bounce into the house, rolling a suitcase behind her....

For a bharata natyam dancer to hold her leg high is as shocking to an Eastern classicist as a ballet dancer standing on her head would be to a Western traditionalist. That’s partly the result of the Indian form’s complicated history: though it’s derived from a 3,000-year-old treatise, the Natya Shastra, it’s been widely practiced only in the last few centuries–and onstage only since the 1930s–as an expression of national pride in response to colonial rule....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to an August story from the Associated Press, Mormon communities in Utah are providing a market for bowdlerized videos of Hollywood movies. At CleanFlicks, a trio of video outlets near Provo, Ray Lines rents tapes of major-studio releases from which the sex, cursing, nudity, and extreme violence have been deleted, and in Kaysville, David Schenk’s Clean Cut Video club has 62 edited tapes for members to check out....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In September in Perth, Scotland, Edwin Young was ordered to pay Yvonne Rennie over $9,000 in damages for a 1998 traffic accident in which he crashed his car into hers while suffering an epileptic seizure. Part of the compensation was for Rennie’s minor injuries and subsequent “fear of driving,” but over $5,000 was awarded because of her mild post-traumatic stress–brought on, she claims, because Young’s seizure continued after he was removed from his car, and his contorted face made her fear he was dying of a heart attack....

When director Antonio Franceschi approached 26th Ward alderman Billy Ocasio early last summer for help shooting on location in and around Humboldt Park, the alderman needed some convincing. Filmmakers who’d shot in the neighborhood before had more often than not contributed to its image as an impoverished wasteland of hustlers, heroin addicts, and homeless people. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So Franceschi sat down with the alderman and went over the script with him....

The Philanderer, ShawChicago, at Chicago Cultural Center. For this refreshingly personal 1893 curiosity George Bernard Shaw drew as much on his diary as on his intellectual insights into the war between the sexes. Leonard Charteris, the title character, finds himself trapped between two adorers who both pretend to model themselves on Ibsen’s “new woman.” One proves to be a merely conventional “womanly woman” who uses her wiles to gain her ends while the other, a true mistress of her fate, is too free to marry....

Mark Burger steps onto the roof of his office building just as the clouds blow away. “Perfect timing,” he says, tiny suns now glittering on his shades. Solar power has long been touted as the energy of the future. Our ultimate furnace is available 12 hours a day on average, and all its energy is free to anyone who wants to buy or build a collector. Burger’s mission is to get those facts through the heads of power-company executives and auto engineers who’d like to keep burning fossil fuels until they’ve incinerated the last lump of coal and the last drop of oil....

Denis Johnson was well on his way to cult fame by the time the desperadoes and articulate lowlifes that populate his fiction attracted the attention of Hollywood. Over the course of the 90s, in addition to publishing novels and short stories, he worked on a half-dozen screenplays, only one of which (an adaptation of Jim Thompson’s A Swell-Looking Babe) was produced. Although his star was rising, he was frustrated. Best of Chicago voting is live now....