The big news about this year’s World Music Festival is that it’s smaller–reduced by half in both duration and number of performers–thanks to the weakened economy. It’s laudable that organizer Mike Orlove was able to keep the festival going at all (some at the Department of Cultural Affairs thought it would be better to cancel this year and bounce back in 2004), but the current edition seems a bit lackluster after the diverse sprawl of 2002....
Dear Dan [Tamarkin], Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To begin with, I find it amusing that you would characterize yourself as a “long-standing member of Sweetback Productions.” Since it was founded in 1994, Sweetback has produced 22 shows. Including shows presented prior to my joining the company in 1996, as far as I can determine, you contributed to 4. (I include your work on The Birds despite the fact that it consisted of two days–out of a rehearsal and production period of approximately 11 weeks)....
Winifred Haun started this festival, now in its seventh year and coproduced by Frank Fishella, as an “incubator” for new work. This season the sheer volume of new pieces is impressive: each individual or troupe in the three completely different programs is presenting a premiere. And if Breakbone DanceCo.’s new duet is any indication, the festival should have a high avant-garde factor: artistic director Atalee Judy and fellow dancer Robbie Cook have come up with a disturbing piece whose creepy costumes, video, and choreography provide more insight into mental illness than we might want....
What’s amazing about the African diaspora is the way cultures survived despite–or because of–efforts to annihilate them. When slaves were brought to Brazil from Angola, social dances were allowed in the hope of perpetuating schisms in the Yoruba culture and averting rebellion against the slaveholders. And when Catholicism was imposed in an effort to wipe out the Yoruba religion, slaves promptly transformed the “orishas,” the gods with whom they were familiar, into Catholic saints....
In the summer of 2003 Louis Carter decided to organize a little reunion in Seward Park of friends he’d grown up with in nearby Cabrini-Green. They joked that they had to hurry because the neighborhood was changing so fast they might not be welcome anymore. Several Cabrini high-rises between Chicago Avenue and Division Street had already been torn down, part of the massive, federally funded Plan for Transformation the city launched in the mid-90s....
“Style is what makes the movement, not steps,” says Nan Giordano, artistic director of Gus Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago. That’s certainly true of the new piece LA-based Cuban-American choreographer Liz Imperio has written for the company. La Raza del Barrio is all about style and attitude–the looks and walks and gestures you see in Latino neighborhoods. The first of its four sections, “La Raza,” shows four men in close if sometimes antagonistic relationships, shoving or throwing each other around....
This touring revival of the wacky, tuneful 1950 musical, based on Damon Runyon’s comic tales of Times Square’s hoodlum subculture, boasts song-and-dance man Maurice Hines as Nathan Detroit, operator of the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York. Hines is good, though he dances less than one might wish; but the real stars of this boisterous, laugh-packed production are the less famous leading players. The foxy Alexandra Foucard brings sizzling sexiness and a huge, dynamic voice to the part of Miss Adelaide, Nathan’s showgirl fiancee of 14 years; her Betty Boop-style line readings are sometimes eccentric and over-the-top, but her timing’s so good and she’s having so much fun with the role that you can’t help but fall for her....
To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I am one of the persons mentioned in the January 10 article “Suits vs. Boots.” Now on a whole, all the response to the article I heard was good. Carpenters of all ages, races, and genders had told me so at all the rank-and-file meetings we attend. But all readers of the Chicago Reader were treated to, in response to the article, was none other than the response of the president/executive secretary-treasurer of the Chicago and Northeast Illinois District Council of Carpenters and Joiners of America, Earl Oliver....
The final installment of a trilogy that began with Nitrate Kisses (1992) and Tender Fictions (1995), this 2000 experimental feature by Barbara Hammer completes a well-researched, loosely chronological study of how lesbianism has been codified by the mainstream and embraced by the fringe. The images and sounds excavated, most of them pre-1960s, are impressively vast and obscure (found footage, vintage photos, educational shorts, tabloid headlines, pulp fiction covers), and Hammer juxtaposes them with technical finesse and subversive humor, often noting their homoerotic subtext (clips from a 50s bra commercial are intercut with women disrobing for sex, newsreel footage of army training is inserted into a montage with porn loops, a speech by Eleanor Roosevelt is tweaked into an endorsement of lesbian love)....
It’s not surprising that so many of the greatest Indian classical musicians, from Anoushka Shankar to Amjad Ali Khan, are the progeny of other famous musicians. Mastery of the tradition requires the kind of rigorous day-in, day-out study that a university education isn’t likely to provide. Sitar master Irshad Khan is no exception–he’s the son of Imrat Khan and the nephew of Vilayat Khan, both sitar legends. Like his elders, he also plays the surbahar, a bass sitar invented by his great-great-grandfather....
Norwegian sound artist Lasse Marhaug got his start in the mid-90s as part of the international noise underground, releasing dozens of hard-to-find cassettes produced with effects pedals and cheap tape recorders. His stuff was harsh, loud, and violent, with no regard for melody or rhythm. But that’s changed quite a bit since he started Jazzkammer in 1998 with guitarist and improviser John Hegre. Though he still finds beauty in static, feedback, and electronic interference, he’s using a computer now instead of just analog instruments, and the duo’s music is subtler and quieter than Marhaug’s earlier stuff....
MIRROR Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Englishman Andrew Chalk and Germany’s Christoph Heemann, who’ve collaborated under the name Mirror since the late 90s, have been operating on the fringes of experimental music for nearly two decades. Heemann founded the early industrial group H.N.A.S. in the 80s and has worked with collagists and mod musique concrete practitioners like Nurse With Wound, Coil, and Current 93, while Chalk has focused primarily on solo electronic work, at first under the name Ferial Confine and more recently under his real name....
Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In December in Portland, Oregon, after the police chief defied a local judge and insisted that officers could legally seize and search curbside garbage without a warrant (arguing that it becomes public property when discarded), reporters from Willamette Week dug through garbage and recycling put out by the chief, the district attorney, and the mayor (technically the chief’s superior) and published an inventory of each official’s trash....
Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Earlier this month leaders of the right-wing paramilitary group the United Self Defence Forces of Colombia publicized an E-mail address for reporting complaints about its mistreatment of civilians; Carlos Castano, a founder of the group, admitted that he himself had killed many people but said he was concerned about “excesses.” . . . And last month in Nepal, American citizen Raymond Coughron told reporters that his mountain-climbing party had been robbed by Maoist revolutionaries who negotiated with the victims over what property they would take, settled on hard cash, and wrote out a crude receipt for the stolen money....
I’ve been here on several occasions. My second time here, it was getting toward the end of the evening and I met this woman on the staircase, and right away we seemed to have a rapport going and we’re being a little flirtatious. I invite her to go to this bar. She says that would be great, and at the bar we have a great time. We go back to her place, and we’re sitting there having good conversation....
In recent weeks certain bellicose correspondents have stormed onto your letters page, purple in the face and shaking their fists at Garret Gaston for daring to make fun of the Catholic church in his cartoon La Petite Camera [June 21]. Last week’s missive by Raymond E. Drake of something called the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property was especially priceless: “This blatant, filthy mockery of the papacy and the church is a grave insult to God and to all Catholics” read one passage....
George Bernard Shaw’s play has serious points to make about class, morality, and marriage, but it’s also lots of fun, especially in ShawChicago’s vibrant, vigorously paced staged reading, directed by Robert Scogin. Reading from scripts on music stands, the nine cast members dynamically demonstrate all that can be accomplished with vocal inflections and facial expressions (and slight suggestions of costumes). Linda Gillum as Eliza Doolittle makes an affecting transformation, while Terence Gallagher’s hubristic Henry Higgins never does change....
By Michael Miner “We were approaching this very conservatively, very carefully, very slowly. It wasn’t a dot-com operation. We started talking about it in January of ’99, and we’ve been working on it off and on for the last two years. What we wanted to do was fill a need we saw in journalism in Chicago by providing in-depth stories–readable, compelling stories about urban life–both journalistically and in fiction and essays....
When Teena Marie was in her prime there were few other white performers in R & B and none quite as distinctive. She was an independent artist, writing, producing, arranging, and performing her own material in a genre where the hit-factory mentality looms large to this day. Marie signed to Motown in the mid-70s, but didn’t record until 1979, when she began a working (and, briefly, personal) relationship with the label’s biggest star at the time, Rick James, who produced Wild and Peaceful....
Is there any truth to the rumor that Anne Frank’s father was the person who finished writing his daughter’s famous diary? I recall being told that the original is kept in a Swiss bank vault and when examined it was discovered that the last chapters were written in ballpoint pen, a writing instrument not invented until after Miss Frank’s death. –Stavok, via the Internet Best of Chicago voting is live now....
