This multidisciplinary performing arts festival, hosted by the Pilsen area’s Blue Rider Theatre, runs through December 17, with shows most Fridays and Saturdays at 8 PM and Sundays at 7 PM, as well as children’s matinees on selected Saturdays and Sundays at 3 PM. Most evenings feature two or more artists, with intermissions between each act. Blue Rider Theatre, 1822 S. Halsted, 733-4668. Tickets: $10 a night except where noted in the listings below; $60 for a festival pass (good for all performances); some student and senior discounts available....

Female Deviations: By Justin Hayford Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Loomis embodies the transgressions that send a large sector of the American population into apoplectic fits. Despite Hollywood’s aggressive attempts to neutralize (read “de-gay”) the subversive potential of drag, America remains a land of pathological gender insecurity; how else can you explain the cultish popularity of Julia Sweeney’s “It’s Pat” sketches on Saturday Night Live, designed with no other objective than to ridicule someone of indeterminate sex?...

MARTY STUART 7/14, STAR PLAZA As the recent compilation The Marty Stuart Hit Pack (MCA) proves, beyond Stuart’s absurdly flamboyant style is one of those rare Nashville stars that doesn’t suck. He imbues his music with a rock ‘n’ roll swagger, manages to give it a nice lilt as well, and can write, play, and sing with equal skill. Early apprenticeships with Lester Flatt and Johnny Cash have sopped his music in tradition, but he’s refused to be held prisoner to the past....

Charles Dickens’s novels have been natural sources for dramatic presentations–you don’t have to know the whole plot of one of his epics to enjoy a character or episode from it. But the London-based Oddbodies, consisting of actors Paul De Ville Morel and Tanya Scott-Wilson, don’t simply perform passages from the printed page; they may incorporate a few words of description or a couple lines of dialogue (in which they skillfully display the wide range of accents necessary for Dickens’s class-conscious comedy), but mostly they use extended passages of mime to communicate Dickens’s vignettes....

By Harold Henderson Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I was getting stopped by police so much that I used to compute the time of my stop into my travel time,” Chicago’s Salim Muwakkil tells Michael Fletcher of the Washington Post National Weekly (April 8-14). “Out of 10 trips, I would say that I would be stopped at least five times.” Adds Fletcher, “Muwakkil thinks he was being stopped for what he sardonically calls DWB–driving while black....

Something there is that loves a loser. Fans of the Cubs feel compelled to deny that, especially when the White Sox are in first and the Cubs are muddling through another mediocre season, but, really, who are we kidding? Losers put no pressure on the audience. A fan feels entitled to take the game on whatever level seems appropriate at the moment, whether that be concentrated frustration or, at the other pole, benign neglect....

Get a load of this clip from the Washington Times. It says the latex used in condoms contains pores through which HIV, the AIDS virus, can readily pass–suggesting that “safe sex” using a condom may not be very safe. What gives? Answer quickly. Lives are in the balance! –M.L., Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ll say. Your clip is a 1992 letter to the editor from Mike Roland, editor of Rubber Chemistry and Technology, a publication of the American Chemical Society....

Utu Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Set in the 1870s, this 1983 New Zealand film gets its title from a Maori word that’s been variously translated as “revenge,” “compensation,” and “justice.” Following the massacre of a village by British soldiers, a Maori named Te Wheke becomes a warrior, declaring, “I must kill the Pakeha [white man] to avenge what he has done. The spirits of my people command me....

Epic Soundtracks, Evan Dando Not in four decades of pop music has a rock star elicited such extreme reactions among young people as Evan Dando. He has inspired both a fanzine devoted solely to not liking him and a song by the young boys of Noise Addict that expresses their desire to be like him. From 1986 to 1991, Dando’s band the Lemonheads enjoyed underground credibility on college radio stations. But in 1992, when It’s a Shame About Ray found its way onto MTV, the critics started focusing on other things....

Bailiwick Repertory’s sixth annual Directors Festival showcases the aspirations of generally unknown, mostly young pro, semipro, and student directors whose projects range from established classical and contemporary selections to brand-new material. The fest runs through October 27, Mondays-Thursdays at 7:30 PM, with a different program of three one-acts each night. Tickets are $8 per program. Each week highlights a different theme: “World Premieres and Visionaries of the Past” concludes October 6; “American Writers” runs October 10 through 13, “New Works and Unknown Treasures” October 17 through 20, and “Symbols and Absurdities” October 24 through 27....

MAY Veteran choreographer Shirley Mordine is never content with the small idea. Her evening-length piece, Edgemode, looks at social and spiritual changes in the contemporary world; the first part, premiered a year ago during the Spring Festival of Dance, uses the metaphor of migration to address societal changes, while the second and third parts focus on the individual. Essentially, she says, she’s asking what we must do to survive. Winner of a 1994 Ruth Page Award for her artistic achievement, Mordine and her company (which she’s directed for 26 years) present Edgemode Friday and Saturday at 8 in the auditorium of the Harold Washington Library, 400 S....

Friday 22 The Hollywood Casino continues to turn sleepy Aurora on its head with a day of country and western folderol in honor of Willie Nelson’s two sold-out appearances at the Paramount Arts Centre tonight and tomorrow. The Wild, Wild Westfest, which runs from 10 to 10 today out in front of the Paramount, 23 E. Galena, offers movies (The Electric Horseman at 10:30 AM, High Noon at 12:30, and Gunfight at the O....

To most Japanese, a character like Bizet’s Carmen epitomizes wanton sexuality and fiery independence–qualities, often associated with bar girls and prostitutes, that elicit disapproval tempered by pity and grudging respect. With Carmen From Kawachi, one of director Seijun Suzuki’s trilogy of women-centered films from the mid-60s, the emotional scale is tilted subtly toward sympathy for the eponymous heroine, who escapes her sordid village upbringing only to be entrapped by the decadence of the urban demimonde....

I’ve got the same problem every year. Go to the store, can’t find the Hanukkah cards. Or when I do find them the selection is so small and pathetic I almost wish I hadn’t. There’ve been years when the selection at the local Osco was so bad I wound up buying Christmas cards instead. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There were five choices, which was enough really....

Dalton Brown Born in Brooklyn in 1951, Dalton Brown grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area. “Brooklyn had been a thriving arts community,” he recalls. “The poor people in the Marcy projects, where I grew up, had such a high level of self-esteem–it wasn’t like project living today.” His childhood interest in art led his mother to place him in a mostly white school with better facilities, where he recalls that his reading score jumped “significantly....

In the last 30 years few if any musicians have extended the language of Latin jazz as much as pianist Eddie Palmieri. While the confluence of the mambo craze and the rise of bebop in the 40s brought striking fusions in the music of Dizzy Gillespie and Machito, by the late 50s Latin jazz had lost its mainstream appeal and eventually fell under the all-inclusive Afro-Caribbean rubric of salsa. Born in Spanish Harlem in 1936, Palmieri started out as a Latin-music purist, resisting the influential spell of jazz until Art Blakey’s classic 1958 recording of the Benny Golson tune “Moanin’” liberated his mind to the different ways horns and percussion could interact....

Lou Cabeen: Mapping Desire Labor I Meditation began as a large white tablecloth, with a white damask leaf design. Cabeen burned circular brown marks into the fabric with an electric range, a slightly mordant reference to cooking, that disrupt the fabric’s clean white surface. She stitched into the center a traditional Christian prayer, replacing the word “Christ” with “labor”– “Labor is the foundation of this home the unrecognized source of every meal....

Jesus Lopez Holograms are gimmicky. There are exceptions, but most holographic art that I’ve seen has been dominated by the almost hypnotic illusions of depth and movement. And for many of us, a mere optical trick is not “art.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some of his art-school training can perhaps be seen in two images that reflect the cubist idea that no single view of a subject is complete....

Lessons in Censorship Recently McQuade heard much more. Now an editor at a small press in Minneapolis, she set out to interview prominent writers who’d passed through the university, a project that eventually took the form of the recent book An Unsentimental Education: Writers and Chicago, a collection of reminiscences. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Paul Carroll was poetry editor of the Review. After he and other senior editors resigned in protest, he helped found and then ran Big Table, which published the long, steamy excerpt from Burroughs’s Naked Lunch that the Review could not....

** WHITE With Zbigniew Zamachowski, Julie Delphy, Janusz Gajos, Jerzy Stuhr, Grzegorz Warchol, and Jerzy Nowak. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kieslowski’s Red, the crowning work of his “Three Colors” trilogy, met with a very different public response. As far as the international press was concerned, it was the popular favorite. Considering that Kieslowski had already won prizes for Blue and White at Venice and Berlin in the past year and had announced his retirement from directing at Berlin, some people were primed for a triple crown, even if more savvy forecasters were noting that at a festival dominated by the U....