Results tagged “performingarts”

Alash, masters of Tuvan throat singing and traditional instruments, will perform Wednesday at the University of Chicago's International House (1414 E. 59th) as part of its Global Voices Performing Arts Series.

It’s cold. And you need something hot to spice up your weekend, don’t you? If so then make your way to the Funky Buddha Lounge, where this Saturday night the club will play host to the Sex Workers' Art Show, a traveling sextravaganza that features a variety of visual and performing arts produced entirely by sex workers.

Saturday night at SketchFest was bigger, better, rowdier, drunker. Performers might have found audiences more forgiving (when friends and family came) and tougher (when the front row was soused). Groups filling the most coveted slots brought energy, harmony, and a bizarre hilarity to the stage.

It’s expected to revitalize a neglected part of Hyde Park but won’t look anything like its neighbors—a sleek skyscraper surrounded by Gothic curiosities and post-war bureaucratic eyesores. It is the new Reva and David Logan Center for Creative and Performing Arts, expected to rise 160 feet above the Midway Plaisance and scheduled to open in 2011. Yesterday, the University of Chicago awarded the $100 million project commission to Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, a New York based husband and wife team plus associates, who “see architecture as an act of profound optimism.” We’ll see if that attitude can transform Where Fun Comes To Die.

Between resting from the family and finishing off the leftover turkey we figure you won’t have too much time for action this weekend. We are bringing you a special Thanksgiving weekend jaunts together for your viewing and doing pleasure. As always, feel free to add additional events in the comments section. As the ignoble comments your family made wear off, we suggest laughing at their expense. Second City presents the Dysfunctional Holiday Revue at the...

Don't let your ex-hippie parents try to convince you that they invented the student protest back in the 60's. Even with all the sit-ins, marches, slogans, and weed, they were just continuing a long tradition of student oppostion to everything from the physical fitness of their professors to too much emphasis on trigonometry in the curriculum.

When you think of Chicago arts students, several schools might come to mind. The School of the Art Institute and Columbia College would surely be on the list, and maybe even you’d throw in Northwestern for some theatre. But the University of Chicago? Not unless your idea of art is some abstract illustration of economic models or something equally dorky.

Camp of Dreams is a Chicago program that helps bring free educational programs to young people who would otherwise go without. Students participate in a 3-week sleepover camp in the summer and in Community Days 2 Saturdays a month during the school year. Activities include things of an academic nature, visual and performing arts, mind and body, and civic engagement. And in all of the activities, the students learn about accountability and about living up to commitments to themselves, their fellow participants, and their broader community.

Small and smallish theaters routinely provide some of the best entertainment value in the city. Seems like no one understands that better than the side project, who has turned one of Chicago’s most intimate performance spaces, the side studio, into a Rogers Park destination. Opening in 2000 as a 20-seat venue that would expand to 32 seats a year later, the studio has hosted a steady stream of imaginative productions for a mix of friends, friends of friends, and theater nuts who read deep into the performing arts listings. The side project helps perpetuate this city’s reputation for immediate, in-your-face theater. Late night and off-hours, the space hosts spirited, cash-strapped groups, often on the experimental side: this was where the world (and Chicagoist) first saw Sock Puppet Showgirls.

Anton Chekhov famously advised aspiring playwrights: If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last. Craig Wright turns that rule on its head in Grace, his powerful meditation on faith, reason and time now playing at the Northlight Theater. Here, the gun fires during an opening scene staged in reverse. The rest of the show pieces together how protagonists Steve and Sara, a devout Christian couple undone by a sham business deal compromising their faith, and their neighbor Sam, a scientist who doubts God in the wake of tremendous loss, arrive at that violent moment.

For most of Chicagoist, not to mention the majority of its readership, our first exposure to Richard Pryor was not that of the man who combined his own personal pain with what the Tribune's Allan Johnson calls "the human condition" to create some of the most important social commentary in American history but rather as the balloon vendor in The Muppet Movie. It would be several years before we were not only able to get...

Small theaters may have a friend in City Council. Yesterday a Council committee advanced a theater-friendly proposal, moving one step closer to ratifying the much touted Performing Arts Venue (PAV) license and relieving small companies who can’t or won’t navigate municipal bureaucracy.

Admittedly, Chicagoist tends to be on the jaded side when it comes to ...

‘Tis the season for all sizes and flavors of “Christmas Carol” offerings, plus variations on its time-honored (some might say “tired”) theme. Our favorite standby is ye olde Muppets version, costarring a surprisingly tuneful Michael Caine, but our job here is to send you out into the world, not to your sofa zones. Luckily, Chicagoland has plenty of theatrical Scrooges to please everyone, everywhere, over the holidays: For the Purists: “A Christmas Carol” The...

Aida