Improvisational dance is as much a philosophy as an art form. To do it well, a dancer must have a heightened awareness of the environment, opening up all the senses, and allow the normal babble in the brain to fall quiet. Once this Zen-like state has been achieved, movement becomes energized–becomes a pure response to other dancers, to the surrounding space, to the music, and to one’s own feelings. Watching it requires a similar level of awareness: becoming open to the impulses that propel the dancers to move spontaneously and freely....

German pianist Georg Grawe is a fascinating study in the impact of Cecil Taylor on European sensibilities. GrŠwe discovered Taylor through fellow German Alexander von Schlippenbach, the influential free-jazz pianist Grawe grew up listening to, and this filtration process has yielded a particularly invigorating approach. Like most post-Taylor pianists, Grawe blurs the line between composition and improvisation, wielding a thorough knowledge of both jazz and classical music. Best known for his astonishing trio with Dutch cellist Ernst Reijseger and American percussionist Gerry Hemingway, Grawe can retool his approach to fit any context–say, for example, his terrific large ensemble GrubenKlangOrchester or his highly intuitive duets with performers like pianist Marilyn Crispell and reedman Frank Gratkowski....

Ask Zach Jacobs about the differences between Europe and America, and you might hear something like this: Travelers in Europe are in constant contact with each other, through an endless network of rail routes, cheap hotels, and cafes. Travelers in the United States have virtually no contact at all, especially in the midwest. With Chicago marooned between the coasts, visitors are more likely to arrive by plane than by any less hurried, more congenial mode of transportation....

MODERN PROBLEMS IN SCIENCE Back in high school and college there was always a wiseass who could do impressions of our teachers. He’d swagger about like that flamboyant drama instructor, purse his lips and mimic the Latin prof, and then crack his whip and teach swimming like Frau Lazar. Sure, the impressions pretty much sucked, but hell, we weren’t paying for it. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now that party topics have graduated to stock options, networking, and the ghastly Tex-Mex-Cajun-style grouper parfait somebody got sick on last week, we might be a little nostalgic for the time when Paulie’s imitation of Madame Durham made us breathless with laughter, when comedy was only a few blocks away in somebody’s basement or dorm room....

Sitting in an anchored boat 15 feet from a violently overflowing cofferdam on a rainy winter night is not my idea of the idyllic Illinois fishing experience. But this story isn’t about barefoot boys, poles propped between toes, snoozing on the banks of sun-kissed streams. This is about the Rock River, particularly the fast-flowing stretch of the Rock that passes through the town of Oregon, Illinois. It’s the stretch you see as you cross the Route 64 bridge on your way to Galena or Mississippi Palisades State Park....

Lead Story In March elementary school teacher Myra Obasi, 29, of Shreveport, Louisiana, was brought, bleeding from the eyes, to Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas by her two sisters, who eventually were charged with having gouged out Obasi’s eyes with their fingers because they thought she was possessed by the spirit of their father. Detectives were unable to question Obasi for several hours because she refused to stop chanting, “Thank you, Jesus....

Excerpted from Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama copyright 1995 by Barack Obama. Reprinted by permission of Times Books, a division of Random House, Inc. “That’s how things were, one long adventure, the bounty of a young boy’s life. In letters to my grandparents [in Hawaii], I would faithfully record many of these events. . . . But not everything made its way into my letters; some things I found too difficult to explain [such as] the face of the man who had come to our door one day with a gaping hole where his nose should have been....

In 1988 the Bay Area experimental band Negativland issued a bogus press release suggesting a link between their song “Christianity Is Stupid” and a set of gruesome ax murders in Minnesota. Poking fun at the way the media rarely checks sources, the hoax snowballed into a nationally reported story. Such “culture jamming” is a common interest of all the people in Craig Baldwin’s film Sonic Outlaws, which profiles Negativland and such like-minded artists as John Oswald, the Tape-Beatles, the Barbie Liberation Organization, and Emergency Broadcast Network....

You can’t tell the players without a scorecard, folks–now that the ballet scene in Chicago is about as mixed-up as it can be. But you should know that one of Ballet Chicago’s brightest stars, former resident choreographer Gordon Peirce Schmidt, has started his own company, RPM Productions, with his composer-brother Kimberly Schmidt and designer Jeff Bauer, and that as part of Dance Chicago ’95 they’re performing three holiday pieces, two old and one brand-new....

Coppelia Despite it all Ballet Chicago has managed to stage Coppelia, a genuinely entertaining romantic comedy first produced in 1870 and based on a story by E.T.A. Hoffmann (the same fellow who penned The Nutcracker). Coppelia is to ballet what A Midsummer Night’s Dream or The Importance of Being Earnest is to theater: true love, fickle hearts, mistaken identities, and quick wit work their way into this charming story about a giant doll who seemingly comes to life and steals the heart of a young villager named Franz....

SMITHEREENS 7/29, METRO On their recent Don Dixon-produced A Date With the Smithereens (RCA), the veteran New York pop/rock foursome prove they still have a way with straight-ahead, crisp, hooky, precise songwriting and execution. But time seems to have taken an ugly toll on Pat DiNinzio’s lyrics. I assumed both “Sick of Seattle” (“Tired of flannel and growin’ my hair”) and “Gotti” (“Goodfellas, politicians, what’s the difference anyway / Gotti is my hero, he’s the Robin Hood of the present day”) were tossed off as low-rent jokes....

Sticker Shock Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One part of the contract sure to cause problems is the provision calling for each group to make a $21,000 deposit. An initial payment of $5,000 would be due this May, followed by another $7,000 in December and a final $9,000 in July 1996–still well over a year before the theater’s proposed opening in late 1997. Several sources say the board of directors needs the cash up front to secure the project’s financing....

Suede’s jaw-dropping show at Metro a few months back merely confirmed the bruising, caterwauling authority of the British band’s swaggery debut album. Singer Brett Anderson’s undisguised polymorphous perversity (“Have you ever tried it that way?”) and guitarist Bernard Butler’s hooky, bashed-out guitar lines combined to approach the “pandemonium live” the pair vowed to create when they started their bond two years ago. After a tumultuous reception in the UK, they came to America this year to find the colonies in the arms of some grungy and more masculine boys from Seattle, many of them sporting funny goatees....

THE GOOD TIME GIRLS, at Cafe Voltaire. Michael Flores’s play exemplifies a key principle in the genre of erotic literature, whether hard-core porn or soft-core soap–namely, that nobody gets excited about a bad girl doing bad things, only about a good girl doing bad things. A trilogy of monologues ostensibly delivered by legendary 50s cheesecake model Betty Page, self-promoting 60s supergroupie Pamela Des Barres, and accused 90s “Hollywood Madame” Heidi Fleiss, The Good Time Girls examines women “whose strength is their sexuality,” according to the program....

Chicago TheatreWorks, at the Organic Theater Company Greenhouse, South Hall. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some playwrights seem to have difficulty remembering that they’re writing for the live stage, not for the television studio. John L. Wood’s two new full-length plays, both being produced by Chicago TheatreWorks, are full of the manufactured improbabilities and facile plot devices that network producers slobber over. In The Santa Anas a downtrodden class-conscious Latino kid gets caught burglarizing the sumptuous home of a Zen-spouting, suicidal Hollywood hack....

Trib Wins the Tape Race But what buried the Sun-Times from the get go–despite that paper’s flashes of superiority as the trial wore on–wasn’t anything tony at all. The Tribune simply ran the (bowdlerized) transcript of the Heard-Reynolds tapes a day before the Sun-Times did. Sometimes a day is like a century. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Regular readers of the Tribune’s “Corrections and clarifications” might conclude the paper’s editors endlessly suffer the torments of the damned, wrestling nightly with their souls over venial sins and wringing their hands in contrition every morning....

Technically, this low-budget 16-millimeter television film (1986) qualifies as Jane Campion’s first feature. The script is by Australian novelist Helen Garner, one of whose books was the source for Monkey Grip, a film in the Australian retrospective at the Film Center. (She also worked with Gillian Armstrong on The Last Days of Chez Nous.) The mise en scene, though clearly Campion-esque in certain stretches of oddball inventiveness, is still some distance from the splendors of Sweetie, An Angel at My Table, and The Piano....

Lost, lost, I don’t wanna be lost. –Maestro Subgum and the Whole, from the song “Rainy Day” Beau talks about the difficulties involved in covering a $2,000 overhead with $1,800 in receipts. He talks about the strains involved in working experimentally, reminding us both that “there are no models: what’s vital about the fringe isn’t just new work, it’s new forms.” He takes a moment to consider the prospect of a theater world without new forms....

GREEN MILL ALL-STARS REUNION Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s a long-standing music-business tradition that most steady jazz gigs run Tuesday through the weekend–which leaves the players free on Monday nights. When the Green Mill opened up as a jazz room nearly 12 years ago, owner Dave Jemilo took advantage of that fact to assemble a Monday-night quintet under the leadership of saxophonist Ed Petersen and trumpeter Steve Jensen....

**** THE SECOND HEIMAT (Masterpiece) Directed and written by Edgar Reitz With Henry Arnold, Salome Kammer, Daniel Smith, Noemi Steuer, Armin Fuchs, Martin Maria Blau, Laszlo I. Kish, Frank Roth, Anke Sevenich, Franziska Traub, Michael Schonborn, Hannelore Hoger, Susanne Lothar, Alexander May, and Peter Weiss. The point of citing all these examples is that the revolutionary politics and artistic ferment we associate with the 60s and early 70s weren’t independent phenomena....