Tucked in a side room during September’s Taste of Serbia Festival (an annual event at Old Holy Resurrection Serbian Orthodox Church in Logan Square), Milena Tatic Bajich, 57, and her mom, Ljubica Tatic, 86, were simultaneously showcasing their passions (respectively, Nikola Tesla and textiles). Milena is the director of the Chicago chapter of the Tesla […]
Tag: Vol. 51 No. 3
Issue of November 11, 2021
Making music immortal
An interview with pipe organ conservator Jeff Weiler
by Philip Montoro
Find a print copy of the Reader.
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Posted inArts & Culture
‘I need to know trans joy exists in order to imagine myself living in the future.’
Trans joy and pain gently mingle in poet H. Melt’s new chapbook There Are Trans People Here, out this month from Chicago’s Haymarket Books. The poems in this collection give the reader a sense that all the pain and suffering the world inflicts on trans people is something that can be overcome, transformed, and understood. […]
Posted inMusic
Chicago rapper Mick Jenkins points out the Elephant in the Room
On “Stiff Arm,” three songs into Mick Jenkins’s new Elephant in the Room (Free Nation/Cinematic Music Group), Chicago performer and activist Ayinde Cartman delivers a scorching rumination that doubles as thesis statement for the album, identifying a key paradox of Black life in America. “Our existence is the elephant in every boardroom,” Cartman declares. “How […]
Posted inMusic
Ben LaMar Gay’s Open Arms to Open Us embraces all—including us
In an essay accompanying Open Arms to Open Us (International Anthem), composer-cornetist Ben LaMar Gay says his latest album is part of the extended death terror many have felt since the start of the pandemic. “What can I leave behind for the young people in my life?” he asks. Open Arms to Open Us sounds […]
Posted inMusic
Circuit des Yeux transforms isolation and grief into absorbing musical ambition on -io
Chicago vocalist, guitarist, and composer Haley Fohr is such a creative force that she can’t be contained by one persona—in addition to performing as Circuit des Yeux, she uses the alter ego Jackie Lynn to tell musical tales from the points of view of characters that feel personal yet slightly removed. Fohr began her new […]
Posted inTheater Review
The Wind Phone blows through family dysfunction
The setup of Madelyn Sergel’s The Wind Phone is tried and true: Trap several people with complex personal history in a room, and let the hidden secrets and long-simmering resentments take it from there. In Sergel’s latest, the trapped are estranged sisters Ellen (Elizabeth Rude) and Jenny (Susie Steinmeyer) and their mother, Patty (Maggie Speer). […]
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Growing for Good with Green Thumb: My Block My Hood My City
Lighting up the south side this holiday season
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“The Sweetest Gift” is a grand finale for Reunion
Reunion was founded by Kristen Kaza and Elijah McKinnon as a coworking space and incubator centering LGBTQ+ and BIPOC creatives in Chicago. After a remarkable six-year run, the two are closing the space.
Posted inTheater Review
C is for confusion
Michael Mejia directs Laura Ruohonen’s 2003 exploration of power, identity, and freedom in Trap Door Theatre’s return to in-person performance. Loosely based on Queen Christina, the 17th-century Swedish monarch who abdicated because she couldn’t rule on her own terms, Queen C pays only cursory lip service to period specificity. The message is spelled out at […]
Posted inArts & Culture
‘You have to respect the power of objects’
In July, as COVID-19 restrictions began to lift and the Chicago performing arts geared themselves up to resurrect, the Rough House Theater Co. headquarters at coartistic directors Claire Saxe and Mike Oleon’s home in Humboldt Park morphed into a puppet rehearsal palace. Rough House’s anthology production House of the Exquisite Corpse wouldn’t be opening at […]
Posted inTheater Review
Games witches play
Adolescence is like living in a haunted house made up of your own newly confusing flesh and psychological demons. So it makes sense that horror narratives so often bring together creepy cabins and horny melodramatic teens. In Emma Smart’s The House of Baba Yaga, the teens are a quartet who find out too late that […]
Posted inMusic
On the new Seven Bridges, Charles Rumback gathers together the many sounds he’s mastered
Update on Fri 11/12: The Charles Rumback show at Constellation on Sat 11/20 has been canceled. No rescheduled date has been announced. It’s the drummer’s job to make everyone else in the band sound good, and Charles Rumback does it very well. Whether he’s playing folk rock with the Horse’s Ha, baroque pop with Steve […]
Posted inMusic
Damián Antón Ojeda lets it all out in Sadness
In the last week of October, one of the most popular releases on Bandcamp was made by a 24-year-old who works at a theme park outside Saint Louis and records as Sadness. Damián Antón Ojeda’s dramatic, grandly atmospheric music mixes black metal and postrock, and on Sunday, October 24, he put out a two-track EP […]
Posted inDance
Dances of delusion
Months of confinement and isolation inform two introspective, retrospective works on a bill shared by Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble and RE|Dance this November, and one thing is certain: never has an apse looked more like the inner curve of a cranial vault, and our activities within the bone-white walls of Ebenezer Lutheran Church seemed more like […]