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Friday 1/21 – Thursday 1/27 Irish theater darling Joe Dowling directs Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Dowling says his version–which partly takes place atop a giant motorized electric-blue flower–was inspired by the works of Hieronymus Bosch. Preview performances begin tonight at 7:30 at the CST, 800 E. Grand. Tickets are $23; call 312-595-5600. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 22 SATURDAY Two authorities on another genius of the arts hit town today for a symposium called An Afternoon’s Insight…Mozart....

Eighth Blackbird Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some reviewers of recent concerts by the new-music ensemble Eighth Blackbird have compared them to the Kronos Quartet. Yes, the members of this sextet–graduates of Oberlin and the University of Cincinnati–have a casual collegiate look and wildly eclectic tastes, but a better comparison might be the University of Chicago-affiliated Contemporary Chamber Players. Like the CCP, Eighth Blackbird is an eager advocate of new currents from academia, and the variety of instruments its members play–flute, clarinet, violin, viola, cello, percussion, and keyboard–allows them to take on a broad repertoire....

EL-P, MR. LIF, CANNIBAL OX Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I make my own grain and go against it,” rapped El-P on Company Flow’s Funcrusher Plus. It was no hollow boast either: on the 1997 album, one of the unqualified classics of underground hip-hop, El-P and fellow MC Bigg Jus packed a breathless barrage of tongue-twisting verbiage with off-kilter internal rhymes, obscure hip-hop references, and bizarre imagery....

Brandon Wetherbee says he learned everything he needed to know about publishing when he edited the Fenwick High School newspaper, the Wick, in 2000. But he also quickly learned that he didn’t like the Oak Park school’s administration telling him what to do. “I hated having to write about local town crap and not being able to write about stuff that interested me,” says Wetherbee, who’s now a sophomore at DePaul....

Five new films by established masters of the avant-garde, three of which are so finely made that they require the viewer’s attentiveness to every frame. Robert Breer’s deceptively simple ATOZ (2000) files through the alphabet, following each letter with a brief burst of animation or photographic images. Ecstatically beautiful, these minimovies use rapid changes in color and shape and edit together colliding representations of an object to create afterimages and illusions of depth, rivaling anything Breer has done in his 50 years of filmmaking....

As a kid on the northwest side, John Borowski made monster masks and couldn’t get enough of films like Psycho and Jaws. When he was 13 he bought an eight-millimeter camera with money saved from odd jobs and started making his own rudimentary horror movies. A couple of years later a friend came across some gruesome pictures that belonged to his father, a police detective. “We were both into that horrific stuff, making masks and gore effects,” Borowski recalls....

At five and a half hours including a dinner break, Rose Rage, Edward Hall and Roger Warren’s two-part adaptation of Henry VI, is an epic chronicle of ambition, intrigue, and above all bloodshed. For his staging Hall, the director, chose as his conceptual metaphor a slaughterhouse. As the War of the Roses rages center stage at Chicago Shakespeare, a menacing chorus of cutlery-wielding butchers waits on the perimeter, scraping and sharpening knives....

In the last few years 29-year-old Matt McCormick of Portland, Oregon, has emerged as one of our strongest independent filmmakers, doing work that’s both ingenuous and humorously absurd. His latest, Going to the Ocean (2001), is as simple as a haiku: it begins with a long take of ships gliding through an urban waterway at night while superimposed highway lights sail by, creating a strangely menacing mood; then it cuts to old home-movie footage of adults playing in the surf....

Scott Portman gives moving, though unsurprising, personal testimony regarding Saddam Hussein’s well-known genocidal actions toward Iraqi Kurds [“War: What It’s Good For,” March 7]. As in the best Reader cover stories, this firsthand detail provides an alternative to common knowledge which manages to be progressive without toeing any party lines. Still, I see little connection between his focused, informed analysis and the shifting and conflicting rationales and proposals which have come out of Washington in the last few months, other than that neither of them contain convincing assessments of the spillover effects of an invasion, and both suggest that moral obligation trumps this uncertainty....

The announcement was as abrupt as the double knifing at ithe end of Pagliacci. Last month, just a week before the Lyric Opera season opened with the story of the tragic clown–paired with Cavalleria rusticana–Lyric management announced that its radio broadcasts were being “suspended for the 2002-2003 season because of lack of funding.” For nearly 30 years, opening-night performances have been aired live over WFMT and taped for national syndication, carrying the Lyric into the homes of people who can’t make it to the palace on Wacker Drive for whatever reason: distance, schedule, health, price....

KNIFE IN THE WATER 3/29, EMPTY BOTTLE Named for a Roman Polanski film, these Austinites play atypical country-based indie soul, biding their time and getting where they mean to go with sounds that seem sweetly broken but aren’t exactly in need of fixing. Laura Krause’s organ lines and Bill McCullough’s pedal steel lift the traditional-sounding, modern-feeling songs out of the realm of the ordinary. Last year they released their second album, Red River, on the Chicago label Overcoat; on this tour they’ve got a new five-song EP for sale from Peek-a-Boo, and are working on a third full-length for release in the fall....

Stereolab have stuck with Chicago-based producers John McEntire and Jim O’Rourke since they first came to the city to record their 1996 release, Emperor Tomato Ketchup. But the third album to come out of the relationship, 1999’s Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night, suggested that it might be time to try somebody new. It sounded beautiful, and embedded in the usual dense dots and loops were some new twists–a touch of bebop on “Fuses,” the robotic breathlessness of “Strobo Acceleration....

In 1994 Timothy Doyle, accompanied by his hired Sherpa guide, Kali, set out from his residence in Kathmandu to hike 500 or so miles to the Nepalese town of Dolpo. Going to Dolpo (Imperfect Music and Literature/Aark Arts), his spare memoir of the trip, depicts a spiritual and geographic journey. Traveling “to see the mountains,” as Kali informs a checkpoint policeman along the way, Doyle, who’s also a photographer, intersperses his snapshotlike descriptions of the beautiful and often treacherous landscape with asides on the history of Buddhism and his own musings on the nature of existence, but he never comes across as preachy or high-minded; he approaches the philosophy with a seriousness and sincerity often lacking in the stuff found on New Age bookshelves....

The youngsters in the Trinity Academy of Irish Dance have been winning international awards for their traditional step-dancing for years, but Trinity founder and artistic director Mark Howard can’t leave well enough alone. Now he’s hired former Bill T. Jones dancer and Stomp performer Sean Curran, who studied step-dancing as a kid, to set a couple of new dances on the professional troupe, the Trinity Irish Dance Company. Curran Event, a Chicago premiere, features 18 dancers and a score that begins with Dublin rock band Kila playing music said to resemble “a mix of reggae and Irish reels”; Curran employs the symmetrical floor patterns of traditional Irish dancing but adds clapping and other percussion to the footwork....

Nearly 20 years after its founding, Cirque du Soleil has indeed, as the title of an early show put it, reinvented the circus–and perhaps inevitably repeated itself a few times along the way. But whereas Dralion (the Montreal-based behemoth’s last local appearance, in 2001) focused on the pretty and dreamlike to sometimes languorously New Age effect, Varekai, directed by Dominic Champagne, is a muscular and swiftly paced showcase for the troupe’s global array of artists....

The 2003 edition of Bailiwick Repertory’s annual showcase of emerging directors has been spread out over three installments: “Chicago Works,” running through February 11; “In Adaptation/Translation” in April; and a gay- and lesbian-themed series in June. The “Chicago Works” portion, listed here, features ten short plays organized into programs of three or four plays each; all the scripts are new works by local authors. Performances take place Mondays and Tuesdays at 7:30 PM at the Bailiwick Arts Center, 1229 W....

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Emerald City Theatre Company, at the Apollo Theater. In this children’s musical, the greatest candy factory in the city, run by madman Willy Wonka, is giving tours to five lucky children. Four of them are symbols of bad habits—there’s a glutton, a gum chewer, an obsessive television watcher, and one girl, Veruca Salt (a gleaming Brooke Sherrod), who’s simply spoiled. Then there’s Charlie (Dan Forsythe): honest, hardworking, and, in this production, utterly boring....

The Tangerine Arts Group calls Aaron Lipke’s new play a piece of “politicking” on agricultural issues. But the conflicts between family farms and agribusiness figure mainly as a catalyst for the woes of two lovers: a farmer’s son forced to flee his home after an act of industrial sabotage results in a bystander’s death, and a young artist (who exhibits drawings of caged chickens) rejected by her patrons. Further confusing the agenda is Lipke’s ambivalent attitude toward his characters, whose moral progress is charted haphazardly....

One night in 1999, Dan Miles got together with several friends from his high school years in Oak Park for a session of improvised music and performance at Weeds. He dubbed the gathering “Love Chaos,” and while a few of the musicians were startled when performance artist Katherine Chronis stripped and took the stage wearing only some strategically placed flowers, everyone was game to do it again. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Children’s Hour guitarist Andy Bar admits that he was nervous about opening for Zwan at a sold-out Metro show in January. “I was scared that people were going to hate us and throw stuff at us,” he says in a voice barely above a whisper. It wasn’t just that he was more accustomed to playing in front of 30 or 40 people who knew his music than 1,000 who didn’t. The two acts seemed like an odd match: the unabashedly spare, fragile music Bar performs with Josephine Foster–who sings and plays guitar, ukulele, and harp–couldn’t be more unlike Billy Corgan’s overpowering anthems....