Spanish dancers often look like predators stalking their prey–or like armies challenging each other. Dame Libby Komaiko, Ensemble Espanol’s artistic director, celebrates its 30th anniversary in part with a revival of Feria Andaluza, a large-scale ensemble piece that features many festival dances (tangos flamencos, bulerias, sevillanas) in jolly, kaleidoscopic, occasionally confrontational groupings across the stage. Because she was also looking for “something different–different music, a different aesthetic,” she invited Juan Mata and Ana Gonzalez, founding members of the National Ballet of Spain, to choreograph a dance that combines the traditional and the modern....

Local playwright Margaret Lewis offers no easy solutions to the thorny ethical dilemmas in her new script, about two German art students in the 1930s struggling in the face of Nazi censorship and persecution. Max is a neoclassical landscape painter inadvertently in accord with Nazi ideals, and so his star is on the rise despite his contempt for Hitler. But to stay on track he must condemn his best friend, Karl, as a “degenerate” radical modernist and thus an enemy of the state....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Landing with an extravagant thud in mailboxes everywhere right now is that annual testament to the state of specialty foods industry, the Dean & DeLuca holiday catalog. It’s surprisingly appealing for being, in the end, just another catalog. It doesn’t even rate as conventional food porn — no oversized, gleaming, so-close-you can-taste-it art like a cookbook, or the Williams-Sonoma catalog....

It’s not quite a long night’s journey into boredom, but Clayton J. Horath’s revival for Collage Productions does lengthen out the play’s inactive action. Performed in the cramped entry hall of a 1910 mansion, meant to evoke the 1912 cottage where Eugene O’Neill set his family tragedy, this Journey sure looks the claustrophobic part but suffers from poor sight lines and acoustics, not helped by actors’ poor projection. Often inaudible in her character’s morphine haze, Barbara Button is ghostlike as the mother, while Jeff Helgeson as the recriminating dad isn’t large enough to be a nightmare, reciting when he isn’t roaring, and Jeff McVann drowns the inebriated elder brother in enervation....

Didn’t make it south for carnival this year? It’s OK–you can go see Luna Negra’s performance of Vicente Nebrada’s Batucada fantastica. The Venezuelan choreographer made this vibrant, stirring piece in 1977 for his own company, Ballet Internacional de Caracas, which performed the work with one woman on pointe and seven men. Later he set it on the New York group Ballet Hispanico, where Luna Negra artistic director Eduardo Vilaro was a principal dancer for nine years....

To record the new Natural (Quarterstick), this 30-year-old transatlantic combo convened in a farmhouse in the English countryside. The pastoral surroundings seem to have rubbed off on the wonderfully ragged, mostly acoustic music, but the album is hardly idyllic: darkness and doom lurk everywhere, and the lyrics return again and again to our powerlessness in the face of nature and the ultimate insignificance of our desires. It’s the best Mekons record in more than a decade, reconciling the American hillbilly adaptation of British folk with the real deal and applying the band’s rich mix of sounds–Susie Honeyman’s rustic violin, Jon Langford’s sorrowful guitar, and Rico Bell’s boozy accordion, plus Lu Edmonds’s oud and saz and the occasional bit of banjo, harmonica, or kalimba–to everything from crawling folk-rock to hijacked reggae....

This 1957 noir masterpiece by Jacques Tourneur stars Aldo Ray as a man fleeing a private investigator and Anne Bancroft as the barroom acquaintance who agrees to help him. Ray’s past is revealed gradually in a series of flashbacks, which are intercut with the couple’s flight and the investigator’s pursuit; by developing each narrative in a parallel space or time, Tourneur movingly articulates the theme of a character trapped by his history....

I appreciate the exposure the Reader and Ben Joravsky have given to the Logan Square community [The Works, April 7]. For those readers who are interested in this fascinating neighborhood, I would like to flesh out ideas from his article titled “Extreme Makeover.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Logan Square community has a wealth of ethnic, economic, and political diversity, which is a major attraction for my wife and me and for many of our friends and neighbors in the 35th Ward....

This is kiddie theater with a vengeance. Eleven years after the cartoon feature came out, Julie Taymor’s Disney musical is still going strong–and with good reason. It doesn’t matter that the plot and characters are melodramatic, because what really carries the show for children of all ages is the stagecraft. And the stagecraft’s human proportions are what set it apart from most big-ticket musicals: technology is less significant than the carefully crafted puppets and props, representing everything from elephants to buzzards to grasslands and herds of antelope....

Friday 6 –Peter Margasak Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » NINE INCH NAILS, DRESDEN DOLLS On the surface this bill makes sense–after all, both bands’ fan bases include a large contingent of pale white kids dressed in black. But the longer you think about it, the less natural the pairing seems: Trent Reznor’s grim, tense postindustrial defoliant alongside the sensual, harrowing goth cabaret of up-and-coming Boston duo the Dresden Dolls, who seem cheerfully determined to turn their every gesture into a glammy, hyperliterate neo-Weimar genderfuck....

The Bohemian Theatre Ensemble’s dazzling production of Andrew Lippa’s underrated 2000 musical is sexy, violent, melancholy, rapturous, and simply fun. The book, based on Joseph Moncure March’s scandalous 1928 poem (which was banned in Boston), tells the story of a debauched Jazz Age party thrown by the vaudeville artist Queenie to provoke her explosive lover, Burrs. The firecracker cast, directed by Stephen M. Genovese with musical direction by A. Scott Williams and Fosse-inspired choreography by Brenda Didier, seduces us with a fluid rendering of the jazzy, bluesy, and gospel-tinged score, finding the poignant centers of characters devoted to booze, sex, and drugs....

Mr. Miner, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In discussing the costs and benefits of the U.S. invasion/occupation, and the intentions and reconsiderations of those on both sides of the issue [Hot Type, January 6], you (and many others) neglect to mention the tens of thousands of Iraqi citizens killed and tens of thousands more wounded. Any discussion about the war on Iraq–regardless of the speaker’s position–which fails to mention this reality, this death and destruction caused in the name of accomplishing “something useful,” is simply obscene, akin to Bill Bennett’s hypothetical abortion of black babies in the name of reducing crime....

The tenth annual Asian American Showcase, presented by the Foundation for Asian American Independent Media and the Gene Siskel Film Center, continues Friday through Thursday, April 7 through 13, with screenings at the Film Center, 164 N. State. Tickets are $9, $7 for students, and $5 for Film Center members; for more information call 312-846-2600. R Eve & the Fire Horse Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » An auspicious debut for Canadian filmmaker Julia Kwan, this 2005 feature follows two young sisters on their divergent paths to recovery after their beloved grandmother dies....

Sufjan Stevens “I’m not so sure it is [worth releasing], even now. I think I decided that the material was interesting to me, so maybe it would be interesting to an audience. I was going to post them online as free downloads, but I’d spent so much time reworking them and editing them that I felt there was a value to them, that it wouldn’t honor the songs enough to have them as downloads....

“True love has no conditions,” says one character in Charles L. Mee’s exuberant updated adaptation of Aeschylus’ tragedy The Suppliant Women. And when conditions are put on love, there are terrible consequences. Fifty sisters try to avoid marrying their crass American cousins by fleeing Greece for Italy. In Jaclyn Biskup’s Experimental Theatre Chicago production, the setting is an elegant Italy of opera and candelabras, and that formality sometimes translates into dramatic stiffness....

For nearly ten years the teachers at Haugan elementary begged schools officials to add new classrooms to their overcrowded building. “We said, ‘Just give us an addition and we’ll be happy,’” says Mary Orr, a kindergarten teacher at Haugan. Haugan is actually a Chicago Public Schools success story. It’s a neighborhood school, so it takes all comers. It can’t restrict enrollment to students who have high test scores or whose parents have the drive to fill out application forms and then keep pushing to get their kids enrolled, as parents who want their kids to go to the city’s charter and magnet schools have to do....

APRIL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Barrier Device, a 26-minute film by Grace Lee, a researcher conducting a study on female condoms faces an ethical dilemma when she discovers that one of her research subjects is dating her ex-fiance. The short won a Student Academy Award and a Directors Guild of America Student Award when it was released in 2002. College of Lake County professor Patrick Gonder, who’s screening the film this weekend, says it’s a funny but subtle look at the lives of two Korean-American women, and he admires its maturity and discipline: “Unlike a lot of people right out of film school, [Lee] lets the camera watch the characters without intruding....

American cities are relying increasingly on private security guards and advanced technology such as video surveillance to secure public space. New York City is gearing up for the first phase of the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, a $90 million program that will install 3,000 cameras in lower Manhattan by the end of 2008 and partner police with corporate security forces. In Chicago there’s Operation Disruption–a multimillion-dollar effort that has placed 170 cameras in high-crime areas since 2003....

If you think about it in terms of a screen-time-to-audience-impact ratio, Ari Lehman is one of the greatest film actors of all time. If you don’t count his first role, in “a movie about orphans playing soccer,” you’re left with all of two seconds of acting–but millions have seen those two seconds, and none of them can forget it. Lehman is the last thing you see in the original Friday the 13th, as the algae-and-rot-mottled Jason flinging himself out of Crystal Lake at the last surviving camper....

Lead Story The Entrepreneurial Spirit Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The East Oregonian of Pendleton, Oregon, reported in December on the local First Church of God and its attempt to finance a missionary trip to Costa Rica in March by selling rolls of two-ply Angel Soft toilet paper. And in November Agence France-Presse reported on Portuguese toilet paper company Renova, which had recently started selling black toilet paper in France and planned to introduce it in North America this year....