JINSKY PINSKY–A NIGHT IN TIGHTS Timothy Buckley at Link’s Hall, through March 21 Timothy Buckley may be as valuable a teacher as he is as an artist–which means extremely valuable. His work is characterized by technical proficiency, imaginative construction, and psychological depth, and he has a strong interest in pushing dancers into nondancer realms. He […]
Tag: Vol. 22 No. 23
Issue of Mar. 18 – 24, 1993
Posted inNews & Politics
The Straight Dope
Please enlighten your earth-conscious fans about the commerce in “pollution futures” at the Chicago Board of Trade. The term suggests that the pollution lobby has invented a sneaky way to poison the air at its own discretion. Don’t the antipollution laws already in place preclude the creation of such “pollution rights”? –Eugene Blahut, Chicago You’re […]
Posted inNews & Politics
More on the Jane Play
To the editors: In respect of the legacy of the Abortion Counseling Service of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union and to the integrity of the Chicago theater community, we can no longer remain silent, allowing the play Jane: Abortion and the Underground to be obscured by wild claims, chronological gaps, half-truths, and petty, egocentric insecurities. […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The City File
War is–green?! “Thousands of unexploded bombs and mines from the Gulf War are still strewn across the Kuwaiti desert. According to Charles Pilcher, a conservationist who has taught at Kuwait University for many years, the results are wonderful,” reports the Chicago-based Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (March), citing the Washington Times (January 6). “The unexploded […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Police Torture Cover-Up
To the editors: Congratulations are in order for the Reader: The Chicago Police Department has just fired Detective Commander Jon Burge for torturing a Black prisoner in a police station, and your paper was the first to open up the story of police torture with John Conroy’s article “House of Screams” [January 26, 1990]. The […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe/Winnie-the-Pooh
THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE Though most adults have mercifully repressed the memory, being a child offered a crash course in frustration: an inexplicable and unpredictable world disappointed our cravings for instant gratification. It’s not surprising then that kids love tales, like Hansel and Gretel and The NeverEnding Story, where they’re in control, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Digable Planets
The Digable Planets are the latest groovy entry from the sparking and restless world of alternative rap. Our players are three insect munchkins (Doodle, Butterfly, and Ladybug) who groove on abstract existentialism, gentle and percolating beats, and irresistible bebop samples. The title of their unlikely but ingratiating hit single “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)” […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Human and Suprahuman
ARIE BURSZTYN and SINAPSA DANCE GROUP at the Dance Center of Columbia College, March 9 and 10 Some dances are human, others suprahuman. Human dances are unmistakably enmeshed in social and cultural currents, explicitly testing the dancers’ and viewers’ shared world. The suprahuman ones explore the essential materials of dance–movement, space, time–for their own sake, […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Close quarters: northwest-siders seek city crackdown on illegal housing
Two years ago, the gas company dispatched an inspector to examine the pipes in a bungalow on the northwest side. The company realized something was fishy when the owner wouldn’t let the inspector in. So it got a court order, forcing the owner to open his house. What they discovered in the basement was a […]
Posted inArts & Culture
House of Illusions
THE BALCONY New Crime Productions at At the Gallery New Crime’s production of Jean Genet’s The Balcony layers illusion upon illusion upon illusion. Watching it is like walking through a fun house full of mirrors where sexual fantasies are acted out, where every situation can be believed yet nothing is real. The Balcony is not […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Road to Nirvana/The Road to Graceland
ROAD TO NIRVANA Steppenwolf Theatre Company THE ROAD TO GRACELAND Lifeline Theatre In a year-end review of the theater scene in PerformInk, WBEZ critic Andrew Patner compared Steppenwolf’s new space to a mausoleum. Then the company received an incredible amount of bad press following the cancellation of Frank Galati’s production of As You Like It. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Jan Erkert & Dancers
Jan Erkert takes her politics further and more seriously than any other Chicago choreographer while still creating theatrical, well-crafted, intelligent dances. Her 1991 dance Sensual Spaces looked at the sensuality in sacred music that was stolen from women. Erkert stripped the stage to its black walls and floor and dressed the six women in black […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Buddy Guy & Junior Wells
Buddy Guy and Junior Wells worked together for so long–steadily from the 60s through the 70s and sporadically well into the next decade–that a lot of people never stopped to consider how unlikely a musical combination they really were: Guy’s slash-and-burn guitar style melding with the warbling subtleties of Wells’s harmonica blowing; Wells’s street-tough posturing […]