Zephyr Dance Ensemble artistic director Michelle Kranicke has created two new dances that sneak up on you. At first her duet A Minor Concern seems merely a catalog of quirky movement, made even more disjointed by its accompaniment: a singsong children’s ditty. But the movement starts to create a logic of its own, the logic of a broken windup toy. When Tom Waits’s music begins in the second half of the dance, the movement becomes more assured and driving, delivering an emotional punch, a sort of absent grief over things that have never been found....

Famous Door Shows Its Board the Way Out Taking its uncertain future firmly into its own hands, the award-winning Famous Door Theatre Company has made the unusual decision to fire its entire ten-member board of directors. Usually a theater company’s board makes the final decisions about how the company is managed and who is hired or terminated, not the other way around. Famous Door’s extraordinary action apparently reflects the significant growing pains and financial pressure that the six-year-old company faces....

Paris is where the most ambitious Francophone African musicians go to try for international stardom, and it’s also where singers Nyboma Mwan Dido and Wuta Mayi, guitarist Syran Mbenza, and bassist Bopol Mansiamina all met in 1983 and teamed up as Les Quatres Etoiles (the Four Stars). All are outstanding Zairean soukous musicians who–after apprenticing with such popular central African recording artists as Franco, Tabu Ley Rochereau, and Dr. Nico–had established themselves as popular recording artists in Africa before moving to Paris....

Ghetto Life 101: Was It Exploitive? “It’s kind of rowdy in the morning,” says LeAlan into his microphone. “Sometimes we learn. Most of the time it’s just too rowdy to learn.” The boys interview their teacher at Donoghue Elementary. “Yes, yes it’s difficult,” she says. “It’s difficult because of the publicity that surrounds the area. And you don’t believe that we believe you’re smart.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The tenor of our times? Quite possibly: the innovative signals of saxophonist Joe Henderson’s luminescent style have long made him a favorite of his fellow musicians. (These include his unflappable and wholly modern swing; his burred, woody tone; the fluttery expressionism of his upper register; and his nomadic improvisations, which seem to sprawl but cut like a scalpel.) In any case, now is this tenor’s time: having spent years as a darling of the cognoscenti, Henderson has emerged in the 90s to popular acclaim and two successive Grammy-awarded albums....

Ever since the recording industry began marketing African music to Westerners, it’s been disheartening to note how many acts have embraced glossy, high-tech production style, to the point where their music starts to resemble the overprocessed Anglo-American pop slop that sent so many listeners to the international music bins in the first place. It’s not so much that African acts are filtering the grit out of their art to broaden its appeal to foreigners–on the contrary, it appears that the tendency for musicians to be attracted to studio slickness may simply be universal....

For The Pink: An Erotic Ritual of Sound and Dance, New York choreographer Muna Tseng took her inspiration from The Golden Lotus, an erotic Ming dynasty novel that remains banned in her native Hong Kong. “I took out of it the essence of human desire,” she says, “of human longing, of an inner life, of sensuality–the desire to have contact with another human being.” The Pink addresses such heavy issues as sexual oppression and objectification, but Tseng never preaches....

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 and the occasional late-night extra. 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....

Every week Joe Sochor packs up his kitchen and brings it to a new location. Last November Sochor started FoodRave, a floating restaurant offering constantly changing menus with sometimes telling and sometimes not-so-telling names like “Tribute to Charlie Trotter’s” and “Invented in Chicago.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “People are not just tumbling in off the street,” he says. Occasionally an extra person shows up, but, according to Sochor, numbers have not been a problem....

Mere mention of the bass trumpet will usually stop a perfectly good discussion in its tracks, if only because so many people otherwise schooled in music have never heard–or even heard of–this odd cross between trumpet and trombone. In fact, most listeners mistake its throaty, polished sound for that of a trombone with valves (itself a relatively rare bird); but because of its compact, more tightly coiled design, the bass trumpet offers more weight and a sharper attack in the lower ranges and an added clarity up top than trombones of traditional design....

By Harold Henderson Those of us who are neither mathematicians nor poets tend to prefer our paradoxes out of sight and out of mind. But Kauffman seeks them out. Then he scrutinizes them, plays with them, tries to find parallels in other paradoxes. Some of the underlying patterns he discovers will become useful in biology, chemistry, physics. Some will simply remain oddities. Of course you can’t do much math if you worry about which are which, and you can’t tell ahead of time anyway....

Pegasus Players. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Joseph Soto’s Mi Barrio Loco, about Mexican families torn apart by street gangs, is tough, tersely written, and compulsively watchable. It may be a tad overwritten in parts, and its gritty dialogue often feels imitative, but the right production could have made it crackle–it might one day make an excellent film. Yet it’s been crippled by some stilted approximations of street talk and director Ralph Flores’s peculiar casting choices: a white, suburban girl-next-door type in the role of a rough-and-ready Mexican, and Rey Francia in a stunningly off-the-mark campy turn as an addled matriarch....

BUDDY MILLER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Country journeyman Buddy Miller traveled a long road to reach the gates of last year’s superb Your Love and Other Lies (Hightone). Back in the 60s he cut his teeth on bluegrass and brushed them with psychedelia, moving around from San Francisco to New York, Austin, and Los Angeles before ending up in Nashville. While in LA he hooked up with Jim Lauderdale, and the duo soon gained moderate popularity as a live act....

Friday 10/11 – Thursday 10/17 Anyone who’s spent time sipping joe at Earwax has gotten a taste of sideshow art–those banners advertising exhibitions of the weird and extraordinary. Unconcerned with representing reality, most artists never even saw their subjects, creating fantastical depictions that rarely resembled the actual attraction. The flashy form’s legitimized at Carl Hammer Gallery’s Freak Show: 20th Century Sideshow Banner Art exhibit, which features works with such subjects as “the monkey girl” and “the tattooed woman....

Captured at the James Randi Hotline http://www.mindspring.com/-anson/randi-hotline Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The January issue of the Smithsonian magazine ran a major article that is extremely shocking, bearing in mind the reputation of this periodical. It’s hard for me to imagine who on the staff of Smithsonian made the decision to run the piece. It’s a highly positive article on dowsing, a seven-page paean to the wonders that are accomplished with pendulums and forked sticks–such as choosing medications, vitamins and foods, finding water, deciding upon which “Personal” ad to answer, and even assessing videotapes for entertainment value!...

Steve Reich’s music is so rarely heard in Orchestra Hall that the local premiere of a major orchestral compostion of his is welcome news even if it is belated. Three Movements, commissioned by the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra in 1985, represents the New York minimalist at the top of his form, asserting with clarity and purpose the supremacy of pulse and tonality. The seating of the orchestra is rearranged to accomodate the flow of ever so subtly changing rhythms: marimbas, vibraphones, and pianos are placed directly in front of the conductor, and the strings are divided evenly between both sides of the stage a la Bartok to better convey the slow alterations in harmony....

Degas: Beyond Impressionism The Art Institute is touting its big, special-admission Degas show as an exhibit that comes “from a period of his career once shrouded in mystery.” Once, perhaps, but the huge 1988 Degas retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York placed this same period in the context of his whole career. The story that show told was of a painter who after age 50 transformed himself into a kind of proto-abstractionist: Degas’ late pastels have an extraordinary inner light, an intensity of color and form that makes them fully the equal of the fauvist and abstract work of later painters....

These exceptional personal documentaries add up to a potent double bill; of the nonfiction films in the festival that I’ve seen, these are in many ways the best. Deborah Hoffman’s Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter, which deals only in passing with the fact that the director’s a lesbian, is a beautifully precise, acute, intelligent, practical, touching, and even (at times) comic record of how she copes with her discovery that her mother has Alzheimer’s disease....

CORIN CURSCHELLAS & THE RECYCLERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Spoken by some 50,000 residents of eastern Switzerland, Romansh is the country’s fourth official language. Singer Corin Curschellas has used Romansh, her native language, on her own records, Music Loves Me and Rappa nomada (both on the Swiss MGB label), and she’ll be singing the words of contemporary Romansh poets in the free mini festival “Voices of Romansh....

Film Fest’s Evans Bows Out Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Evans confirms that the discussion took place. He says he listened to the board member (whom he declined to identify), but after some consideration decided not to pursue the matter. Subsequently he resigned. Though he’s leaving Cinema/Chicago, the fest’s not-for-profit parent organization, at the end of this month, Evans, who’s interested in pursuing a job in film production, says he will probably continue to work as a consultant on the upcoming 31st annual film festival, which runs October 12 through 29....