JAN ERKERT & DANCERS It’s hard to write about this dance. I don’t know when I’ve seen another work so tightly and perfectly controlled and yet seeming to exist beyond the choreographer’s artistry, beyond the reach of language. Exactly as long as it has to be and no longer, it unfolds with an imperceptible but seemingly inevitable logic. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The film is grainy and distorted, projected not on a flat, hard screen but on a piece of cloth with soft folds; we see primarily the hands and faces of the women in the film, and they’re beautiful....

Choral singers have the great humdrum job in music. They dress alike, they sound alike, they drill and drill–a squad of G.I. Joes, a platoon of Unknown Soldiers. Each singer’s identity is subordinated to the needs of the group. You’re supposed to blend in. If anyone notices you, you’ve screwed up. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Arthur Moswin tells people he’s in the Apollo Chorus of Chicago, the country’s oldest volunteer chorus and the city’s oldest musical organization, they’re usually puzzled....

PILL HILL Chicago Theatre Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Five years later, Charlie has been passed over for the promotion but swallows his disappointment and concentrates on maintaining his perfect attendance record. Eddie has passed the bar, and Al is a real estate agent. Scott now has a job with the CTA, and Joe still insists he’s only “a few paychecks” away from his last mill shift....

When AIDS activist Lori Cannon ran into Jon-Henri Damski and his friend Richard Cooke last Thursday on Broadway, her heart sank. “Jon-Henri’s face had as always that curious little whimsical look,” Cannon told me. But Cooke was grimly shaking his head. Damski is 58, and he went under the knife a year and a half ago; Cannon’s first thought was for his health. I know Damski by phone, letter, and column, and I like him....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I had a brief experience with Prozac and have several close friends who have used the drug. For all of us there were significant negative side effects. In my case, Prozac took away all the sharp edges of life–not only depression but pleasurable experiences as well. The effect was most noticeable in the areas of sex drive and sexual pleasure, but even life’s small joys–sunsets, the laughter of children, a Michael Jordan breakaway dunk–no longer provided exhilaration....

CARLA BLEY BIG BAND Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Carla Bley writes big, inclusive compositions, now playful (with large dollops of irony and parody), now confrontational. Filled with lyrical surprises and translucently scored, they have a Technicolor, Sensurround aspect, a special emphasis on the most vivid extremes of the instruments at her disposal. Bley writes music of serious whimsy–and after 30 years of doing so, she has the stature to cast leading-man soloists in her musical screenplays....

“They called it exotic. They said we should be in the nightclubs. I said, ‘I think this is concert dancing.’” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So Darlene Blackburn took her art–African and Afro-Caribbean dance–to the schools: to public schools through Urban Gateways and to Columbia College, where she gave master classes and lectures. That was back in the late 60s and early 70s, when even African Americans were not quite ready for what she was doing....

DARDI MCGINLEY AND PAM MCNEIL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At a recent concert at Link’s Hall, Dardi McGinley’s and Pam McNeil’s dances were unmistakably the products of their own movement styles. McGinley’s oldest work on this program, Tigerbutter, a solo she danced herself, seemed most characteristic. She’s very young and strong and springy, with an explosive style that can give her dancing a stop-start quality, one burst of movement–cartwheel, jump, or turning leap–after another....

Though known outside Japan mainly for his deliriously inventive gangster pictures, Seijun Suzuki also ventured, with no less passion and an equally bold style, into literary adaptation and melodrama. Joy Girls is from a trilogy he made at the end of his studio days (1956-’67) that puts prostitutes center stage, mixing the Freudian notions of Eros and Thanatos. Played with breathless intensity and frankness by Yumiko Nogawa, postwar Japan’s most daring actress, the main character of Joy Girls is a prostitute, Harumi, who volunteers to serve garrisons of soldiers and officers fighting Chinese insurgents in Manchuria during the last days of World War II....

I have a Jamaican friend who can’t understand why Chicagoans paint their houses white, gray, or beige. If he had a house, he says, he’d paint it violet or sky blue. I think Guinea must be filled with people like my friend: when its national dance company, Les Ballets Africains, appeared here in the fall of 1991 at the Auditorium Theatre, I called it an avalanche of color. Now the troupe returns, for one night only, with a show they’ve been working on for the last two years....

“Hi babe,” came Eileen’s voice over the phone. “I need you to do me a really, really big favor.” The medical examiner’s notes say Bob,* a 59-year-old white male, was driving his own car (not a cab) when a massive heart attack hit. He lost control and struck another car, but there were no other injuries, to himself or others. Bob had called his garage that day to reserve a cab, but he never showed....

When you go to hear pianist Michael Weiss, don’t expect him to sound strikingly different from a raft of other pianists–at least, not at first. Weiss has a strong, clean technique that serves his mastery of bebop phrasing and dynamics, and a complete command of the idiom’s conventions and idiosyncrasies (including the ability to offer a wide variety of humorous or telling quotations from other songs). But then so do dozens of his peers, not to mention all those twentysomething keyboardists shooting for the big time....

Lead Story In Kissimmee, Florida, in May, William Nelson was shot twice point-blank by a man with a .38-caliber snub-nosed revolver. One shot went through his shoulder; the other hit him “square in the forehead and just stopped,” according to police officer Jim Lakey. Nelson’s only major problem was that his “ears were ringing.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Consumer Product Safety Commission’s May report on sports injuries said 1,455 people were sent to emergency rooms in 1992 with injuries suffered while playing Ping-Pong....

Hector Duarte wears a characteristic red bandanna. It makes him look swashbuckling, a blue-jeaned pirate of mural art. Mariah de Forest has donned a print dress and a sun hat that ties around her chin; she resembles a home gardener. Today they’re not up on the scissors lift painting; they’re on terra firma talking. They stand together in this large empty parking lot at 4100 S. Ashland and point at a very long building wall full of flying squares and spheres....

The most misused and abused word in the restaurant business these days is probably “bistro,” successor to its distant Italian cousin “trattoria.” Everything from Greek-owned coffee shops to pretentious spaghetti joints call themselves bistros, and some California and New York chefs–perhaps at the suggestion of their marketing consultants–have even laid claim to creating the “true” American bistro. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bistro cooking is simpler than that of the grand restaurant, but more elaborate and varied than at a cafe or brasserie....

Sometimes you can tell a band by its alumni: two of our most insightful and eclectic young blues guitarists, Duke Robillard and Ronnie Earl, cut their teeth in this veteran New England-based group. Those names alone should give you an idea of Roomful’s style: they mix hip jump-blues sophistication with enough rawness to keep the house rocking, all within a framework of brawny big-band swing. Sugar Ray Norcia’s sweet-timbred baritone vocals evoke a more callow Billy Eckstine, and the band’s unusually wide array of soloists–from guitarist Chris Vachon to trombonist Carl Querfurth to baritone saxophonist Doug James–evokes over a half century of tradition and an entire continent’s worth of regional styles in a single set, sometimes in a single number....

SLOW DANCE ON THE KILLING GROUND Touchstone Theatre’s production of Slow Dance on the Killing Ground provides a textbook example of why a theater company should remain faithful to the original words of a playwright. The company veers away from William Hanley’s script only on a couple of occasions, but that changes the play, muddling its meaning. Rather than being a play about truths hidden beneath lies, it becomes a play in which truths and lies are indistinguishable....

Many friends and colleagues have been moaning about what a bad year 1994 was for movies, but I disagree. The main issue, I think, isn’t so much how we feel about the same movies–though there are a few differences there, including in some cases where and when we happened to see them–as it is what we saw. If you’re lucky enough to be living in Chicago, you had loads of terrific movies to see last year, new as well as old, and if you didn’t see very many of them, it’s possible that you were looking in the wrong places–where the mass media was telling you to look....

THE INNOCENTS’ CRUSADE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The question of how to find meaning in an uncertain world has intrigued many contemporary playwrights, but none more than Keith Reddin. “Either you build yourself a bunker,” he has said, “or you learn to deal with it.” His Peacekeeper is set in a bunker–an underground nuclear-missile site where soldiers watch their lives disintegrate while they anticipate the moment that will destroy the world but validate their sacrifice....

*** NAKED Mike Leigh’s virtuosity as a writer-director and the raw theatrical power of David Thewlis, his lead actor, combine with the sheer unpleasantness of much of Naked to make it a disturbingly ambiguous experience. The apocalyptic, end-of-the-millennium rage of Thewlis’s Johnny–an articulate, grungy working-class lout on the dole who abuses women and spews negativity–registers at times as Leigh’s commentary on the bleak harvest of Thatcherism. But at other times it registers as the ravings of a malcontent too frustrated and paralyzed to even know what he wants....