Merce Cunningham’s dances show that structured randomness provides a playground for the mind. In eyeSpace, being performed on both programs here, audience members listen to randomly arranged selections from the score on iPods. Fabrications, on the second program, brings a “dance painting” to life from an initially limited palette: two performers barely stand out from a hazy blue matrix. Later shifts in lighting and choreography reveal what’s actually there–five dancers strategically arranged to look like two–and change your perception of the backdrop, an abstract painting whose lines and colors appear and disappear....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Researchers at the UK’s University of Birmingham announced in May that they’d powered a small electric fan using hydrogen excreted by E. coli bacteria that had been fed caramel and nougat waste from a chocolate factory. And in March Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan said that her team had successfully synthesized vanillin, the primary element in vanilla extract, from cow manure....

I’m a divorced man who’s been dating a married woman in an open/poly relationship for six months. Her husband has been occupied with his new girlfriend. As a result his wife has been spending a lot more time with me. She’s feeling (understandably) abandoned by her husband, and I’m picking up the slack. While I find her general GGG-ness refreshing, the truth is that I also find her boring. I’ve made it clear that she could never be my primary partner, and she assures me that she’s fine with that–so long as I don’t dump her....

R = recommended With his Tarzan physique, Dutch-boy haircut, and cucumber crotch, model and gay erotica legend Peter Berlin set a standard for masculinity in the 70s. Jim Tushinski’s video documentary reveals how the German-born Berlin cultivated his iconic image by photographing himself for magazine layouts and directing two Warholian porn features before abruptly retiring from filmmaking. Now in his 60s and living in relative seclusion in San Francisco, the proudly narcissistic star of That Boy reflects on his career in interviews that are intercut with vintage footage and the reflections of people such as Armistead Maupin and John Waters....

This summer’s festival schedule started with the frisson of a behind-the-scenes flap: Most of the credit for the success of last year’s inaugural Intonation Music Festival went to its curators at Pitchfork Media, not to organizer Mike Reed and the events-planning and publicity company Skyline Chicago, who got the whole thing off the ground. So when Skyline announced they’d be parting ways with Pitchfork (and Reed) and picking a different curator for each subsequent festival, it surprised just about everyone–including Pitchfork’s staff....

friday6 cFALGUNI PATHAK Of the estimated 125,000 Indian immigrants living in the Chicago area, approximately half hail from the western state of Gujarat. To celebrate the autumn Hindu festivals of Navratri and Dussehra, Gujaratis perform a dandiya raas, or “dance of swords,” in which actors use wooden sticks to re-create the battle between goddess Durga and demon Mahishasura. The dance is generally performed to upbeat folk music dominated by traditional percussion instruments like the dhol, but Falguni Pathak has become India’s “dandiya queen” by adding Western instruments....

This Chicago Vanguard/Strawdog Theatre Company coproduction of Philip Dawkins’s two one-acts explores the comic potential of mixing issues of ethnic identity and sexual orientation. In 564 Things to Do With a Peanut a gay couple tries to back out of adopting an Indian woman’s baby because they find it ugly. Though Dawkins might have poked fun at wealthy Westerners who view underprivileged children as fashionable accessories, the piece gets stalled in its premise....

The Bluest Eye at the Duncan YMCA Chernin Center for the Arts Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The central character in Morrison’s tragic, poetic 1970 novel, Pecola Breedlove, is an 11-year-old black girl living in Lorain, Ohio (Morrison’s hometown), in 1941. Pecola desperately wants blue eyes–as blue as Shirley Temple’s, as blue as Jane’s in her Dick and Jane primer. She believes that blue eyes will make her beautiful and loved–perhaps even as loved as the little white girl her emotionally stunted mother, a domestic worker, cares for during the day (a child represented by a large white baby doll in this production)....

If Charles Berg’s new comedy, staged at Italian hot spot Vivo, doesn’t please you, chef Vicente Duran’s cooking will. The seven performers excel at blending in as waitstaff (and one ireful theater critic), but Berg’s script feels spotty and underdeveloped despite its occasional wit and agreeable quirkiness. In the first of several intended episodes, a failed actor returns to the restaurant owned by his father, now managed by his hard-as-nails brother....

For not much more than the cost of a movie, you can watch dozens of accomplished Chinese acrobats juggle, fly from trapezes, jump through hoops, and ride a bike en masse. Unfortunately, you have to put up with emcee Marco Polo’s annoying cartoon-character delivery of writer Richard Marcus’s anachronistic patter, with its doomed stabs at humor. Though the impulse to put the show in the context of the Silk Road is admirable, the execution cheapens it....

Lisa Loomer’s bittersweet comedy deserves better than this Rivendell Theatre Ensemble staging. Her story of a thirtysomething couple who desperately want to conceive or adopt a child rings true–and avoids all the cloying cliches that make shows like Maltby and Shire’s Baby so nauseating. But too many of the Rivendell folks don’t have a clue how to mine the humor and pathos in Loomer’s script. In particular artistic director Tara Mallen doesn’t really have the range to play all the moods of the protagonist, Miranda, a once rational woman driven over the edge by painful medical procedures and all the myriad torturous details that turn the attempt to become parents into an emotional roller coaster....

Good last point: What is the difference between contemplated solutions to difficult problems and actual behavior [Hot Type, March 4]? Too bad there wasn’t a good answer. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If the test tells us something valid, then we have to accept the fact that journalists are incompetent. Either they lie or they screw up. Whichever it is, they do it a lot....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s pretty hard to describe the highly conceptual work of German sound artist and composer Christina Kubisch —part of its allure is the air of mystery that surrounds it. But one thing she’s long demonstrated is her deep interest in the everyday sounds around us, the ones we usually take for granted. A recording like Twelve Signals (Semishigure, 2003), which chronicles 52 minutes in the life of a sound installation she put up in a Berlin church back in 1999, manages to stand on its own, in a minimalist sort of way, though it obviously pales when compared to the actual installation....

While waiting to get my eyebrows waxed for free last summer at Shop CHICago, a femme bazaar sponsored by the nonprofit arts group Gen Art designed to promote girl bonding and the buying of crap, I got into a spat with a tall blond who didn’t understand the concept of a line. She sat down in the chair when it was my turn to go, and when I asked if she was somehow involved with the event–if she had some kind of VIP status–she said, “You must be really insecure to say something like that....

Near the end of John Kolvenbach’s sweet, strange romantic comedy, Molly Regan and Ian Barford as disparate siblings sit together in quiet rapport, smoking imaginary cigarettes. One can almost see the smoke whorling above their heads, and yet of course they’re not doing anything that could really damage them. The moment serves as the play’s own commentary on Kolvenbach’s defiantly sentimental but smart defense of the role of imagination (or even delusion) in keeping human relationships alive....

In the last four years or so some of the most successful female country singers have turned their backs on the formulas that made them chart fixtures: Patty Loveless experimented with a more acoustic, bluegrass-flavored sound on her last three albums, and Lee Ann Womack’s last record was filled with old-school honky-tonk ballads complete with unhappy endings. Maybe it’s coincidence or proof of a trend among women hitting middle age in a youth-dominated market, but Martina McBride joined that company late last year with Timeless (RCA), a stunning collection of covers....

Mary J. Blige has released four albums since her tumultuous relationship with former Jodeci front man K-Ci Hailey ended in 1997, each chronicling a different stage in the postbreakup struggle to find love and self-respect. The first, Mary, was about prideful mourning: the “fuck him, I’m awesome” period. The second, No More Drama, was the summer of parties, drunken rebounds, and private crying jags. The third, Love & Life, was the new relationship and clarity you get after dropping six grand on therapy....

News Flash: Soccer’s Huge If soccer’s not the church you worship at, all this is ecstatic gibberish. Or hilarious overwriting. But let’s be kind. Let’s call it an attempt to cover soccer the way Tocqueville would have covered the World Series for a paper back in France. It’s a love of the game talking, and also maybe a fear of readers who think soccer unadorned is sort of silly and sort of a bore....

In conjunction with the Field Museum’s exhibit “Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years,” Live Bait Theater restages Edward Thomas-Herrera’s 1995 adaptation of social secretary Letitia Baldrige’s memoirs. “History is often a matter of the simple and everyday,” she says, then proceeds to make her point by offering personal accounts of situations when national and international goodwill was facilitated–or threatened–by such factors as wardrobe, party refreshments, and diplomatic gifts. In this chamber reading, Laurie Larson reprises the role of Baldrige while the rest of the ensemble replicates the icons of the period, giving them an uncaricatured dignity....

Andrew Douglas’s remake of The Amityville Horror takes a more accurate measure of the diminishing cultural authority of the Catholic church in America than any news analysis piece that followed the death of Pope John Paul II. In the original version, released in 1979, Father Delaney (Rod Steiger) piously struggles to save a family from the haunted house on Long Island it has just moved into; in the new version the priest’s role is greatly reduced, and the one who does appear—Father Callaway, played by Philip Baker Hall—is cowardly and ineffectual....