STAGE BLOOD Sliced Bread Productions at Space Gallery It would be a mistake to take anything that came out of the late Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company too seriously: Ludlam rejected the idea of seriousness, citing the Ridiculous as a keener weapon against pretensions and “certain kinds of bullshitting.” He took his Ridiculous seriously, but […]
Tag: Vol. 22 No. 19
Issue of Feb. 18 – 24, 1993
Posted inArts & Culture
Gerhard Stabler
It’s not easy to describe or categorize Gerhard Stabler’s music. Take his druber…, for instance: Scored for “eight active screamers, violoncello, and tape,” the 20-minute work–whose title loosely translates as “beyond”–comments on the act of screaming and the emotions it conveys and evokes. In its first half, the screamers clamor for attention with their primal […]
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Unexpected Convergences
JOSEPH HOLMES CHICAGO DANCE THEATRE at the Dance Center of Columbia College, February 4-6 At first glance, the last two concerts at the Dance Center of Columbia College could not seem more different. Joseph Holmes Chicago Dance Theatre, under the artistic direction of Randy Duncan, is struggling to become a commercially successful and nationally known […]
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Reel Life: casualties of AIDS
By the time Zack Stiglicz finished his doctoral dissertation on “War and Alliance Behavior Among the Major Powers of Europe” between 1815 and 1939, his passion for teaching international strategy was flagging. Stiglicz began instead teaching courses like Meaning, Drama, and Aesthetics in Films of Violence, Revolution, and War. Now the 41-year-old Chicagoan teaches filmmaking […]
Posted inNews & Politics
News of the Weird
Lead Story In December Archie Johnston, 18, became the youngest person ever to head a Ku Klux Klan group when he took over as imperial wizard of the Independent Knights of the KKK in Orlando, Florida. He said that his dad “is totally against it,” but his mom “trusts” him to do a good job. […]
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Chi Lives: Marguerite Horberg, HotHouse keeper
Marguerite Horberg, proprietor of HotHouse, still supports Fidel Castro, and peppers her conversation with Marxist phrases: friendships are “alliances,” issues like homelessness are “contradictions,” progressive art should “demystify” the “homogenous hegemony” of Western cultural imperialism.” Yet she comes on like Rosa Luxemburg with a gypsy soul. For more than ten years before she opened HotHouse, […]
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The Unpretentious
CHRIS SULLIVAN and BRENDAN DE VALLANCE at Randolph Street Gallery, February 12 and 13 Performance art, unfortunately, is burdened with an aura of pretension. From the hipper-than-hip audience members who act as though the rest of us have come to watch them to the artists who seem to believe that obscurity, impenetrability, and starting half […]
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Luther Allison
This is a homecoming celebration for a major bluesman who left Chicago for Paris in the early 80s and has performed here precious few times since then. Allison cut his teeth in the 50s and 60s playing with such greats as Freddie King and Magic Sam, but he emerged into the “mainstream” (i.e., white) consciousness […]
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Free-lancing Doesn’t Pay/Jane Play Update/Big Jim on Board
Free-lancing Doesn’t Pay “I’ve always enjoyed the classic tough American detectives,” Max Allan Collins was telling us. “Whether we’re talking about Dick Tracy or Eliot Ness or Joe Friday or Mike Hammer, I feel the classic American detective is most at home in the 30s and 40s and 50s. That’s when you can really wrap […]
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Local Lit: Chicago Beau’s book of the blues
Bluesman Lincoln McGraw-Beauchamp, or Chicago Beau, as he is known in local and international blues circles, grew up in the 50s in a boardinghouse near 39th and Ellis, a place he recalls as “a house of blues.” The building was populated with hustlers, drug dealers, prostitutes, and gamblers. The landlady ran a numbers operation on […]
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Ballet Chicago
George Balanchine looked for a certain savagery in dancing. Former New York City ballet principal dancer Daniel Duell, now artistic director of Ballet Chicago, once overheard Mr. B complaining to a dancer about English training: the choreographer described it as being like the elaborate process of making a very small, very polite cup of tea, […]
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Shakespearean Heights
KING LEAR Shakespeare Repertory It takes a ton of energy to keep King Lear from sinking under the immense sorrow of its story. An unrelenting onslaught of crimes against humanity, most of them senseless, King Lear is a play in which the bitter negations of “nothing,” “no more,” and “never” lose all abstraction and turn […]
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Best of the Young Playwrights Festival
BEST OF THE YOUNG PLAYWRIGHTS FESTIVAL Pegasus Players Over the past six years Pegasus Players have workshopped and produced 23 plays, selected from over 1,100 entries, for their annual Young Playwrights Festival. These Chicago-area playwrights, most of them high school age, get the benefit of seeing a fully realized production with a professional cast directed […]
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Music of the Baroque
Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, which premiered in the Mantuan court in 1607, is generally acknowledged as the first full-fledged opera ever written. And it is an almost perfect opera in its pacing, proportions, and control of dramatic tensions and contrasts. Monteverdi, who later laid the foundations for the Neapolitan opera that led to the flowering of […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Stopping the Government
To the editors. I enjoyed the letter George W. Price wrote in the January 29 issue, about the effect on the CTA of the possible privatization of the streets and expressways [“Can You Get There From Here?,” December 11]. He notes that a private expressway company should pay its fair share of taxes. An interesting […]