It’s impossible to summarize everything that’s happening onstage this season. (It’s also hard to tell you exactly what COVID-19 precautions are required at venues now; we suggest checking ahead and being prepared to show proof of vax, and wearing a mask as a courtesy to other patrons.) But here are ten offerings that promise to […]
Author Archives: Irene Hsiao
Posted inArts & Culture
Tools for new movement
On September 24, Toolbox @ Twenty opens at the Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC) to celebrate the Seldoms’ 20th anniversary with an exhibition and performances in a large-scale experiment in collaboration among dancers, visual artists, and the alternative visual arts exhibition space. Curated by the Seldoms’ founding artistic/executive director Carrie Hanson in collaboration with HPAC […]
Posted inTheater Review
Revolutionary abstractions
“Not that it matters, but most of what follows is true,” reads the supertitle projected over a stage sparsely set with stools. Enter a small conference of artists tasked with establishing a school to nurture and transmit their craft. Amid the heady debate over whether history and technique are still relevant in a new world […]
Posted inDance
Seeking a friend for the end of the world
The stage is dark and lightly clouded with fog—in the distance, a dense heap of jumbled objects signals the end of systems and uses. Booms Day brings us into the story of a Girl (KC Bevis), who, equipped with little more than her boom box and her big pink glittering heart, must find friends and […]
Posted inDance
‘Black dance is American dance’
On August 27 in Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, the eight companies representing the Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project—Ayodele Drum and Dance, Chicago Multi-Cultural Dance Center, Deeply Rooted Dance Theater, Forward Momentum Chicago, Joel Hall Dancers and Center, Muntu Dance Theatre of Chicago, Najwa Dance Corps, and Red Clay Dance Company (joined also by Creation […]
Posted inTheater Review
The play about the baby
In March 2020, Theatre L’Acadie opened a production of Tennessee Williams’s The Two Character Play the same week the city locked down for the COVID-19 pandemic: sibling actors, mad and maddening, tilt on the edge between fantasy and reality with a backstory of undefined trauma. Two years later, we return to nearly the same scenario—two […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Blasian March comes to Chicago
On plantations in the 1800s, plantation owners used diversity as a means of division. “We lay great stress on the necessity of having our labor mixed. By employing different nationalities, there is less danger of collusion among laborers,” reports an 1883 Planters Monthly article. Sowing division was essential to maintaining the oppression of the working […]
Posted inTheater Review
Dimming of the day
“When people die, they move from the first person to the third person. They also move from the present tense to the past tense.” These words are spoken by Christine (Kendra Thulin), who opens Simon Stephens’s Light Falls, directed by Robin Witt, by narrating her own death—sudden, solitary, and mundane in a liquor store in […]
Posted inTheater Review
Native tongues
The grounds are defined by meandering turns of grass and dirt, a rainfall of lightbulbs, a shining blue curve that sometimes picks up projections and reflections of what might be ghosts or clouds, and a dotted line made of glass bottles of water. Amid these clear and reflective surfaces, natural elements and their simulations curbed […]
Posted inPerforming Arts Feature
Hot weather, hot shows
Summer is officially here, in case the sweat and lightning bugs weren’t enough of a clue. In addition to the shows and artists we profiled in our summer arts preview issue this week, we’ve got just a few suggestions for other offerings in theater, dance, and opera that look promising—whether you’re looking for a nice […]
Posted inArts & Culture
‘Huge, very loud, and with a lot of glitter’
For the first time since a pandemic hiatus, The Fly Honey Show is live for three days only of sparkle, sweat, and shimmy. Begun in 2010 with about 30 performers in the living room of the DIY venue The Inconvenience, The Fly Honey Show has since manifested through the bodies of hundreds of dancers, musicians, […]
Posted inTheater Review
Just skating by
The year is 1994, and rock star Jacqueline Miller (Diana DeGarmo) is zigzagging the country on a tour. Her dishonest manager has absconded with her earnings, her deadbeat saxophonist boyfriend (Ace Young) is either cheating or has forgotten her birthday, and she’s going on Oprah tomorrow but just lost the cover of Rolling Stone to […]
Posted inDance
Romance languages
Two years into this pestilence, the misery of war, the disappointment of mankind day after day weighing down desperate minds, with a future certain of nothing but social and planetary destruction, do we not long for a reprieve? As the nobleman Alonso Quijano sought glory in the guise of the knight Don Quixote, as a […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Reshaping the landscape on the southeast side
A ribbon-cutting ceremony was held on May 21 at 89th and Commercial on the southeast side. It celebrated the opening of Commercial Ave Alfresco, a joint initiative organized by the group South Chicago Parents & Friends along with the city’s Special Service Area 5 commission. Both entities worked together with local artists and businesses, and […]
Posted inDance
Light drives the story in TAKE
On an industrial strip of Rockwell just off Elston, beyond a white door with numbers painted in red, past a makeshift bar, through a dark curtain lies a white brick room filled with smoke. Through the haze, folding chairs line each wall, leaving bare an expanse of concrete, above which soar long sheets of white […]