Giving It Away for Free Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » CC&C says this is all part of its effort to give back to the community, so maybe it has nothing to do with things dragging a bit in the exhibitor department: at press time, according to the CC&C Web site, 60 were lined up for Navy Pier (though a spokesman insisted there’ll be 100), while Thomas Blackman’s Art Chicago, which is running concurrently, listed about 70, many Chicago names among them....

No Danger of the Spiritual Thing: Short Works by Beckett The workload was increased for both artists and audiences for one of two programs on opening weekend at the Museum of Contemporary Art, when five pieces–Play, Footfalls, Fizzle 4, Rough for Theater I, and Not I–were mounted in various spaces. Magnus spent six months negotiating with the MCA, trying to gain audience access to nonpublic corridors and to galleries during off hours....

Louise Brooks was a success stateside when she left Hollywood for Berlin in 1928, but her legend rests on two films she made abroad: G.W. Pabst’s Diary of a Lost Girl and Pandora’s Box. Following a similar path, Chicago’s Silent Theatre Company took its cult hit Lulu–based on Pandora’s Box and its source, Frank Wedekind’s “Lulu” cycle–on the road this fall, traveling in a live-in school bus repainted in the show’s signature colors, black and white....

Merce Cunningham’s relentlessly abstract, often only vaguely musical works can seem formless and purposeless. Closer to paintings than dramas, they act as meditation devices. Yet each piece has a distinct feeling and movement style. Sounddance, created 30 years ago, is performed to an electronic score by David Tudor that recalls engines working, sometimes almost cheeping like birds. The movement is quick and sometimes birdlike, utilizing oddly lifted feet, and often the clusters of dancers look like the intertwined moving parts of a machine....

Manya Sklodowska was born in 1867, the fifth child of a poor physics professor in Russian-controlled Poland. An adept science student, she was shut out of college in Warsaw because she was a girl; instead, she went to work as a governess in order to support her sister, a medical student in Paris. At 24 Sklodowska managed to get to Paris herself, where she gained access to a rudimentary lab and studied at the Sorbonne....

Teaching degree in hand, an idealistic young woman from Manila (Alessandra De Rossi) arrives at a desolate Philippine village to teach at the local school, where the teachers are less interested in education than in selling popsicles to the students at recess. The children come from poor farming families that have dismissed school as a privilege of the rich, and their parents are less than thrilled when the new arrival decides to organize a school choral group for an upcoming competition....

On July 6 the board of directors at HotHouse suspended founder and executive director Marguerite Horberg without pay. Horberg says the board didn’t tell her why, and the board is limited in its ability to comment publicly on personnel matters. But the bone of contention was clearly the venue’s impending transition to a dual-leadership structure–Horberg was to remain executive director, handling programming and fund-raising, and a newly appointed business director was to take over other day-to-day operations....

Since the first reports of Chicago police torture surfaced a quarter century ago the list has swelled to nearly 200 cases involving dozens of public employees—and still no one has been prosecuted. Now, with the results of a four-year, multimillion dollar investigation due any day, here’s a guide by staff reporter John Conroy to the key figures in the scandal. Some of them may look familiar. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

THE BROTHER HANCOCK PRODUCTIONS WHEN Through 11/18: Thu 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM WHERE Theatre Building Chicago, 1225 W. Belmont PRICE $30 INFO 773-327-5252 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » David Greenglass was Ethel Rosenberg’s brother. His testimony that she was a Soviet spy sent her and her husband, Julius Rosenberg, to the electric chair in 1953. Greenglass later recanted, saying he’d lied on the witness stand–in a case prosecuted by the ruthless Roy Cohn–as part of a deal to obtain immunity for his wife, Ruthie....

On his debut recording, a six-track three-inch CD called Nok (Mego, 2000), Viennese electronic musician Uli Troyer sounded a bit like an emaciated version of Autechre: fractured rhythms slithered and stuttered across a barren, glitchy background only occasionally colored by faint digital ringing and pinging. Last year’s Rose de Shiraz (Deluxe) doesn’t forgo the choppy grooves and clipped phrases Troyer loves, but it does trade in his old monochrome palette for a Technicolor one–he’s added vocal samples, urban field recordings, and guitars to the mix, putting synthetic flesh on the bones of his rhythms....

If you’ve listened to Wilderness’s self-titled debut and realized that these guys must be very enamored of an album called Metal Box, give yourself a prize, smart guy. But this Baltimore quartet gets bonus points for borrowing the one element of Public Image Ltd.’s sound that hasn’t been aped by a billion neo-postpunk bands–John Lydon’s vocals. Their label, Jagjaguwar, says they sound like Johnny Rotten fronting Explosions in the Sky, which is true....

Not long into Christian TeBordo’s The Conviction and Subsequent Life of Savior Neck (Spuyten Duyvil) I started wondering what exactly I was reading. A philosophical fantasy? A noirish mystery? A slick postmodern trick? I settled on a fairy tale–if the Grimm brothers had written one about a dirty, stinky old drunk. After an intro in which a boy awakes to the smell (“like withered flowers doused in gasoline”) of his own death, the story moves to the town of Discord, New York....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When death comes, the press takes its threesomes any way it can find them. The Tuesday Tribune carried a front-page box titled “Farewells,” with directions to the obits inside the paper for Ingmar Bergman, Bill Walsh, and Tom Snyder–who were certainly closer in death than in life. The Sun-Times’s Richard Roeper began his column the same day, “It was a dark trifecta for those who believe celebrities die in threes....

Jane Austen is the real star of Stephen Fedo’s intelligent but busy new adaptation of Emma: the novelist’s witty dialogue and blazing critique of class snobbishness propel this play about an arrogant, bossy young woman who fancies herself a gifted matchmaker. The comedy comes off best; Sam Wootten and Erica Elam are particularly good in the plum parts of foolish Mr. and Mrs. Elton, and Ashely Bagot is fetchingly dim as 17-year-old ninny Harriet Smith....

Jonathan Gilad, who made his Carnegie Hall debut in 1996, when he was 15, has since performed around the globe, both in recital and as a soloist with major conductors. Last year at Orchestra Hall he gave a stunningly sensitive and thoughtful performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 23, displaying a superb tone and touch, and this Sunday he returns to give a recital of works by Mozart, Beethoven, and Liszt....

Balletomanes might quarrel over the relative strengths of this or that prima ballerina, but the fact is, when it comes to the Kirov, you really can’t go wrong. This is the first time the full company has performed here in 16 years, and a different dancer is scheduled to play Odette/Odile in each performance of its Swan Lake, choreographed by Konstantin Sergeyev after Petipa and Ivanov. Judging by the two ballerinas I saw on DVD, the approaches may vary–one might emphasize steely physical control, another the characters’ emotional shifts–but the level of expertise won’t....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last year he was called an “idiot” and a “moron.” Last week he was called a “mental midget.” And last weekend Rex Grossman, the much-maligned quarterback of the Chicago Bears who nonetheless helped land the Bears in the Super Bowl last season, was called a “retarded vagina.” When Alex Borstein was introduced as the voice of Lois Griffin at the live voice-over performance of Family Guy at the Chicago Theatre Saturday night, the Chicago native and former MADtv star emerged in a long Walter Payton Bears jersey, wearing only short spandex shorts underneath....

For more than a decade Ann Wiens has been making hotly colored animal paintings that radiate an almost dangerous sensuality. In her six new panel paintings at Byron Roche, various nonmammalian creatures are depicted in front of brightly patterned backgrounds that set off their lush colors. Eight-Spotted Forester (Alypia Octomaculata) juxtaposes a red-and-white caterpillar with a red background punctuated by green and blue circles that intensify the reds and curves of the caterpillar....

By the time Rem Koolhaas heard about the competition to design the new Seattle Public Library, it was hardly a competition. A Seattle native, Steven Holl, who’d designed the splendid Saint Ignatius chapel on the Seattle University campus, already had the inside track. But chief librarian Deborah Jacobs and the members of the board were so wowed by the work done by Koolhaas’s firm, Office for Metropolitan Architecture, that the project was soon in the hands of Koolhaas and his partner Joshua Ramus....

Playwright Jeremy Menekseoglu commits a crime against drama in this overwrought, unfocused new script. The audience never gets the opportunity to invest in the outcome by anticipating the action; instead we spend all our time and effort trying to fathom what the hell is happening. Menekseoglu himself plays the lead in this story about a young sultan locked up for 23 years; when freed, he attempts to assert his will over a designing vizier and tormenting demon....