Chicago Reader print issue of January 23, 2025 (Vol. 54, No. 16) by Chicago Reader

WINTER THEATER & ARTS

THE FILMS OF FREDERICK WISEMAN, P. 20

FRONT

04 Reader letters “Crazy” Steve Szegho 04 Publisher’s note What’s going on with the Reader’s ﬁnancial state?

FOOD & DRINK

06 Sula | Feature Palestine in America drops a food issue.

07 Reader Bites Seafood udon ramen at Shinya Ramen House

NEWS & POLITICS

08 Feature City buildings in Chicago now use 100 percent clean energy.

COMMENTARY

10 Isaacs | On Culture “$acred Motherhood” at Woman Made Gallery

ARTS & CULTURE

12 Museums A massive Pan-African exhibition boasts 350 objects, covering a timeline of 100 years.

13 Galleries Apartment gallery Unda.m. 93 centers radical novelty.

14 Cra Work Jazmin Delgado’s Fiera brand expands beyond accessories.

THEATER

16 Reid | Stages of Survival Steep Theatre

18 Feature Avaaz at Chicago Shakespeare FILM

20 Feature Frederick Wiseman’s portals of possibility

22 Screening Trust Fall into the arms of Oscarbate Film Collective.

24 Galil | Feature Don your beaver suit: Hundreds of Beavers is back at the Music Box.

25 Moviegoer Fix your hearts or die.

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

26 Secret History Yama & the Karma Dusters embodied the hippie counterculture.

28 City of Win SolarFive is a hip-hop legend underneath our noses.

30 Shows of Note Previews of concerts including the Abortion Access Beneﬁt Series, Yves, Lazer Dim 700, and Yakuza

34 Gossip Wolf Concert photographer Vicki Holda needs help with medical bills, Moyana debuts with an album of lush cosmic R&B, and more.

(Top) Still from Legend (1985) MUSIC BOX THEATRE (Clockwise from above le ) Michael Shayan in Avaaz TERESA CASTRACANE PHOTOGRAPHY

Detail from the cover of the recent food issue of Palestine in America AMEERAH BAD’R

Awol Erizku. Nefertiti - Miles Davis (Gold), 2022. Distinguished Private Collection. COURTESY SEAN KELLY GALLERY

A still from Hundreds of Beavers (2022) MUSIC BOX THEATRE

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PUBLISHER AMBER NETTLES

CHIEF OF STAFF ELLEN KAULIG

EDITOR IN CHIEF SALEM COLLO-JULIN

ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR

SAVANNAH RAY HUGUELEY

PRODUCTION MANAGER KIRK WILLIAMSON

SENIOR GRAPHIC DESIGNER AMBER HUFF

GRAPHIC DESIGNER & PHOTO RESEARCHER

SHIRA FRIEDMAN-PARKS

THEATER & DANCE EDITOR KERRY REID

MUSIC EDITOR PHILIP MONTORO

CULTURE EDITOR: FILM, MEDIA, FOOD & DRINK TARYN MCFADDEN

CULTURE EDITOR: ART, ARCHITECTURE, BOOKS, LITERARY ARTS KERRY CARDOZA

NEWS EDITOR SHAWN MULCAHY

PROJECTS EDITOR JAMIE LUDWIG

DIGITAL EDITOR TYRA NICOLE TRICHE

SENIOR WRITERS LEOR GALIL, DEANNA ISAACS, BEN JORAVSKY, MIKE SULA

FEATURES WRITER KATIE PROUT

SOCIAL JUSTICE REPORTER DEVYN-MARSHALL BROWN (DMB)

STAFF WRITER MICCO CAPORALE MULTIMEDIA CONTENT PRODUCER SHAWNEE DAY

SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT

ASSOCIATE CHARLI RENKEN

VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS ANN SCHOLHAMER

VICE PRESIDENT OF PEOPLE AND CULTURE ALIA GRAHAM

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ON THE COVER

Portrait of ﬁ lm director Frederick Wiseman from the Peggy McKenna Collection; Penobscot Marine Museum, Searsport, Maine. Courtesy of Zipporah Films. For more information on Wiseman, read the feature on page 20 and go to zipporah.com.

Reader Letters m

Re: “Farewell to a larger-than-life architect of Chicago’s concert ecosystem,” written by Leor Galil and published in the Gossip Wolf column within the print issue of January 16, 2025 (volume 54, number 15)

This obituary of “Crazy” Steve Szegho . . . is one of the better things I’ve read recently. What an absolute character this man was. —Matt Lindner, via X

Solid cat, had a lot of great conversations with him. —Steven Chesney, via Facebook

Re: “City contractor ‘failed’ clients as migrant shelter complaints mounted, staﬀers say,” written by Emeline Posner for Borderless Magazine and the Investigative Project on Race and Equity, and published in our January 9 issue (volume 54, number 14)

$342 million and now they realize they don’t trust them. Clowns in oﬃce. —Johnny Denveer, via X

Ah Chicago, where the [poop emoji] ﬂoats to the top. —Irina Hynes, via Threads

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The Reader accepts comments and letters to the editor of less than 400 words for publication consideration.

m letters@chicagoreader.com

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is not how we wanted to begin 2025. Last week, we announced layo s and immediate cost-cutting measures to address a looming risk of closure caused by a ﬁnancial deﬁcit.

Our ﬁnancial challenges stem from an unexpected convergence of setbacks, including significant revenue shortfalls in advertising and philanthropy during late 2024.

Ultimately, our organization grew very quickly over the past year, with the best intentions. But revenue did not match our expenses.

As of January 1, we have eliminated six director-level positions, including two members of the editorial team, and three additional nonunion roles.

These reductions, combined with voluntary cuts and furloughs for the rest of sta , have resulted in a budget reduction of 34 percent.

Our dedicated team across editorial, operations, marketing, and revenue is working tirelessly to cut costs, raise funds, and implement

Chicago Reader

We can’t imagine a Chicago without the Reader. Right now, we need your financial help more than ever. Chip in today. Share on social media. We can’t do this without you.

needed organizational changes as quickly as possible.

However, time is not on our side. Coursecorrecting, including legal work and negotiations, creates additional expenses before the savings kick in. But each week we are here makes it more likely we will be here another week.

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To everyone who has donated so far, thank you. Your contributions and the heartfelt messages that accompany them keep us going and remind us why this work matters. We see the

likes, the shares, and the comments, and we are holding them close—they are our fuel.

To our ongoing monthly donors, philanthropic partners, and advertisers: Thank you for your support over the years. We wouldn’t be here without you, and everyone here is working overtime to continue our partnerships and relationships.

The Reader has been a trusted voice in Chicago since 1971. It’s been an honor to serve this city, and we hope to continue doing so.

To donate, visit chicagoreader.com/donate.

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—Amber Nettles, publisher m anettles@chicagoreader.com

KIRK WILLIAMSON AMBER HUFF

BIG NAMES, BIG FUN!

WINTER THEATER & ARTS

FEATURE

PalestineinAmerica drops a food issue

The nine-year-old magazine is the only U.S. publication devoted to the Palestinian diaspora.

By MIKE SULA

One writer, filing from the northern Gaza Strip, describes her family grinding animal feed to make bread. Another, based in Jordan, recounts how her grandmother’s kitchen was “a battleground for cultural and political survival.” A third, in Ramallah, interviews steely-eyed food vlogger–turned–relief worker Hamada Shaqoura on the challenges of feeding delicious and healthy food to children in Gazan refugee camps with an unreliable supply of canned goods.

These stories and nine others are all published in the new issue of Palestine in America, the only print publication in the U.S. devoted to the Palestinian diaspora. It’s the 17th

issue in nine years and the second devoted exclusively to food. It’s not just a collection of recipes, though there are a few. Rather, it’s a collection of stories about food as a means to resilience, sovereignty, and resistance.

“A lot of people want to get into food journalism because ‘food brings people together,’ and ‘food is this happy thing,’” says guest editor Nylah Iqbal Muhammad. “And it is. But this reporting can really break your heart. I don’t think people understand on the back end how di cult it is to ﬁnd publications who are willing to let you tell the truth.”

chief, is a 2014 Columbia College broadcast journalism graduate who wanted nothing more than to be a sportswriter. He got hooked

It’s a collection of stories about food as a means to resilience, sovereignty, and resistance.

of everybody running around the hallways: ‘Did you hear what he said about Coach?’ It was all over from there.”

Ihmoud grew up in Belmont Cragin, but he witnessed firsthand the extremities of Israeli occupation while visiting his father’s West Bank village as a three-and-a-half-year-old in the summer of 1995. He says he was present when Israeli Defense Forces raided his grandparents’ house looking for an uncle who was already in custody.

“This Israeli soldier was throwing shoes in the air [as if] my uncle’s under the fucking shoes,” he says. “I remember running up behind him and kicking him, and he turned and pointed his riﬂe at me. My sister picks me up and, crying, runs me into another room and closes the door until they leave. My family laughs about that to this day, like ‘You fucking almost died over some Jordans.’”

“That was the moment—even at that age, to have that gun pointed at me and realize that, to these people, I am nothing—that moment piqued my political awareness when it came to who I am and where I’m from.”

Nader Ihmoud, the magazine’s editor in

at Lane Tech College Prep covering his first football game for the school paper. “It was a playo game,” he says. “They ended up losing, and I interviewed the star running back who shit all over the head coach, who was also the athletic director. I just remember the feeling

Still, when it came to reporting, Ihmoud mostly stayed away from Israeli-Palestinian issues. “My first journalism course in college, they were like, ‘If you have any sort of tie to something, any bias, you shouldn’t report on that subject matter.’ And I thought, ‘I guess I’m super biased. How can I not be?’” But late in his senior year, he diverted from his beat at the student-run Columbia Chronicle , devoting his regular sports column to an account of the shooting and beating of two Palestinian soccer players by Israeli Border Police. Ihmoud cited a published report on the incident by Inside World Football, but he says a faculty advisor nevertheless spiked the column, saying the incident couldn’t be veriﬁed. It was only after a previously published

Nader Ihmoud, the editor in chief of Palestine in America , and the cover of the magazine’s recent food issue

AHMED HAMAD PHOTOGRAPHY AMEERAH BAD’R

report in the Israeli Haaretz newspaper was discovered that Ihmoud’s story was allowed to be published—and only after an extraordinary intervention in the editing process by the advisor. In the end, “I had to disclose my Palestinian descent, as if that’s the only possible reason to be critical of Israel,” he writes.

His editor in chief, Heather Schroering, however, had his back.

“During those final edits she was like, ‘You don’t deserve to go through this. I know what you want in the article. Go home.’

We had our Monday morning meeting, and [the advisor] was livid: ‘Why was this left in?’

‘Why was this left in?’

I remember her standing up and going, ‘I’m the editor in chief, and I decided.’”

Schroering, now a podcast producer in Brooklyn, has contributed to Palestine in America and helped edit the food issue.

She says that at the time there was a tendency among faculty advisors to over-police stories on Palestinian issues. “These are seasoned journalists who were teaching at Columbia,” she says. “There were times where I felt like he was really provoked by them, and it was understandably upsetting.”

The faculty advisor in question no longer teaches at Columbia and could not be reached for comment.

The incident galvanized Ihmoud. “There was a void,” he says. “I love print, and I didn’t know any print Palestinian magazines.” He launched Palestine in America’s website that year, covering stories like conflicts between Loyola University’s administration and Students for Justice in Palestine; and the Detroit immigration fraud trial of activist Rasmea Odeh.

In August 2015 he registered as a not-forprofit and published the first print issue. “I think maybe $1,000 I spent out of pocket to pay writers and for printing. I was dumb. I printed ﬁve thousand copies thinking I would sell all of them. I sold like a hundred.” He moonlighted a digital editing job for the Sun-Times Network, while driving for Uber,

but after the paper’s aggregating site laid him o , he sold insurance to fund subsequent issues, which he’s published roughly once or twice a year ever since, telling stories from the Palestinian diaspora, often on a specific theme. Editions have been devoted to sports, music, fashion, politics, and journalism. The 15th issue, published in August 2023, was a particularly joyful one about the Palestinian National Baseball team, for which Ihmoud played second base and outfield in tournaments in Taiwan and Islamabad. It would be more than a year before he published another, this one devoted to the journalists reporting— and dying—in Gaza. “I didn’t feel comfortable working on a magazine that’s usually lighthearted in nature during a genocide, so I wanted to wait until a ceasefire that never came. And then when I landed on the journalism edition, it was hard to find contributors. Plus, my mental health [and] survivor’s guilt—I wasn’t working as e ciently as I’m used to.”

But the food issue came together quickly. “If it’s something that’s my forte, I’ll take on the editor role, but I like to hire guest editors.” For this issue, he brought on Muhammad, a James Beard Award–nominated, Chicago- and Minneapolis–based travel and food writer who’s published stories in Travel + Leisure, Vogue, Eater, and more.

But as prolific as she is, Muhammad had taken a break of her own after October 7, 2023. “I really kind of stopped writing in a lot of ways, for almost a year,” she says. “It felt very strange at the time to do travel writing. There was something about the idea of being on a train while Palestine was burning that felt a little impossible for me at the time. I don’t think I knew yet how to respond to that moment as a writer. It definitely feels more possible now. I’ve had a clearer vision of what decolonial food writing could look like and what that mission is.”

Ihmoud says that within a few days, Muhammad brainstormed some 50 story ideas, which they narrowed down to a dozen, including her

WINTER THEATER & ARTS

letter from the editor, which describes the tension of working as a food writer covering both exorbitantly priced ﬁne dining and famine.

The lead story, by Salama Al-Ladaa, describes famine in northern Gaza where a frozen chicken can cost up to $110. Laura O’Connor and Jana Amin describe how Gazan Hayani dates and boycotts of exported Israeli dates represent the concept of sumood, or nonviolent, everyday resistance. The magazine’s creative director, chef Sabrina Beydoun, writes an essay arguing that pop-up fundraising dinners in support of Palestinian causes aren’t enough without long-term follow-up— and the brick-and-mortar spaces to foment it.

Alejandro Hernandez, a Reader contributor, writes about one of those third places, Uptown’s Palestinian-owned Nabala Cafe.

There are stories about food motifs in Palestinian embroidery and the underreported ﬁvethousand-year-old Palestinian wine industry.

Hamza N. Ibrahim writes about how during war, Palestinians adapted their national dish, musakhan, with rice and lentils instead of chicken, olive oil, and bread.

How good is the seafood udon ramen at Shinya Ramen House? Allow me to dig out my cinephile credentials and count the ways. Whenever I get the urge to rewatch one of my favorite movies, Juzo Itami’s Tampopo (1985), Shinya is where I carry out from. To watch Tampopo—and view its exquisite ode to food, life, love, and especially ramen—is to hunger, and seafood udon is what complements the experience for me. There’s an exquisite, richly ﬂavorful seaweed broth; thick, smooth noodles that ﬁt so well with a variety of mushrooms; and

The tension between inspiring stories of food as cultural survival and its devastation that Muhammad describes runs through the issue.

“I don’t believe in sugarcoating things,” she says. “I think it’s a travesty that there aren’t other Palestinian magazines, or that a lot of these writers would not have been able to publish their stu . These are all ideas I had on a Google Doc, but they’re also not particularly original. The information is out there.”

Palestine in America is still scrappy and self-funded, but at 39 pages, the food issue is its longest to date. Ihmoud still sells insurance to make ends meet, and his wife, an accountant, handles administration. But it’s given him license to think bigger.

“The dream for the magazine is to have bureaus all over the country,” he says. “There are Palestinian communities everywhere. I would love to have a reporter everywhere. But should I limit myself to only stories about things that are happening here? With this edition, I think I opened up the gate to do whatever I want.” v

msula@chicagoreader.com

of course, shrimp, clams, and scallops. It’s a dish worthy of Itami himself. The metaphorical cherry on top is the fact that I often head there with my partner, who tends to order the original Hakata tonkotsu ramen and generously allows me a taste. With my twist on a staple and him ordering said classic, it tastes like the best of both worlds.

It was a long search, ﬁnding a place that could live up to the hype of my foodie and film dreams, but Shinya is the place I will return to, rewatch or not. —ANDREA THOMPSON SHINYA RAMEN HOUSE 3240 S. Halsted, $15.99, 312-877-6008, shinyaramen.com v

Reader Bites celebrates dishes, drinks, and atmospheres from the Chicagoland food scene. Have you had a recent food or drink experience that you can’t stop thinking about? Share it with us at fooddrink@ chicagoreader.com.

An interior page of the food issue, featuring Hamza N. Ibrahim’s story about Palestine’s national dish SOFTLIGHTARTS

Seafood udon ramen at Shinya Ramen House

NEWS & POLITICS

CLEAN ENERGY

Chicago keeps its New Year’s resolution

All city buildings now use 100 percent clean power.

By JUANPABLO RAMIREZ-FRANCO, GRIST

This story was originally published by Grist. This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and WBEZ, a public radio station serving the Chicago metropolitan region.

It takes approximately 700,000 megawatt hours of electricity to power Chicago’s more than 400 municipal buildings every year. As of January 1, every single one of them—including 98 fire stations, two international airports, and two of the largest water treatment plants on the planet—is running on renewable energy, thanks largely to Illinois’s newest and largest solar farm.

The move is projected to cut the carbon footprint of the country’s third largest city by approximately 290,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year—the equivalent of taking 62,000 cars o the road, according to the city. Local decarbonization efforts like Chicago’s are taking on increasing significance as President Donald Trump promises to reduce federal support for climate action. With the outgoing Biden administration doubling down on an international pledge to get the U.S. to net-zero emissions by 2050, cities, states, and private-sector players across the country will have to pick up the slack.

Chicago is one of several U.S. cities that are taking advantage of their bulk buying power to spur new carbon-free energy development.

“It’s a plan that gets the city to take action on climate and also leverages our buying power to generate new opportunities for Chicagoans and the state,” said Angela Tovar, Chicago’s chief sustainability o cer. “There’s opportunities everywhere.”

Chicago’s switch to renewable energy has been almost a decade in the making. The goal of sourcing the city’s power purely from carbon-free sources was ﬁrst established by then mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2017. His successor, Mayor Lori Lightfoot, struck a 2022 deal with Constellation, an electricity supplier, to purchase the city’s energy from the developer Swift Current Energy beginning in 2025.

Double Black Diamond

Swift Current began construction on the 3,800-acre, 593-megawatt solar farm in central Illinois as part of the same ﬁve-year, $422 million agreement. Straddling two counties in central Illinois, the Double Black Diamond Solar project is now the largest solar installation east of the Mississippi River. It can produce enough electricity to power more than 100,000 homes, according to Swift Current’s vice president of origination, Caroline Mann. Chicago alone has agreed to purchase approximately half the installation’s total output, which will cover about 70 percent of its municipal buildings’ electricity needs. City officials plan to cover the remaining 30

percent through the purchase of renewable energy credits.

“That’s really a feature and not a bug of our plan,” said Deputy Chief Sustainability O cer Jared Policicchio. He added that he hopes the city’s demand for 100 percent renewable energy will encourage additional clean energy development locally, albeit on a much smaller scale, which will create new sources of power that the city can then purchase directly, in lieu of credits. “Our goal over the next several years is that we reach a point where we’re not buying renewable energy credits.”

More than 700 other U.S. cities and towns have signed similar purchasing agreements

since 2015, according to a 2022 study from the World Resources Institute. Only one city, Houston, has a larger renewable energy deal than Chicago, according to Matthew Popkin, the cities and communities U.S. program manager at Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonproﬁt whose research focuses on decarbonization. However, he added, no other contract has added as much new renewable power to the grid as Chicago’s.

“Part of Chicago’s goal was what’s called ‘additionality’: bringing new resources into the market and onto the grid here,” said Popkin.

Chicago also secured a $400,000 annual

The

solar ﬁ eld near Waverly, Illinois

commitment from Constellation and Swift Current for clean energy workforce training, including training via Chicago Women in Trades, a nonprofit aiming to increase the number of women in union construction and manufacturing jobs.

The economic beneﬁts extend past the city’s limits: According to Swift Current, approximately $100 million in new tax revenue is projected to ﬂow into Sangamon County and Morgan County, which are home to the Double Black Diamond Solar site, over the project’s operational life.

“Cities and other local governments just don’t appreciate their ability to not just support their residents but also shape markets,” said Popkin. “Chicago is demonstrating directly how cities can lead by example, implement ambitious goals amidst evolving state and federal policy changes, and leverage their purchasing power to support a more equitable renewable energy future.”

Alex Dane, the World Resources Institute’s senior manager for clean energy innovation and partnerships in the U.S. energy program, said many cities have set two renewable ener-

NEWS & POLITICS

gy goals: one for municipal operations and a second goal for the community at large. Even though the latter is “a little bit harder to get to, and the timeline is a little bit further out,” said Dane, the community-side goals begin to seem less lofty once a city has decarbonized the assets it directly controls.

Indeed, Chicago’s new milestone is the ﬁrst step in a broader goal to source the energy for all buildings in the city from renewables by 2035. That would make it the largest city in the country to do so, according to the Sierra Club.

Dane said it will be increasingly important for cities, towns, and states to drive their own efforts to reduce emissions, build greener economies, and meet local climate goals. He said moves like Chicago’s prove that they are capable, no matter what’s on the horizon at the federal level.

“That is an imperative thing to know, that state, city, county action is a durable pathway, even under the next administration, and [it] needs to happen,” said Dane. “The juice is deﬁnitely still worth the squeeze.” v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

An Embrace

I’ve missed our wind, my lake, n the view from south

Pilling fried okra on my plate

Chewing its crisp n’ slimy seeds

I eat the browned doughy fruit

Slurping out the palm of my hand

Best meal I know is bread n’ fruit

Its an old lady tendency

To crave fried green tomato

Grease staining my ﬁngertips

Hungry as a child I cooked cheesy bread

A microwaved american slice crammed inna hot dog bun

I traded two roach heads for a blunted sword

Myself for a ticket n’ my blood for an accolade

What am I holding at the end of it all but

Plump blushing hairy southern peaches

Thick red leaking watermelons with black seeds

N’ handfuls of scally pink red lychee rocks

My father’s glo-day is etched into my skin

Every song I sew my mother told me inna dream

Pouring henny upon familial altars

Watching the sun set upon familiar waters

What do I do with this clay life?

Planting language down time

I know where I grew this shame

N’ I know a place to burn it

Come rest with me

Waves skitter foam dirty green

At the rock point facing Lake Michigan

I’ve molded a beautiful life for myself

The produce is fresh

The bread is warm

The za is loud

Hold my Blackblue hand

The fruit of my love is sweeter than my labor

By Imani Joseph

Imani Marie Joseph is a slam poet from the Southside of Chicago. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing & Political Science and is currently pursuing her Masters in Public History & Library Science.

Poem curated by Demetrius Amparan. Demetrius is a music artist and poet from the south side of Chicago. He is a nonproﬁt leader and father to daughters Ella and Addison. His latest work, Hold Me Down, released August 2024.

Opening Hours

Wednesday, Friday, Saturday: 11:00 AM–5:00 PM Thursday: 11:00 AM–6:00 PM

More Light! Exhibition

Chicago design duo Luftwerk’s immersive interpretation of Aram Saroyan’s poem “lighght” transforms the Poetry Foundation gallery into a dynamic lightbox.

Extended through February 15, 2025

Learn more at PoetryFoundation.org

A weekly series curated by the Chicago Reader and sponsored by the Poetry Foundation.

WINTER THEATER & ARTS

ON CULTURE

Nightbitch gallery

Woman Made’s “$acred Motherhood” exhibit resonates with themes in the Amy Adams ﬁlm.

By DEANNA ISAACS

Icame straight home from the opening of Woman Made Gallery’s “$acred Motherhood” exhibition last Saturday and signed up for Hulu so I could watch Nightbitch , the movie about an artist so stiﬂed by her life as a stay-at-home mom to a toddler she periodically transforms into a dog.

The artist, surprised to find that she’s breaking out in a double row of nipples and a tail, joins a pack of neighborhood strays to run the streets of her suburban neighborhood. She might just be dreaming all this, but also maybe not: She recalls (and we see) that her own stiﬂed mother also had a habit of running o on all fours.

It’s a metaphor, and it’s ludicrous. But Amy Adams’s growling, barking performance as a woman who discovers that motherhood awakens animal instincts has won critical recognition (including a Golden Globe nomination). And the movie’s deadpan humor is dead serious about what women are expected to endure to keep the human race going.

No one was turning into a dog at Woman Made, but the art on display—by 44 artists, selected from an international call—includes one transformation of a mom into a dinosaur (Rachel Garber Cole’s photograph, In the Kitchen #196 ), and a lizard-like digital Wet Nurse sculpture (by Oksana Kryzhanivska, who’s imagining algorithms and machines operating as maternal surrogates).

The exhibit curator, Chicago-based artist Kiki McGrath, says planning for “$acred Motherhood” (running through February 15) began about 18 months ago, after the idea for it came to her as she was walking through the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum collection.

“I saw this small print of a woman sitting in front of her sewing machine, early 1900s, nursing a baby, two children and a line of

laundry behind her,” McGrath says. “Her expression, it was so bereft, so unlike all the serene mothers in Renaissance art history paintings, and I thought, ‘I’m curious to see what artists would make if they were asked about their experience now of what motherhood is.’”

Woman Made featured that print (of a 1907 drawing by Luther D. Bradley), with its illustration of the triple exploitation of marriage, motherhood, and piecework labor, on its call for this exhibit, and got back submissions that ranged from humorous to “deeply sad.” Most of all, McGrath says, she was taken aback by “how raw and open people were in their work, self-revealing in ways that I don’t always see in galleries.”

“ $ acred Motherhood” Through 2/ 15 : Thu–Sun noon- 5 PM (artist walkthrough 2/ 15, 2- 4 PM), 1332 S. Halsted, 312-738 - 0400, womanmade.org, free

There’s plenty of irony. Some of the artists reacted to their own mothers: Mackenna Morse’s vibrant patchwork oil painting Mom’s Rage , for example, is a whimsical take on a dreadful nuclear family dynamic: storming mom, defenseless daughter, and “avoidant” dad. Others focus on the humor inherent in nature’s plan: Linda Marcus’s Wait(ed) has two enormous fiber breasts, each with an orange-juicer nipple, resting on a wooden chair.

But the work that speaks most directly to the erasure of self that is Nightbitch ’s subject is Emily Mayo’s Madonna and Child . In this commanding, art-historical charcoal-on-paper version of Michelange-

lo’s La Pietà , the son is an infant—alive, jarringly mature, and clearly unhappy to be interrupted. He faces and directly challenges the viewer, while all we see of the shrouded mother who holds him is a cradling arm, a pair of feet, and the breast he’s momentarily turned away from.

McGrath hadn’t yet seen Nightbitch when we talked, but noted that four or ﬁve artists she spoke with at the opening all mentioned that they’d seen it, and that “it resonated with their experience.”

As a double feature with “$acred Motherhood,” it’s grrrreat. v

m disaacs@chicagoreader.com

Clockwise from top L: Mom’s Rage (Mackenna Morse); Madonna and Child (Emily Mayo); Wet Nurse (Oksana Kryzhanivska) COURTESY WOMAN MADE

WINTER THEATER & ARTS

REVIEW

R“P ROJECT A BLACK PLANET: THE ART AND CULTURE OF PANAFRICA”

Through 3/30 : Thu 11 AM– 8 PM, Fri–Sun 11 AM– 5 PM, Mon 11 AM– 5 PM, closed Tue–Wed, Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan, artic.edu/exhibitions, free with museum admission ($14 –$ 40, see website for special rates for Illinois residents, Chicago residents, seniors 65 +, students, and teens 14 –17; free access to children under 14, Chicago teens under 18, Link and WIC cardholders, Illinois educators; Illinois residents free each Mon, Thurs, and Fri through 3/ 14)

The Art Institute surveys the culture of Panafrica

The monumental exhibition aims to reﬂect the beauty and nuance of Africa.

By JEN TORWUDZO-STROH

Africa Restored (Cheryl as Cleopatra) by Kerry James Marshall is on view as part of “Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica” at the Art Institute of Chicago. Using his trademark black pigment, Marshall’s massive sculpture of Africa is draped with chains, medallions, golden letters, drawings, maps, and framed portraits. It is a stunning artwork. Photos of it don’t do it justice—it’s so large, so complex. The objects that adorn the piece are tangled and entwined together. It all overlaps and interconnects; there’s no obvious beginning or end. Every time the work goes on view, another piece is woven in. It’s a never-ending story.

Africa, the Motherland. The cradle of humankind. It’s made up of 54 countries and over 2,000 languages. It’s the second-largest and second-most populated continent on the planet and the ancestral home of the Black diaspora. There isn’t one history to be told about Africa; there are inﬁnite. The story is never-ending, far-reaching, and extraordinarily complex. The Art Institute’s massive survey wrestles with this vastness by bringing together a broad swath of African and Black art that reﬂects the beauty and nuance of the African story.

Pan-Africanism, the driving ideology behind the exhibition, is the belief that all African descendants are connected by a shared history and bound by an inseparable destiny. Across the African continent and throughout the diaspora, millions of individuals have a stake in Pan-Africanism. To some, Pan-Africanism manifests as a political movement, one focused on governance and policy that advance the independence and unity of Black and African communities. For others, it’s a cultural movement that promotes Black and African culture and history. Philosophically, it’s an effort to reconcile the atrocities committed against Black people and shape an African future that is self-deﬁned and self-determined. Anti-colonialism, Black diasporic reunion, and reclamation of the Black historical identity—

these foundational themes of Pan-Africanism are frequently found in Black art worldwide. The exhibition explores and expounds on those ideas in the past, present, and future. Beginning in the past, the exhibition opens with monumental imagery. In the main gallery, Awol Erizku’s dazzling bust of Nefertiti spins suspended in a corner, shimmering and beckoning like a golden disco ball. Tremendous arched murals, Art of the Negro by Hale Aspacio Woodru , span the walls like stained glass windows in a cathedral. The paintings of elongated Black and Brown ﬁgures depict vibrant scenes and symbols of the African story, the scale of the works elevating them to something almost spiritual. Curated by Antawan I. Byrd, Adom Getachew, Elvira Dyangani Ose, and Matthew S. Witkovsky, the exhibition is the culmination of ﬁve years of research, contains 350 objects from four continents, and covers a timeline of 100 years. It’s an ambitious undertaking, from the volume of works to the multiplicity of stories and ideas to the geographical expanse. As such, each of the 11 or so galleries is incredibly dense.

In the next gallery, red and green PanAfrican flags reflect the contention within Black national identities, as a portrait of Toussaint Louverture, leader of the Haitian revolution, regally looks on. Beyond that, in a gallery for Garveyism, the sculpture Large Sailboat (Grande Veleiro) by Arthur Bispo do Rosário, with its array of ﬂags, sits in the middle of the room, perched like a slave ship. Adjacent to it is Yto Barrada’s Tectonic Plate, a three-dimensional wooden map with movable pieces depicting shifting continents—recordings of Garvey’s pontifications play in the background. Further on, we’re asked to contemplate the literal meaning of Blackness with Marlene Dumas’s starkly white painting, Albino , as the sound of African drumbeats throb and pulsate overhead. The area designated Agitation houses Kader Attia’s raw and demanding installation, Asesinos! Asesinos!,

which stirs a sense of communal passion and activism. Winding through it all is a timeline featuring hundreds of publications on Pan-African thoughts. Organized by categories and subcategories, stories, and themes, it’s a dizzying amount of content. The curators intricately piece it together but it’s just so massive. It is nearly impossible to digest in one visit. Africanness/Blackness as a global experience is a fraught and complicated story. This exhibition brings together works from artists who are Afro-Brazillian, South African, Ghanaian, Egyptian, Caribbean, Black American, Black European, and so much more. Each contends with their experiences of Blackness; each infuses their knowledge and culture into their artwork. Any of the subjects could be a

robust stand-alone exhibition but displayed together all at once is so powerful. The overwhelming content is a reminder that there are so many voices and so many stories to tell. The artworks aren’t in conversation—they’re telling their part of a greater story. PanAfricanism can be so much: Afro-utopianism, Afrofuturism, Afro-revisionism. Here it’s used to create a truer identity than the one foisted upon Africans by Western influences. It’s about universal self-determination. “Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica” feels like a study of the people and their culture, like a culture seeking to reunite and understand itself. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Kerry James Marshall, Africa Restored (Cheryl as Cleopatra) THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO, GIFT OF SUSAN AND LEWIS MANILOW

WINTER THEATER & ARTS

APARTMENT GALLERY

Making something out of nothing

A look at the new artist-run project space Unda.m. 93

By NATALIE JENKINS

Inside an unassuming Logan Square walkup, something revolutionary is happening. Unda.m. 93, a domestic gallery started in July 2024, is disregarding institutional contemporary art norms by celebrating radical novelty. Allegra Harvard and Parker Davis, the Chicago artists who run Unda.m. 93, hope to inject visitors with a “mind virus,” infecting their audience with a sense of “emotional, irrational newness.”

Their inspiration came during a night spent drawing and watching TV. With a suite of imaginative drawings and nowhere to show them, Harvard and Davis decided to “make something out of nothing” by founding a gallery in their living room. Ever since, Unda.m. 93 has hosted a dizzying run of eccentric, short-term exhibitions paired with memorable live programming. Last November, a closing event dazed viewers with a screening of Kasper Meltedhair's absurdist horror ﬁlm Busted Babies, featuring a kaleidoscopic array of characters in lurid scenarios. Unda.m. 93 capped o a recent show with the intimate and tactile sonic landscapes of experimental sound artist Lula Asplund, perfectly complementing the dreamlike paintings of Yifan Li.

The pair curate by seeking out the most avant-garde and fantastical expressions of the creative act with artists whose works range from psychic to cringe and trolling to tormented. Harvard and Davis exhibit works of the artists’ choosing, arguing that “whatever they want to show is exactly what needs to be shown.” As a result, Unda.m. 93 presents exhibitions on the pulse of tomorrow. “A Robot Raised by Children Raised by Wolves,” a show last September, displayed portraits of characters from a comic by Nell McKeon and Harrison Wyrick depicting a future where society has progressed so far as to become medieval. Another exhibition, “Cut the Grease,” featured

frenetic collages, drawings, and prints by Andy Heck Boyd, with one work marked as an “upside down mercedes-benz publication.”

While uplifting esoteric contemporary art, Harvard and Davis nevertheless retain a keen understanding of art history, surfacing subtly in creative decisions at Unda.m. 93. The gallery’s ﬂyers, for example, are inspired by archival design work from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Similarly, early modern art and its imaginative capacity at its time of production informs the pair’s radical curatorial aptitude.

Unda.m. 93 subverts expectations of the aesthetic experience created by institutional contemporary art. Uplifting artistic production at its rawest allows the gallery to express a cryptic newness that taps into the deepest parts of consciousness. Its press releases are sites for language to embody the creative act rather than provide explanatory information, with one text featuring two hefty footnotes on image and irrelevance after an opening paragraph repeating the exhibition title “Endless House” in all caps. Opening and closing events are awkward and raucous, bringing together unusual crowds for comic readings, film screenings, musical performances, and more. With its dedicated community, new-wave curation, and idiosyncratic events, Unda.m. 93 is a mystifying portal to the future of art.

Up next at Unda.m. 93 is an ambitious group show, bringing together over 50 artists to create small-scale works for one cacophonous arrangement on the living room wall. The exhibition runs from February 9 to March 2, accompanied by a play written by Harvard. The show is sure to startle, confuse, and delight, imparting visitors with a positive mind virus they won’t be able to shake. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com R U NDA.M. 93 Undam93.onl, email undam93 @aol.com for address or to make an appointment

Allegra Harvard, Beaulah COURTESY THE ARTIST

WINTER THEATER & ARTS

Exploring identity through art

South-side native Jazmin Delgado expands Fiera beyond purses.

By LAYLA BROWN-CLARK

For her accessories brand Fiera, 26-yearold Jazmin Delgado draws inspiration from her family—mixing and mashing her designs based on her relatives who first got her into art. The south-side native began as an earth and environmental sciences major at the University of Illinois Chicago before making the switch to art.

Taking a Latin American colonial art class “forced” Delgado to reflect deeply on her culture and identity as a queer Latina. In this course, she studied Latin American art history before and after Spanish colonization. It showed how this history has shaped who Mexicans are today and was a catalyst for showing Delgado how to express herself.

“In a lot of ways, it inspired me to try to understand more about my background, my identity, my culture, and the historical context of where I come from in Mexico on my mom’s side,” Delgado said. “I have always been a curious person—that’s why I went into the STEM ﬁeld and ultimately switched to art. I feel this class created a bridge of [my] STEM and creative background with my culture. [It] helped provide me with more language to understand how me being a third-generation, queer Latinx creator came to be.”

Having family members who hadn’t ﬁnished high school or who had a limited elementary school education, it was crucial for her to understand where she came from as she worked on projects for the course.

Soon, she landed on the project that would kick o Fiera: a purse made out of Modelo beer boxes, which merged her experience growing up with a hyperfeminine mother and hypermasculine father. For Delgado, these purses blended the experiences her family did not know how to talk about.

“It’s a powerful experience that I try to tell and share [with] the bags and art I make. I wanted to encapsulate my mom’s side and then my dad’s side,” Delgado said. “It’s kind of integrating these pieces that I think of as portraits of them into one singular item, which ended up being this makeshift purse you

Bag additions such as chains and key chains were inspired by many ventures in Delgado’s life, including how she made jewelry with her mother.

“I started to apply these skills I learned as I was growing and ﬁguring out what I liked a lot [to] the bags that I was making. Initially, I was making bags with a person in mind, with a certain experience in mind,” Delgado said. “It’s like making jewelry pieces that I’m adding to

couldn’t use but looked like you could use it.”

She developed Fiera from that initial project, sourcing new bag materials and colors; attaching charms, chains, and key chains to the bag; and working to develop new concepts for her brand. What stayed the same was how she always kept her family in mind when developing each bag—whether it be in their abstract likeness or through the skills they’ve taught her.

the bags.”

Beyond being inspired by her family, Delgado’s purses also gave her the chance to relish in her inner child and understand herself as a queer femme.

“I always had a bag with me, like a personal connection. I was always that little girl that had her bag that had everything in it. Like if my house burned down, it was OK because I had everything I needed in my little bag,” Del-

FIERA fiera- 460211.square.site instagram.com/fiera_fiera_fiera

gado said. “Truthfully, I think growing up . . . I always honestly struggled with [my identity]. I felt like I haven’t really been so confident in who I really am until college because [I was] so heavily influenced by my culture. . . . Coming into my queerness, understanding that there’s more tools and language for who I am that isn’t just a Mexican woman. I am a queer woman. I’m a pansexual woman. I’m also genderfluid, and I don’t always care to be solely identified through being a woman either.”

Delgado was drawn to bags because they were “always a staple item within a woman’s closet,” and that made her feel safe. “I knew I wanted to share that kind of moment as well, and bring that same kind of love and care into a piece that’s also fun and expressive and not really constricted to, like, a gender binary.”

Delgado is brimming with new ideas for Fiera’s future. The ﬁrst innovation is small but mighty and incorporates her previous STEM background. On each new bag, a wrench charm is now included, which Delgado made using a 3D printer.

The next steps add a little more time to the creation process, but Delgado looks forward to the ride as she considers what she wants for the brand in the coming years and looks into expanding Fiera’s universe into clothing.

“I started working for a manufacturing company, and I am an apprentice in embroidery,” Delgado said. This new job has immersed Delgado into the world of colors and textiles. She’s learning how brands run their collections and plan their drops; the job has also inspired her to start the process of creating her own ready-to-wear clothing and madeto-order pieces, and she has been releasing experimental pieces such as the Fiera wrench T-shirt.

“For the clothing collection, I am hoping to release it . . . come springtime. I have been experimenting more with the material I work with now and finding ways to continue this conversation and visual language for my understanding of what it is and what it looks like to be a queer Latinx artist and be Fiera for me,” Delgado said.

With so much potential in Fiera’s universe, Delgado is open to it all. “I think my new job opened my mind to the endless possibilities of what I can do with the brand and just made me really excited to start playing around and working on samples and really bringing these ideas I have in mind to life in the realm of fashion outside of accessories.” v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Jazmin Delgado and her signature Fiera purses L: AMBERCITA; R: COLLEEN MAYER

WINTER THEATER & ARTS

STAGES OF SURVIVAL

Steep Theatre keeps climbing

As they plan renovations for their Edgewater space, the company still emphasizes new work and community conversations.

By KERRY REID

Stages of Survival is an occasional series focusing on Chicago theater companies, highlighting their histories and how they’re surviving—and even thriving—in a landscape that’s become decidedly more challenging since the 2020 COVID-19 shutdown.

In a recent article for American Theatre , Kelundra Smith made a plea for theaters to resist the urge to think small and safe in the darkness surrounding us. “The future needs a risky theatre, not a risk-averse one,” Smith wrote.

Since its founding 25 years ago, Steep Theatre hasn’t shied away from new work and risky topics. Their most recent production, Chicago playwright Omer Abbas Salem’s Happy Days Are Here (Again) , was an excoriating look at sexual abuse of children in a Chicago parochial school. For most of their history, Steep has produced contemporary plays, often in world premieres or Chicago premieres. Along the way, they’ve forged a strong connection with acclaimed British playwright Simon Stephens. They’ve produced six of Stephens’s plays, starting with Harper Regan in 2010. (The first Steep show that Stephens saw, however, wasn’t one of his own; it was 2012’s Love and Money by Stephens’s fellow Brit writer, Dennis Kelly.) This Friday, they open A Slow Air by David Harrower, which reunites Robin Witt, the director of Harper Regan , with the actors from that earlier show, artistic director Peter Moore and Steep company member Kendra Thulin.

The company operated in a storefront next to a bar by the Sheridan Red Line stop for a few years before moving to a space by the Berwyn stop in 2008. They lost that space during the pandemic shutdown in 2020, but in early 2022 announced that they were buying a new home down the street: the shuttered Christian Science Reading Room at 1044 W. Berwyn. Their first show there was Paris by Pulitzer Prize–winning

author Eboni Booth, a drama about employees at a big-box store that felt completely at home in the stripped-down room.

I checked in recently with Moore and board president Anne Puotinen to get a sense of Steep’s new timeline for the building and what it might mean for Steep’s future. (Marisa Macella joined Steep as executive director in spring 2023, replacing Kate Piatt-Eckert.)

To the first point, Moore tells me that the building on Berwyn “is still as the Christian Scientists left it. Plans are at City Hall and we are awaiting permit approval. We have a contractor engaged—Norcon, who actually did the expansion at Steppenwolf a couple years back. So we’re working with them and our architects to move it forward, get the permits all set, and hopefully start construction this spring with the target of opening the building by the end of the year.”

A SLOW AIR

1/24-3/1: Thu–Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; audio description Sun 2/2, open captions Sat 2/8 7:30 PM and Sun 2/9; the Edge Off Broadway, 1133 W. Catalpa, 773-649-3186, steeptheatre.com, $35 general admission, $45 reserved, $20 access tickets

which hosted readings and music events. Moore notes, “Community space is really important to us, and we’re going to recreate the Boxcar experience, but it’s gonna be more incorporated into our lobby. The old space was off to the side, it was a different entrance, and this is gonna be right when you walk through the door. For us, it’s always been sort of essential to our work. It’s not only the work onstage, but the conversations afterwards in the lobby. The public space after the shows and then on off-nights, opening space up for artists and community activities is gonna be a big part of what we wanna do.”

The commitment to community and new work is why Puotinen (whose day job is as a fundraiser with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists ) joined the Steep board six years ago. During the pandemic, she notes, “Steep was involved with the community and became a place where you could pick up and drop off supplies for people who needed it and things like that. So that was very heartwarming.

Though the numbers are in flux, Moore estimates that the construction costs will come in at around $3.5 million. Steep received nearly $3 million from the city’s Community Development Grant Fund at the end of 2022. “We did quite a bit of capital campaign fundraising to get the down payment for the building, to pay for some of the costs as far as the consultants,” says Moore. “All told, I think if you include the cost of the building and architect fees and all that, the entire project is going to be closer to $6 million.”

In their old space on Berwyn, Steep had a small bar next door called the Boxcar,

production. So it’s a healthy combination of folks who have a history of Steep and folks who are just getting to know Steep for the first time, and bringing new perspectives and ideas and voices to it. And one of the things that we always like to talk about at the first rehearsal is, ‘This is gonna be your artistic home for the next three to four months, and treat it as such.’ And that’s mostly on us, I would say, as an ensemble and a company, making sure that it’s a welcoming environment. It’s a place where people feel their voice can be heard both at the artistic table and also organizationally—if they’re getting what they need or not getting what they need, they feel that there’s an open door to talk about those things.”

But firstly, I really like Steep’s mission, which is to really produce theater that’s gonna be a little bit out there and is going to promote conversation. You know, even if you didn’t like the show right away, you’re gonna think about it and you’re gonna talk about it. And to me, that’s a mark of success.”

A Slow Air , which was first produced in 2012, unfolds through intertwining monologues as a longestranged brother and sister in Glasgow unearth their grievances. Being able to work again with Thulin and Witt was a big attraction for Moore. But he emphasizes that though Steep is an ensemble, they’ve tried not to be insular in their approach to choosing work that only highlights Steep actors. (From three actors at its founding, the ensemble has grown to encompass 43 artists.)

“We still try to create opportunities for the ensemble in our programming,” says Moore. “I think it’s always our goal to bring new voices into the mix when we’re doing a

That open door, Moore and Puotinen hope, will also be there for audiences, especially the Edgewater community they’ve called home for so long. Steep has produced two shows in their raw space (in addition to Paris , there was Alexis Scheer’s Our Dear Dead Drug Lord in October of 2022). A Slow Air is the third piece they’ve produced in the Edge Theater complex on North Broadway. They don’t want to lose the experience of what the company’s slogan calls, “Incredible stories, incredibly close.”

For Steep, the mark of success isn’t the common yardstick of building a bigger venue with larger audiences. It’s the ability to keep doing more of what they’ve always done, but better. (Which includes growing stipends for artists, as Moore notes; the company’s Lights Up Edgewater campaign pledges to “invest in artists through increasingly equitable compensation and supportive facilities.”)

“The intimacy of our old space, or all of our spaces in the history of the company, that was important when we were building our new home. Because again, as you know, the conversations after the show are just as important as the conversations onstage,” says Moore. “So we wanna keep that balance. I think it felt like a real urgency to get this building open again, but just as, like, something on behalf of the Chicago theater community. We’re losing spaces and a resource like this, where people can come together—even if they’re not coming to see a show, they can come afterward and know that there are artists here hanging out, just having important conversations. Or even not having important conversations. It’s just about creating a place to be.” v

m kreid@chicagoreader.com

Kendra Thulin COURTESY THE ARTIST

Peter Moore COURTESY THE ARTIST

WINTER THEATER & ARTS

From Tehran to Tehrangeles

Michael Shayan sings, dances, and jokes his way through his maman’s journey in Avaaz.

By YASMIN ZACARIA MIKHAIEL

“I’m playing my mother, which is every gay man’s dream or nightmare, depending on how you feel about your mother.”

Michael Shayan’s one-maman show, Avaaz, is at home at Chicago Shakespeare Theater this month. The Emmy-nominated Iranian American writer and performer, with a history steeped in magic and comedy, dances in his mother Roya’s shoes, charting experiences immigrating from Tehran to Tehrangeles, California. (Roughly half of the U.S.’s population of Iranians live in California, especially Los Angeles, where Shayan and his mother lived in a small Westwood apartment.)

Shayan’s own infectious humor has been undoubtedly cultivated through his mom, although she often joked to deﬂect his inquiries about her life in Iran, making them feel almost taboo. “She’s larger than life, incredibly funny, and every other line was a joke,” says Shayan. A breakthrough in sharing their family history came when he sat down to more formally interview her.

In that short session, something clicked. “We had a very complicated relationship. There was a lot of love there, but we were just kind of talking past each other,” he says. But in preparation for Shayan’s 2018 Lambda Literary’s Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices, the interview he did with his mom served as the spark for what would become Avaaz. “It gave her permission to tell me things she never told me.”

While at the retreat, playwright and then associate artistic director of Center Theatre Group Luis Alfaro led the fellows through a classic exercise by the late celebrated playwright María Irene Fornés. He instructed them to put their hand on their heart and feel for the heartbeat of a character. Shayan quickly felt the presence of his mother and heard her voice sharing stories. The quasi transference felt magical, spiritual.

AVAAZ

Through 2/9: Tue–Fri 7: 30 PM, Sat 2: 30 and 7: 30 PM, Sun 2: 30 PM; Chicago Shakespeare Theater, 800 E. Grand, 312- 595 - 5600, chicagoshakes.com, $ 47-$ 80

“She was, at times, very critical of me. She was just coming from a di erent world, di erent language, di erent cultures,” says Shayan. “The play was kind of my way of trying to bridge that gap and understand my mother. And through that, I came to actually better understand myself.”

Through his writing process, Shayan imagined his way into his mother’s life, somehow ﬁlling in the blanks of her story and then realizing he wasn’t so far from her truth. When he shared Avaaz drafts with his mom later on, Shayan realized, “What I imagined turned out to be her actual life.”

There’s no direct translation for the Persian word avaaz, and Shayan loves that. “The poetry of the word is a song as it’s being sung—in motion, in process.” He views an avaaz as a song itself being its own full journey.

“My mother is very much singing her song. I feel like our community is, in many ways, singing a collective song right now for freedom—women, life, freedom.” He notes the word became a revolutionary slogan that originated in women-led Kurdish movements and emerged in Iran in the face of Mahsa Amini’s death in 2022. Shayan understands the weight of telling Iranian stories and cherishes the opportunity to expand the narrative of what it means to be not only Iranian but also queer and Jewish.

Persian culture is one of abundance, and Shayan’s Avaaz (directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel) is set during a Nowruz (New Year) party where the warmth and chaos of hosting

and entertaining takes on a tastefully gilded, textural life of its own. “I lean into maximalism here. Maximal joy, maximal celebration, maximal feeling, maximal excavation. All in the context of a party.”

Shayan exercised his performance chops young, at age 12, auditioning amidst hundreds for a spot at Hollywood’s Magic Castle, a historic members-only mansion for magic enthusiasts. In front of his magic heroes, he put originality and technique on full display, earning a coveted booking to perform at brunch shows. “I was performing, I was writing, I was acting, directing myself.” This experience was transformative, shaping his sense of “spectacle, fabulosity, and theatricality.” More recently, Shayan’s written for the Emmy-nominated Discovery+ series The Book of Queer and HBO’s We’re Here. What really moves Shayan is how much his seemingly very specific immigrant kid story of growing up across cultures resonates so deeply with and beyond Iranians. As Avaaz approaches the 100-performances milestone (it premiered in April 2023 at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California, and has since played in Maryland and Denver), Shayan feels “lucky to be able to take the show across the country, to be in community with people from all over the world, and to see that really we’re much more similar than we think.”

His mother Roya’s journey from Tehran to California almost serves as a blueprint, as Shayan recalls an Ethiopian audience member in Denver sharing that details in her father’s

immigration story parallel his own mother’s. “I think the power of theater is it illuminates our sameness.”

Shayan also notes how special it has been, especially in Denver, that some audience members have come back multiple times in an e ort to share the story with their own mothers or kids. Both familial parties see themselves and feel a sort of validation in why they are the way they are. There’s a duality to the perspective of Avaaz; although told through the body of Roya, much of Shayan’s own perspective sings out.

“I’m going deep into my chest cavity and, you know, into the gut and really trying to tell the absolute truth about my relationship with my mom. The ugly, funny, brutal, whole truth about this dynamic.”

Shayan feels this show is his personal Olympics, not just emotionally but physically: “There’s dancing, there’s singing, there’s improv, there’s stand-up.” In touring Avaaz , Shayan wants to challenge his artistry and push the limits of his own growth even amidst the show’s critical acclaim. This is what keeps the show fresh for him and audiences.

“I keep discovering newness—new things about the text, about my mother, about myself.”

Just as the setting of Persian Nowruz translates to “new day,” Shayan’s Avaaz marks another beginning for Iranian storytelling that embraces the complexity of familial relationships in unabashed, thrilling, and hopeful ways. v m letters@chicagoreader.com

Michael Shayan in Avaaz TERESA CASTRACANE PHOTOGRAPHY

OPENING

RFun Home still packs a wallop

Porchlight revives the Tony-winning musical based on Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir.

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, inspired by the cartoonist’s 2006 graphic memoir of the same name, still packs a mighty emotional wallop nearly ten years a er it became an unlikely Broadway darling. As intimate as immediate family, Porchlight Theatre’s carefully cra ed production of 2015’s ﬁve-time Tony winner (music by Jeanine Tesori, book and lyrics by Lisa Kron) feels like an unassuming yet unmistakable gust of warmth and joy in the midst of a winter where both the weather and the world at large seem like they’re programmed to induce maximum bitterness.

Director Stephen Schellhardt and music director Heidi Joosten ﬁnd both the emotional and the melodic heart of Fun Home, including its references to iconic 1970s television (The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family) and its unvarnished exploration of the tragic link between suicide and homophobia.

Porchlight’s staging has a few wobbles: The action occurs largely in the Bechdel family funeral home (the “fun home” of the title), but the otherwise clever cartoon-merged-with-reality set is inexplicably missing the casket that plays a crucial role in the choreography in one of the show’s early numbers. Moreover, a fair portion of the show’s incisive, intelligent, and laugh-out-loud humorous lyrics venture into the garbled side. Even still, the trio of Alisons—Tessa Mae Pundsack and Meena Sood alternate as grade-school or Small Alison, Z Mowry plays college-aged or Middle Alison, and Alanna Chavez is Adult Alison—fuel the production by delivering a trio of deeply empathetic performances. When Mowry unleashes her powerhouse vocals on “Changing My Major,” the stage becomes suﬀused with an intoxicating mix of wonder, vulnerability, and galvanic, joyous self-discovery. The ﬂip side of all that joy comes from Alison’s troubled, troubling closeted father Bruce (Patrick Byrnes), who delivers both love and self-loath-

ing, abuse and aﬀection. —CATEY SULLIVAN FUN HOME

Through 3/2: Wed–Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM; also Thu 1/23 and 1/30 2 PM, no show Wed 1/29; open captions Sat 2/8 and 2/22 3 PM; Ruth Page Center for the Arts, 1016 N. Dearborn, porchlightmusictheatre.org, $20-$85

RModern-day fairy tale

City Lit’s Glassheart reimagines “Beauty and the Beast.”

Classic characters confront the modern world in Reina Hardy’s Glassheart a contemporary retelling of “Beauty and the Beast.” Glassheart situates the Beast (Mark Pracht), still cursed with a grotesque appearance, far from 18th-century Europe. Now, he and his loyal friend and underling, a magical lamp called Only (Kat Evans), have moved to present-day Chicago. Here, Only hopes that the dejected, reclusive Beast can ﬁnally fall in love and break the curse that plagues them.

This desire becomes more than a pipe dream when Only meets their new neighbor, Aiofe (Cailyn Murray), who has come to start a new life in Chicago. Together, the trio discover what it truly means to be human and what can happen when people from vastly diﬀerent circumstances seek to imagine another world. The production also features Elaine Carlson as the mysterious witch next door.

This story may not suit those who aren’t roused by fantasy. But even those skeptical of the show’s premise can escape into its skillful world-building, staged by City Lit executive artistic director Brian Pastor. Notably, all four actors are thoroughly engrossed in their character’s internal and external worlds, bringing humanity and high stakes to a fantastical yet all too familiar narrative. Evans’s performance as Only is particularly compelling, offering a polished portrayal of someone caught between two realities. —KATIE POWERS GLASSHEART Through 2/23: Fri–Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Mon 2/10 and 2/17 7:30 PM; City Lit Theater, 1020 W. Bryn Mawr, 773-2933682, citylit.org, $35 ($30 seniors, $12 students and military)

Twain with a twist

Kid Prince and Pablo gives a rap faceli to The Prince and the Pauper.

When it comes to classic stories being ﬁt for undergoing a hop-hop remix, you could do a lot worse than The Prince and the Pauper, Mark Twain’s 1881 children’s novel about a highborn heir to the throne undergoing a switcheroo with an impoverished doppelgänger to see how the other half lives.

Last summer was, a er all, the season of everyone trying to wedge themselves under the awning of Kendrick Lamar’s “Us” while desperately convincing themselves they couldn’t possibly be a “They,” right down to national party delegates and—my personal favorite—jaw-droppingly self-unaware keynote speakers at Salesforce’s annual mega-convention.

Rap is, even to those who don’t appreciate it, the ultimate badge of authenticity.

Written by brothers Brian and Marvin Quijada and directed by Raquel Torre, Kid Prince and Pablo reimagines wealthy Tom Canty as Kid Prince (Joshua Zambrano), a wannabe rapper and privileged member of an autocratic family responsible for criminalizing hip-hop and breakdancing. Intrigued by imprisoned Spanish-speaking bucket boy Pablo (Jesús Barajas), the two swap clothes and lives, and lessons are learned.

Despite its themes of revolution, appropriation, and class solidarity, Kid Prince dons kid gloves in a way Twain’s writings famously didn’t, even though Lifeline markets the play for teens and up. The face-pulling acting styles, hyper-articulated dance movements, and gentle, simple verses all suggest theater for young audiences, ultimately landing the show in a tonal valley between kids and adults such that it seems ill-suited for either. —DAN JAKES KID PRINCE AND PABLO Through 2/16: Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2:30 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM; touch tour and audio description Sun 1/26, open captions Sun 2/2; Lifeline Theatre, 6912 N. Glenwood, 773-761-4477, lifelinetheatre.com, $45 ($35 seniors, $20 students with ID and active and retired military personnel) v

Z Mowry (L) and Patrick Byrnes in Fun Home at Porchlight Music Theatre LIZ LAUREN

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FEATURE

Frederick Wiseman’s portals of possibility

The Gene Siskel Film Center’s Worlds of Wiseman series shows us our world. The question is whether or not we can change it.

By JOE ENGLEMAN

Things are not looking good for American institutions these days, which may be what makes this the perfect time for the Gene Siskel Film Center to mount a Frederick Wiseman retrospective. Wiseman, who went from teaching law to making ﬁlms, is widely considered to be the 20th and 21st centuries’ foremost chronicler of American institutions and the people caught in their orbit. The 33 ﬁlms in the Worlds of Wiseman series, newly restored in 4K, cover 40 years of his nearly 60-year career.

I watched ten Wiseman films across the last few weeks (nine of which are part of the Film Center series, which runs through February 5). This is the first time I’ve engaged with his work, and I feel I’ve encountered the sublime or watched the videotape in the novel Infinite Jest that makes you lose interest in everything else. Every Wiseman film is a distillation of weeks of shooting and editing footage into a sequence that he believes tells a story of what he’s seen and heard. Since these films lack the sort of telltale signs of documentary (like Ken Burns voice-overs), you’re often on your own to make sense of what’s going on; scholars have even compared them to Rorschach inkblots. Rebecca Fons, the Film Center’s director of programming, says that the films are “hypnotic,” and that the events in these films often feel like they’re unfolding right in front of us. To me, Wiseman’s films are portals: You can look through them, step forward into new places and possibilities, or be swallowed up and deposited somewhere familiar but just slightly o , like a fictional small town in a David Lynch film. The difference between those “fictions” and Wiseman’s “reality fictions” is that Wiseman’s worlds are our own. Not unlike Lynch (and cocreator Mark Frost) pulling a rabbit out of a hat to get Twin

RTHE WORLDS OF WISEMAN

Through 2/5, Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, $13 general admission; $ 6 50 Film Center members; $ 8 youth, students, and seniors; $ 5 SAIC students and faculty and Art Institute staff siskelfilmcenter.org/wiseman

York Public Library (2017) or Menus-Plaisirs

– Les Troisgros (2023), his 44th (and latest) ﬁlm about a family-owned French restaurant, which aired on PBS last year and remains available on PBS Passport, following an ep-

Peaks on network television, it’s astounding that nearly all of Wiseman’s nonfictional films have aired on public television. It makes sense for a more recent film like Ex Libris: The New

isode of Chicago Tonight or Check, Please! But Meat (1976), with its winding path to the slaughterhouse, and Primate (1974), with its unending experiments and infamous vivisec-

tion sequence, remain unsettling to this day, so to have seen these when they aired on PBS must have been radical.

Wiseman’s ﬁlms and their subjects are challenging in many ways. They take a deep and damning look at the social and political issues that underlie American life and institutions, and viewers are left wondering how “reform” could possibly ﬁx these systems.

Wiseman’s Law and Order (1969), which trails Kansas City police o cers in the wake of that decade’s assassinations, racial upheaval, and the immediate aftermath of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, imparts a reminder that whether it’s a single camera, a mandatory bodycam, or the whole world watching, cameras trained on police o cers don’t discourage them from using brute force or acting with complete impunity.

In Welfare (1975), applicants and aid recipients at New York’s Waverly Welfare Center talk to each other about getting the “New York runaround”: Come back for an appointment tomorrow at 6 AM, bring a notarized letter, wait here until we call your number. About a decade ago, sociologist Pamela Herd and political scientist Donald Moynihan popularized the term “administrative burden” to describe the rulemaking, regulations, legislation, and executive branch directives that help create an uneven system for exercising rights and accessing entitlements and public aid. Welfare looks at how di cult navigating these systems and their burdens was when some of these programs were relatively new, never mind how they function today and the additional burdens we can expect to see soon.

Wiseman’s Public Housing (1997), which screens at the Film Center on January 30, was ﬁlmed here in Chicago at the Ida B. Wells Homes just a year after the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development took control of the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA). In one harrowing sequence, an elderly senior gets evicted by CHA police as his radio plays diegetic classical music, presumably on WFMT. The o cers describe the bureaucratic tangle that awaits the man: They’ll take him to a community center where they will try to place him in a shelter and then a senior center, but also, the Department of Human Services and CHA are looking for shelters or housing, too. “It’s gonna take a little time, so you’re gonna have to be patient with us,” one of the o cers says. Meanwhile, the federalized CHA has bigger burdens to address, like making it easier for residents to start businesses and win CHA maintenance contracts.

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If you’re new to Wiseman’s work or think that institutional safeguards are going to get us out of the mess, you might be walking into these ﬁlms expecting to see scenes of caring public servants cutting through bureaucracy to help people in desperate need. What you’re more likely to see than navigated burdens are people engaging in small acts of care and repair. In Welfare, a caseworker gives a recently released prisoner her phone number. She explains that he needs to get phone numbers from everyone else from here on, because everyone will be looking for any excuse to close his case. Another caseworker argues with a supervisor to stop a client’s case from being closed, but the caseworker can’t give the client any relief that day because of regulations.

In Public Housing, Wiseman has his cameras follow maintenance people, exterminators, daycare workers, and Helen Finner, the longtime head of the Wells’s residents association. In Hospital (1969), there are moving sequences where a patient sees a doctor for the ﬁrst time in years (maybe ever); an ER doctor calls to ﬁle another complaint with a wealthy hospital after their sta dropped o a poor patient in immediate need of surgery at the public hospital’s emergency room; and a psychiatrist is thwarted in his e orts to get a queer teen with nowhere else to turn on welfare. These moments stand out because they are rare instances in which humanity breaks through these crushing and alienating systems. Wiseman’s Near Death (1989), screening this Saturday, January 25, is 358 minutes of nothing but nurses, doctors, and families providing care for people on their deathbeds.

While many of Wiseman’s works share central questions, references, and themes, Canal Zone (1977), Belfast, Maine (1999), and City Hall (2020) stand out because they o er holistic portraits of the systems that fascinate Wiseman operating within the context of each other. These works also appear at symbolic moments—the bicentennial, the end of the century, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, respectively, at times when many questioned if institutions would endure. Of the ﬁlms I saw, these seem to o er both the broadest and most specific answers to questions Wiseman asks over and over: What is life like in this community, and who or what holds it together?

Canal Zone depicts the red, white, and blue–saturated bicentennial year in a “Mayberry,” set against the military-corporate-colonial backdrop of the Panama Canal Zone. It’s an incredible distillation of the banality of the U.S. empire. Here, the man who serves both as gov-

ernor of the Canal Zone and head of the Panama Canal Company talks about the life raft the Vietnam war threw the company and its bottom line; the reported cases of child abuse that are three times as high as a comparable U.S. town; and the jingoistic high school student graduation speeches that seem to echo Ronald Reagan’s 1976 campaign and anticipate the language of his presidency. Wiseman has a knack for ﬁnding the absurd at the heart of our reality, and it all clicks in Canal Zone, perhaps even more now with its gut-punch ending and the Panama Canal becoming the subject of new saber-rattling and twisted dreams of territorial expansion.

Belfast, Maine, which screens on February 1, is a portrait of a rural community held together by roving nurses, caregivers, and social workers making house calls that will likely be upended, as a hospital executive explains, by the arrival of “managed care.” The sequences that really sing in City Hall, which isn’t part of the restoration retrospective, hint at a new kind of arrangement between citizens and the city, like a staffer who not once, but twice, brings up community land trusts as a possible solution to houselessness and a new harm reduction center that lacks a permanent funding source. These are important because even though equity appears on every staffer’s lips, the well-intentioned reforms meant to right historical wrongs in Boston cannot change everything. Every new e ort requires outside consultants, requests for proposals, and lawyers to make sure it stands up to legal scrutiny while the existing systems chug along.

Watching Wiseman while our dire future approaches opens a series of portals—portals that offer the possibility of moving toward a new way of thinking. Wiseman takes us to places that many of us don’t wish to return to, places we’d like to avoid as much as possible, places we’d like to forget. Sometimes the portals bring us to crazed realities that shouldn’t exist and places that promised hope but were designed (both in policy and structural terms) to fail. The institutions that Wiseman has spent decades showing us won’t save us, and now it might be too late to save them. What comes next is what we envision, the kind of alternate arrangements that we can and need to imagine. That future is the one portal Wiseman can’t show us, because we haven’t imagined it yet, but the portals he’s opened can help us get there. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

BY HAROLD PINTER

DIRECTED BY SUSAN V. BOOTH

Stage and screen stars Helen Hunt (Oscar, Emmy, Golden Globe Awards), Robert Sean Leonard (Tony Award) and Ian Barford (Tony Award nominee) form the “eternal triangle” in Susan V. Booth’s major revival of Pinter’s famed masterwork.

Emma, Robert and Jerry have history. As her marriage to Robert comes to an end, Emma reconnects with Jerry, her former lover—and her husband’s best friend—as the action unspools backward in time in an inventive retelling by the Nobel Prize-winning playwright. At once utterly domestic and dangerous, uncovering hidden truths and revealing how little we know about those we think we know so much about, it’s an “elegy about time and memory (where) the greatest dramatic weight lies in what’s unspoken” (New York Times).

IAN BARFORD HELEN HUNT ROBERT SEAN LEONARD

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R TRUST FALL

Monthly, the Davis Theater, 4614 N. Lincoln davistheater.com/special_events/trust-fall instagram.com/oscarbatepod

FEATURE

Trust Fall into the arms of Oscarbate Film Collective

Will Morris and John Dickson’s mystery screening series provokes intrigue, adventure, and community.

By SHAUN HUHN

“Trust us, we’ll catch you.” These words precede each screening of the Trust Fall series, showcased in Oscarbate Film Collective’s custom-made trailers that delight in misdirection. Founded by seasoned Chicago ﬁlm programmers John Dickson and Will Morris, Oscarbate has garnered a reputation for daring, eclectic, and boundary-pushing film programming. Their work challenges conventional ideas about cinema and invites audiences into a unique cinematic experience.

Oscarbate gained recognition with their Highs and Lows series at the Music Box Theatre. Highs and Lows cleverly juxtaposed ﬁlms like American Pie (1999) with Maurice Pialat’s

Graduate First (1978), Freddy Got Fingered (2001) with Lars von Trier’s The Idiots (1998), and their last pairing of 2024: Abel Ferrara’s Ms .45 (1981) with Jack Hill’s Co y (1973). By combining such seemingly disparate films into double features, Oscarbate encouraged audiences to ponder the deﬁnitions of “high” and “low” art and confront their own biases about cinema. This commitment to fostering discourse through programming is emblematic of their ethos.

In addition to their shows at the Music Box, Oscarbate’s collaboration with boutique physical media label Severin Films spotlighted the extensive oeuvre of Spanish filmmaker Jesús Franco. With more than 200 ﬁlms to his name,

Franco’s work o ers a wealth of material. Oscarbate’s touring series of his films, including a newly restored print of Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein (1972), has drawn audiences nationwide. The screening of this film at the Davis Theater in March 2024 marked a significant milestone for the collective, further cementing their place in the film programming landscape.

The seeds for Trust Fall were planted in May 2024 during a Davis screening of Michael Mann’s Collateral (2004), paired with a secret second film. The audience’s enthusiastic response to this blind pairing inspired Dickson and Morris to create a series built entirely around the thrill of the unknown. Trust Fall became a celebration of forgotten,

underappreciated, or rarely seen cinema, inviting audiences to take a leap of faith with each screening.

“In a day and age where folks often seem to decide the quality of a ﬁlm and their reaction to it before they ever step foot in the theater,” says Morris, “we strive to bring back the gleeful sense of discovery that drew so many of us to the world of ﬁlm. That feeling of wandering around a city at night with friends and randomly deciding to see a movie with no consideration for what’s even playing is tragically lost and, we think, for the worst.”

Launching a secret film series poses challenges, but the dedication of Dickson and Morris along with their established reputation in

For skeptics wary of secret screenings, Oscarbate’s impressive programming track record provides reassurance. SHIRA FRIEDMAN-PARKS

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Chicago’s film community allow for this aura of confidentiality and communal trust which has been instrumental in Trust Fall’s success. Both Dickson and Morris work tirelessly behind the scenes to secure film prints, edit trailers, and create promotional materials, all while juggling day jobs. Despite the logistical demands, they present themselves with ease and charm at screenings, even when faced with introducing a film without giving away its title. The shroud of mystery transforms every Trust Fall gathering into a shared journey. Attendees arrive with no idea what they’re about to watch and leave sworn to secrecy, perpetuating word-of-mouth buzz that continues to grow with each screening.

“We hold our audiences accountable to the special nature of this endeavor,” says Dickson, “because we want it to continue, and we don’t want people sharing the titles we screen on social media—we see it as, like, a special club for the city’s most adventurous ﬁlmgoers.”

He jokes, “We are currently working on installing one of those bootlegger doors with the sliding peepholes on the Davis Theater, accompanied by a special password.”

The magic of Trust Fall extends beyond the films themselves. Postscreening, Dickson and Morris linger in the theater lobby, sparking discussions about their film choices. Their encyclopedic knowledge of cinema and genuine passion for the medium fuel vibrant debates among attendees, whether they loved or loathed the film. Oscarbate’s openness to all opinions—combined with their belief in the subjectivity of art—ensures these conversations remain lively and inclusive. Their motto, “Trust us, we’ll catch you,” reflects their dedication to curating films with enthusiasm and care, fostering trust between programmers and their audience.

carbate’s choices defy traditional boundaries between genres, encompassing exploitation cinema, world cinema, horror, Hong Kong action, supernatural romance, and more.

Trust Fall’s allure is further heightened by guest appearances from renowned film historians and authors. Recent events have featured Samm Deighan, editor of Revolution in 35mm: Political Violence and Resistance in Cinema From the Arthouse to the Grindhouse, 1960–1990 ; and Caden Gardner, coauthor of Corpses, Fools, and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema . These guest speakers enrich the series, o ering attendees deeper insights into the ﬁlms and the contexts in which they were made. Oscarbate plans to expand their guest roster in 2025, ensuring the series continues to grow and evolve.

Attendees arrive with no idea what they’re about to watch and leave sworn to secrecy.

For their December ﬁlm, Dickson and Morris warned audiences that their last selection of the year was reserved for more transgressive fare. After the screening, a few audience members told the programmers that the film didn’t appeal to them. Dickson and Morris were ready for a negative reaction, but they didn’t expect those same audience members to assure them they would be back next month. It’s proof that the communal spirit of cinema is still very much alive.

BY JAMES IJAMES DIRECTED BY TYRONE PHILLIPS

For skeptics wary of secret screenings, Oscarbate’s impressive programming track record provides reassurance. Outside of Trust Fall, the collective has presented an array of eclectic titles, including obscure gems like Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers (1972), cult favorites such as The Mangler (1995) and Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), and a mix of surprising selections like The Bridges of Madison County (1995), Crossroads (2002), Project X (1987), Golden Eighties (1986), O.C. and Stiggs (1987), and The Craft (1996). Os-

This year promises to be a dynamic one for Oscarbate. Alongside Trust Fall, they plan to curate a variety of other series, including Terror Tuesdays and Weird Wednesdays at the Alamo Drafthouse in Wrigleyville, Bloody Brunch on Sundays at the Davis, and additional events at the Music Box. Their ongoing Jesús Franco tour will continue to introduce audiences to the filmmaker’s vast and varied body of work. For those who prefer to know what they’re watching ahead of time, these events provide ample opportunities. But for the adventurous, Trust Fall remains an irresistible invitation to dive headfirst into the unknown.

Whether showcasing overlooked classics, cult treasures, or the downright bizarre, the series dares audiences to embrace the unexpected. So, if you’re ready to take a leap into seldom-seen cinema, consider giving Trust Fall a try. Just remember: it’s a secret. And don’t tell them I told you. v

A boisterous Southern cookout sets the scene for a Black, queer discovery of self and resilience in this Pulitzer Prize-winning, five-time Tony-nominated “uproarious reimagining of Hamlet” (The New Yorker).

“This is what I was raised in: pig guts and bad choices.”

As Juicy grapples with his identity and his family at a backyard barbecue, his father’s ghost shows up asking for revenge—on Juicy’s uncle, who has married his widowed mom—bringing his quest for joy and liberation to a screeching halt. James Ijames has reinvented Shakespeare’s masterpiece, creating what the New York Times hails as “a hilarious yet profound tragedy, smothered in comedy,” where the only death is the patriarchy. Tyrone Phillips, Founding Artistic Director of Chicago’s famed Definition Theatre, directs.

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Don your beaver suit: HundredsofBeavers is back

The Music Box Theatre will once again screen the low-budget silent ﬁlm quickly becoming a cult favorite.

By LEOR GALIL

Ididn’t expect to watch my new favorite midnight movie of the past decade on a Wednesday at 9:30 PM, nor did I anticipate said film would involve grown men dressed in animal costumes gallivanting through the Wisconsin wilderness. I went to the Music Box Theatre to see Hundreds of Beavers (2022) last April because my friends Molly and Joe invited me, and their enthusiasm compelled me to buy a ticket without investigating much about what I was signing up to see. I knew just a little bit about Hundreds of Beavers , namely that it’s a mostly silent black-and-white picture with a cartoonish visual sensibility and energy in line with classic Looney Tunes shorts. I did not expect the screening would sell out, nor that I’d ﬁnd people in line dressed up as beavers. The Music Box has played Hundreds of Beavers just a handful of times; the ﬁlm will screen for the seventh time at the theater on Friday, January 31. Beavers cost $150,000 to make and had a small budget for promotion; director Mike Cheslik sent the movie on a small touring circuit that involved adults in animal costumes wrestling at screenings. In the past 12 months or so, Beavers has grown a sizable cult—one that caught the attention of the New York Times last March.

Beavers focuses on the tribulations of novice fur trapper Jean Kayak, played by an athletically built man whose name beﬁts the movie’s frontier setting: Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, who cowrote the movie with Cheslik. They previously collaborated on 2018’s Lake Michigan Monster , which the pair cowrote and Tews directed. Like Beavers , Monster is a black-and-white movie largely made in Wisconsin on a tight budget, though Tews’s film has one critical difference: it’s a talkie. The process of making an indie movie with a lot of dialogue and not a lot of money influenced Tews and Cheslik’s approach to their next collaboration.

“The ADR [Automated Dialogue Replace-

ment] process was very boring on Lake Michigan Monster,” Tews told Filmmaker Magazine in June. “So we knew we didn’t want to have any ADR.” That creative restriction gave Beavers one of its distinctive charms; its near-total lack of dialogue forces Tews to express his every desire with big gestures that extend the length of his body. Since he’s playing an alcoholic learning how to trap rabbits and beavers in the depths of winter with no knowledge or skills, Tews contorts his body in shapes typical in Saturday morning cartoons.

Cheslik leaned into the film’s exaggerated playfulness with his postproduction animation. His Adobe After E ects animations are pointedly unrealistic. The ﬁlm opens with Jean Kayak binge drinking with a crowd of crudely drawn men: they have beards made out of squiggles, their eyes are dots, and their noses are two sides of a triangle. These minor characters move with all the stilted awkwardness of early-2000s Adobe Flash animation videos, and they frame the negative space around Tews’s Kayak like a photo booth background.

Realism isn’t the point of Beavers . The bright-white eyeballs of wolves that light up the pitch-black night, the perfectly circular sinkholes that suck Kayak into the depths of the snowy landscapes, and the stars that encircle Kayak’s head when he’s su ered the kind of physical injury that would ordinarily result in death all supply Beavers with a constant sugar rush. Such details also provide Cheslik, Tews, and their small crew with license to abandon the prescribed usage of visual e ects in film. Marvel Studios poured untold millions into making Mark Ru alo’s Hulk appear to be a natural part of its cinematic universe’s gray patina. Why set money on fire in an attempt to manufacture an illusion of reality, when you can more e ectively capture the spirit of a film with a 3D rendering of an oversized applejack barrel that looks like it’s made for a cut-andpaste punk zine?

R H UNDREDS OF BEAVERS

108 min. Wide release on VOD, screening Fri 1/31 at 11:15 PM, Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport, $11 general admission, $ 8 Music Box members musicboxtheatre.com/films-and-events/hundreds-of-beavers

Just as a bunch of Brits with bad haircuts in the late 1970s made a scene with a few guitar chords and a whole lot of chutzpah, Cheslik and Tews fi gured out how to pull o grand ideas with limited means. Like punk, Beavers’s foundation is simple: it’s still funny to see a dude get injured in the marbles if he makes a goofy face. Cheslik told Filmmaker he and Tews started scripting Beavers by doodling visual gags on note cards for two months. Not every gag lands—the movie runs nearly two hours, and the physical comedy can wear thin with repetition. But Cheslik and Tews execute each gag with great force and speed, stringing the scenes together into a coherent story with callbacks and forward momentum that intensifies as the movie barrels along. It’s a work of magic that also prevents me from being able to identify a specific gag that doesn’t work.

The repetition that can make Beavers feel a bit tired simultaneously establishes one of its strengths; the movie delivers gags with a reliability you can set your watch to. This artistic tic echoes the metronomic handclaps that are central to Milwaukee’s lowend hiphop scene—it’s a scrappy DIY movement that’s earned national praise for its creativity and ingenuity. Midwestern pluck binds lowend hip-hop and Beavers , the latter of which makes Wisconsin central to its identity. Cheslik ﬁlmed Beavers on location in the northern reaches of Wisconsin, near the border of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, in the dead of winter. Nature provided the crew with snow and imparted the film with a chilliness that can erase your memory of a time without subzero temperatures—that’s a sensation I’ve felt most acutely while visiting Land O’ Lakes, Wisconsin.

I’m fond of the cold, but even I have my limits with spending time outdoors when the snow on the ground grows past my knees. In middle school, I had at least one thing that could draw my attention for hours during ceaseless snow days: an N64 video game system. I’ve wondered how often Cheslik and Tews reached for video games in their youth when the Wisconsin snow became too much to bear. The madcap chase scene in Beavers’s third act draws its visual language from video games, though gaming informs much of the rest of the film too; Cheslik told Hyperreal Film Club that Super Mario Galaxy 2 inspired Kayak’s web of increasingly elaborate traps in the ﬁlm’s second act. Beavers doesn’t just borrow from the look of video games—it feels like it’s made by people who know the pain of spending a fruitless afternoon trying to defeat one level of The Legend of Zelda.

The Beavers screening I attended drew the kind of laughter that could spill over into the next joke. Since the movie is 99 percent free of dialogue, I never felt like I missed anything. (This also makes Beavers fit for overactive midnight crowds eager to interact with the movie; this movie can absorb your reactions, but it won’t give you room to insert your voice into the night’s entertainment.) When I revisited the movie at home in December, I was struck by one detail I’d either missed or forgotten: a counter in the upper right-hand corner keeping track of Kayak’s beaver kills. It reminded me of when I learned to play Super Mario Bros. as a kid; I struggled a lot with the basic gameplay, but it felt thrilling when I’d earn a few measly points. How could I not root for Kayak—or, for that matter, Beavers? v

m lgalil@chicagoreader.com

A still from Hundreds of Beavers (2022) MUSIC BOX THEATRE

FILM

Last week was bad. At this point in 2025, there are any number of reasons why that might have been the case, but speciﬁcally in relation to a column about moviegoing, it was in large part because of the death of David Lynch, beloved auteur and mayor of the uncanny.

Lynch’s films are among those I reserve almost exclusively for theatrical screenings. Thanks to the Music Box Theatre (and Daniel Knox, musician and onetime projectionist, who led these events), in my almost 13 years in Chicago, I’ve had the opportunity to see two complete David Lynch retrospectives, and while I didn’t see everything, much of what I did see has become for me the definitive experience of having seen that movie. I saw Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) for the first time there—it was one of those profound moviegoing experiences, during which I felt like Lynch was revealing the ethereal undercurrent of his oblique, often mordantly humorous and fairly violent texts.

There was often an impulse to laugh where it may not have been appropriate (an excess of which has plagued some recent screenings of Blue Velvet [1986] in particular), but to o er a more sympathetic understanding of such behavior in light of Lynch’s death, perhaps being confronted with the pathetic horrors of existence sometimes necessitates a laugh. Where his ﬁlms often dealt with di cult subjects, the man himself seemed to be a beacon among his own darkness. Tributes pouring out from friends, family, and collaborators (Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini, Laura Dern, stars of Twin Peaks, etc.) reﬂect nothing but love, marking a legacy that far surpasses just his creative genius. Anyway, this ties into this week’s moviegoing because on the day of his death, I attended Oscarbate’s mystery Trust Fall screening at the Davis

Theater (see p. 22), where John Dickson delivered a fitting eulogy before the screening. He mentioned that he didn’t want to go out that night—a feeling that resonated with me—but was ultimately glad he did, as was I. Community is more important now than ever; I’m proud to be part of both the moviegoing community and among those who contribute to the Reader, an integral source of knowledge for those looking to live their Chicago lives to the fullest. Along with news of Lynch’s death this week, news of the Reader ’s layoffs pierced my soul. I can’t imagine a life without this paper—it’s not just a weekly source of new and interesting things to do in Chicago or an outlet well-regarded in the ﬁlm world for its standout criticism. It’s been part of my family almost since I moved to Chicago, and to see it go would be another great loss. Please donate, if you can.

Otherwise, this week has been filled with Frederick Wiseman (see p. 20)—I watched and wrote about The Store (1983) and Racetrack (1985) for Cine-File—as well as women experimental ﬁlmmakers for the new Picture Restart program going on at Chicago Filmmakers. It’s another excellent example of a community coming together and the alternative press making people aware of not just what is happening, but how and why, as was evinced in Joshua Minsoo Kim’s piece on it for the Reader earlier this month. I also finally saw The Brutalist (2024), which felt too intentionally epic. The bombastic score echoes in my mind, yet I struggle to connect meaning that might make the film as imposing as its music.

Until next time, moviegoers. —KAT SACHS v

The Moviegoer is the diary of a local ﬁlm bu , collecting the best of what Chicago’s independent and underground ﬁlm scene has to o er.

THE WORLDS OF WISEMAN

A still from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)

THE SECRET HISTORY OF CHICAGO MUSIC

Yama & the Karma Dusters embodied the hippie counterculture

They turned their crash pad and rehearsal space into a commune and printed their recycled LP covers at their kitchen table.

By STEVE KRAKOW

Since 2005 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.

Chicago gets short shrift in tales of the counterculture of the late 60s and early 70s, but our city nurtured its own underground scene full of political activists, hippie communes, mind-expanding newspapers, revolutionary causes, and hallucinogenic music. Some local bands, operating in the mold of the MC5 in Detroit, were more entrenched than others in the revolution. Yama & the Karma Dusters were among them, and the Secret History of Chicago Music got the group’s whole hairy story from founding member Al Goldberg.

Goldberg was born in Lawndale and raised in west suburban Bellwood in the 50s. As a kid he met singer-songwriter Howard Berkman, a transplant to the burbs from Albany Park. Berkman had formed garage band the Knaves (a previous Secret History subject) with bassist Neal Pollack (no relation to the former Reader sta writer), and both of them would ﬁgure into the Karma Dusters story.

Goldberg attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he formed the band Somebody Groovy. They merged with future local heroes the Finchley Boys to become Brownﬁeld Wood, who called it quits at the end of the Summer of Love in 1967. At that point, Goldberg realized he hadn’t registered for more classes and split for home.

After moving back in with his parents, Goldberg transferred to the University of Illinois Chicago, where he had an appointment with destiny at the student union. “There were all

these couches all around the room, and all the hippies hung out on one right by the entrance on the second floor, and we called it ‘the couch.’ That bunch was our crowd, like Cynthia Plaster Caster and Gerry Field.” Field, a violinist, would enter the Karma Dusters picture later, but pianist Karen Tafejian entered it immediately. She’d been part of unrecorded girl group the Marie Antoinettes and played all manner of electric keyboards, including Farﬁsa and Hammond B-3. “I was hanging out at the couch one day when Karen Tafejian said, ‘Alan, you want to do a recording session with Howie Berkman?’” Goldberg recalls. “I was like, ‘Sure!’”

Goldberg played drums on the session, which also included Pollack (fresh from Vietnam and not too thrilled about the experience) and an appearance from T.S. Henry Webb of the Flock on saxophone and ﬂute. The group recorded some of Berkman’s songs. Local promoter Kenny Freeman, who’d set up the session, eventually handed a tape to Buddah Records. Buddah only wanted Berkman, though, and he declined the label’s o er. Sadly, the recordings are lost.

By this time, a loose collective of musicians overlapping with this one-off studio group had started to play protests at UIC (including a big one after the Kent State massacre) and off-campus events (including the first Earth Day, held at Daley Plaza in 1970). Goldberg had graduated from UIC with a degree in business administration, so even though he was driving a cab, his friends Kenn Gorz and Lincoln Zimmanck consulted him about an ambitious venture: founding

rock shows. Gorz and Zimmanck had lost their jobs at the Kinetic Playground in November 1969, after the building caught fire between acts during a run of shows by Iron Butterﬂy, Poco, and King Crimson. Club owner Aaron Russo declared the venue a total loss (it would reopen briefly under new management in 1972), and he told Gorz and Zimmanck they could salvage whatever they wanted. “They’re asking me all these questions,” Goldberg says. “I said, ‘Well, why don’t I become a partner?’ We pulled up with a truck and took speaker cabinets, ampliﬁers, cables, microphones, and mike stands to Wacker Drive.”

Goldberg was renting loft space in the Great Lakes Building at 180 N. Wacker, and they put all the gear in the basement. They named their company Euphoria Blimp Works, and their ﬁrst gig was at a show Russo had booked at the Aragon with jazzy Los Angeles psychrock band Spirit. In Goldberg’s telling, Russo found this more than a little ironic: “I can’t believe I’m paying you guys to rent my own equipment,” he said.

The musicians associated with this rock sound company (one of the city’s earliest)

began to be billed as the Euphoria Blimp Works Band. Percussionist Lewis Favors joined by starting to play with the group uninvited at a UIC protest. One of the bassists who passed through the lineup, Joel Schlofsky, would go on to greater fame as guitarist Djin Aquarian of the Source Family band Ya Ho Wha 13.

The Wacker space that housed Euphoria Blimp Works (they’d move to 8 W. Tooker Place in mid-1970) became a commune more or less by accident. The sound crew would crash there after gigs, and friends, partners, and hangers-on tended to join them. After a local news station taped a spot at the loft, things suddenly got a lot busier.

“They were doing a special on alternatives to marriage,” Goldberg says. “Hours of tape got edited down to 30 or 60 seconds or something—they had, like, two seconds of the band—but they had this one gal sitting on Lewis Favors’s lap, some hot girl who was married to one of the sound engineers, and some comments about free love. That’s what began to

they put on TV, and all of a sudden, we had tons of people wanting to come and join the commune, because they called us a commune. It wasn’t, exactly—we just had nowhere else to crash. We ﬁgured, OK, that’s what it is, a commune. Go with the ﬂow.”

Blind Al Rosenfeld, a friend of the Blimp Works Band who dabbled in music PR and worked for underground newspaper the Seed, got them a gig at Wise Fools Pub. Rosenfeld also convinced a hip Chicago Tribune writer to review the show. That night, Berkman inadvertently christened the band. “Howard’s got a mouth, and he just blabs and stu ,” Goldberg says, laughing. “Just out of the blue, he said, ‘This incarnation is Yama & the Karma Dusters.’” The review used the name, and it stuck. It appears on the group’s only LP, 1971’s Up From the Sewers (beneath the words “Euphoria Blimp Works Presents”).

Field was freshly back from France, where he’d played in Morning Calm with Didier Malherbe from Gong. His fiddle beguiles on the spooky “Reﬂections” and “Snow Bitch,” which contrast with the incendiary street rock of “Evolution” and “All the Way With the C.T.A.” The recording displays other colors too, including the bluesy vamping of “I Want to Talk to You,” the protest-song vibes of “Don’t Kill the Babies,” and the beautiful folk of “Hello Big City.”

The Karma Dusters had the LP pressed by a forgotten company that mostly did records for high school choirs and polka bands, self-releasing it on their own Manhole label. They used leftover red sleeves (intended to be Christmas themed), hand-lettering some and adding artwork to others with linoleum-block printing on their kitchen table. It had two tiny pressings, and original copies (now impossibly rare) routinely sell for as much as $150.

To help the Karma Dusters record the album, Rosenfeld got them three hours of time for free at the brand-new Plynth Studio in Libertyville. They worked with engineer Barry Mraz, who’d later become a heavyweight at Chicago’s Paragon Studios, recording Styx and other huge bands. “Couch” friend Gerry Field came in as a session player, and Jack Sullivan (who lived in a Rogers Park commune with Grateful Dead–loving pals Mountain Bus) ﬁnished the bass parts after Pollack quit between the main session and overdubs.

In 2023, a new legit version arrived via Lion Productions in Geneva, Illinois, with luxurious liner notes and excellent sound quality.

Yama & the Karma Dusters opened for acts as diverse as Howlin’ Wolf (who called Berkman “the Nookie Man”), Wilderness Road, and an avant-garde jazz ensemble connected to the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, and they consistently got a good reception. But shortly after bringing aboard Pollack’s permanent replacement on bass, Vince Blakey, the band ran out of steam. By the end of 1972, they’d dissolved.

“We got photographed by the government Red Squad after playing a beneﬁt at Alice’s and thought we saw the handwriting appearing on the wall,” Pollack recalls in the LP reissue liners. “I had visions of Nixon collecting the Jews, hippies and others he considered unAmerican, marching us down to the Grant Park underground garage and gassing us. Howard and I thought it would be a good time for a European vacation.”

Goldberg continued to gig locally with his pals, then transitioned into real estate. In 2002, he had a hand in creating the Glenwood Arts

District and its annual festival, which continues to this day. He also facilitates the Shiviti Drum Circle and accompanies rabbis and cantors.

Some key members of the Karma crew are gone—Favors and Berkman have passed. Field went on to run a violin shop in Highland Park, and Tafejian lives in Carbondale, Colorado, where she teaches piano, plays in a band, and works as a part-time firefighter. In the 70s, she, Berkman, and Pollack all lived in Carbondale, and Berkman later moved to nearby Paonia, where a bandstand in a public park bears his name. If there were any justice in the world, Yama & the Karma Dusters would have something named after them in Chicago. This insurgent musical collective broke the rock-band mold and gave the finger to the establishment, and their homespun album carries the legacy of the hippie counterculture into the ages. v

The radio version of the Secret History of Chicago Music airs on Outside the Loop on WGN Radio 720 AM, Saturdays at 5 AM with host Mike Stephen. Past shows are archived at outsidetheloopradio.com/tag/secrethistory-of-chicago-music.

MUSIC

CITY OF WIN

SolarFive is a legend underneath our noses

The south-side rapper-producer helped power the 2010s golden era of Chicago hip-hop, but with his new album, he’s no longer looking for the recognition that eluded him then.

By JOSHUA EFERIGHE

City of Win is a series curated by Isiah “ThoughtPoet” Veney and written by Joshua Eferighe that uses prose and photography to create portraits of Chicago musicians and cultural innovators working to create positive change in their communities.

From 2010 till 2017, Chicago hip-hop had a golden era. Rapper and producer SolarFive contributed prolifically to it, though it wasn’t how he got by. “I was still trappin’, like, hard,” he says. ”I didn’t have no real way to make money.”

Born Quenton Cole on Chicago’s south side, the married 36-year-old father of three has left that life behind. He works in tech, and he’s got a fourth kid on the way. He’s currently promoting his fifth full-length project, Please Don’t Get Cocaine in the Faders, released January 14. According to Solar, the album’s title and the stories it tells call back to his time at a studio in the Music Garage (now part of Music Building Chicago) at the peak of that golden era.

“I was running the studio, and, you know, it was literally cocaine in my fucking faders,” Solar says. “Everything was going down in

that studio.”

During that period, the Chicago scene was buzzing. Kembe X, King Louie, and many other future household names got their starts then, and when SolarFive wasn’t trapping or rapping, he was producing for them.

In 2012, Solar teamed up with producer GreenSllime (best known as a live DJ for rapper Mick Jenkins) to found a studio at the Music Garage called the 406. Solar also formed a production collective called OnGaud with Billy Stevenson and Brian Montgomery, both of whom he met through Sllime.

“Sllime had two homeboys, Billy and Brian,” Solar says. “Our beat styles weren’t, like, super far off from each other. They really complemented each other. Any one of us could play a beat, and to most people, you wouldn’t be able to tell which one of us made the beat.”

Solar’s career is full of Chicago hip-hop lore. In the early 2010s, he exchanged bars with Noname (who’s now part of supergroup Ghetto Sage with Smino and Saba) on the single “Cold Green Inferno.” He made a track with Vic Mensa called “DreamDay,” years before Mensa signed to Roc Nation in 2015. As part

little computer mike, and I could record myself. I’ve never lived in a place where I couldn’t just plug up a mike and drop a freestyle or something. Music is just a complete part of my life. I can’t imagine not making shit.”

Solar studied audio engineering at Columbia College in 2007. He dropped out a year later, then in 2010 landed a yearlong internship at the now-closed CarterCo recording studio with Rich Laurel. In 2012, he found his way to the Music Garage.

Unfortunately, SolarFive’s prolific work during Chicago’s hip-hop resurgence didn’t help him much ﬁnancially. Solar says OnGaud haven’t received a penny to this day for their work on The Water[s], probably their highestproﬁle gig. He doesn’t blame Jenkins, though. OnGaud had been o ered a cut, but one of the other members wouldn’t agree to the deal.

The OnGaud collective split up. Today only Solar uses the name. “What it really boiled down to was, we wasn’t working on nobody’s album, and we didn’t get paid,” he says. “Just being able to be around and still maintaining good relationships with the label would have done us a lot of good. That ruined relationships.”

of OnGaud, SolarFive also contributed to Mick Jenkins’s 2014 mixtape, The Water[s] . The collective produced six of the 15 tracks on the album, which has stood the test of time as Jenkins’s most critically acclaimed project.

“I was getting real responses from my music. I was on Fake Shore, Pigeons & Planes. Niggas didn’t know SolarFive was OnGaud. I kept those two completely separate,” Solar says. “I think I was equally as known. I was right there with Mick, Vic [Mensa], and Chance [the Rapper] to a certain degree. I just—I don’t know. I think I was just in the streets.”

Solar’s music often portrays his time hustling street drugs. His tales are dark and brooding, and his ﬂow is 1990s coded, a la Griselda or mixtape-era 50 Cent. “When I was a teenager and when I started getting heavy into rap, like, Wu-Tang, they was always dropping knowledge,” he says.

Survival forced SolarFive to turn to the streets, but music was always a part of his life. “It’s something that I’ve been doing since I was a child—I’ve been banging on tables and making beats with pencils and rapping,” he says. “When I was in high school, I used to have a

Solar has some theories about why he didn’t take o or work with bigger names outside the city. He was hesitant to network or promote himself too aggressively due to his proximity to the streets. “I was just focused on doing something all on my own,” he explains. “I’m from Chicago, so it’s like, that clout shit could get you killed, especially being around where I’ve been around.”

Nowadays Solar focuses solely on the music. “The SolarFive you hear today is different. I was deﬁnitely searching for that recognition. Now I just feel like I’m taking it,” he says.

Please Don’t Get Cocaine in the Faders is 17 tracks long and taps into the sound Solar has been perfecting for years. It’s a continuation of an already legendary career.

“The content is typical SolarFive—it’s gritty stories,” he says. “I feel like, if you come from a certain place or you have trauma and you’re still resilient, I make music for people like that. I try to make music that’s going to make you feel something.” v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Photos by ThoughtPoet of Unsocial Aesthetics (UAES), a digital creative studio and resource collective designed to elevate communitydriven storytelling and social activism in Chicago and beyond

SolarFive, aka Quenton Cole THOUGHTPOET FOR CHICAGO READER

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ON SALE NOW

Recommended and notable shows with critics’ insights for the week of January 23

PICK OF THE WEEK

In its third year, the Abortion Access Benefit Series faces down the return of Trump

THURSDAY23

Yves 7:30 PM, Copernicus Center, 5216 W. Lawrence, $43–$168. b

South Korean singer Yves (born Ha Soo-young) began her career in Loona, one of the most audacious acts in K-pop history. Starting in October 2016, the 12-member girl group embarked on a long and steady rollout: Over the following 18 months, each member was individually revealed to the public as they dropped solo promotional singles and music videos. Along the way, members who’d already been introduced joined forces to collaborate on each other’s tracks or make music in three- and four-person subunits. Finally, a er the release of more than 40 songs, Loona debuted as a full ensemble in 2018. Yves, the ninth member of the group to be revealed, made her grand entrance with 2017’s “New.” This light, frothy electro-pop song captures urgent upli with a measured but propulsive cadence, while B-side “D-1” lets loose: Its swelling synths wrap around a seductive R&B groove, creating a perfect soundtrack for daydreaming about your crush. Later that year, Yves appeared on the irresistible house-pop duet “Girl’s Talk” (with Loona member Chuu) and the giddy, girlish single “Love4eva” (by subunit Loona Yyxy). Though “Love4eva” features Canadian experimental-pop musician Grimes, its aesthetics hark back to classic K-pop songs such as Girls’ Generation’s “Gee”—its bright, bubblegum hooks lodge in your brain by force.

Loona released 11 singles over the next few years, the best of which featured playful vocal performances (“Hi High”), elements borrowed from Atlanta bass (“Perfect Love”), or mesmerizing synth arrangements (“Butterfly”). But in 2022, Yves and other members of the band ﬁled a lawsuit against their record label, Blockberry Creative. Last year, Yves signed with Paix Per Mil and dropped two mini albums, May’s Loop and November’s I Did

IT’S BEEN NEARLY 32 MONTHS since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which since 1973 had protected abortion as a federal constitutional right. As of January 2025, 41 states have passed some form of abortion ban, and 12 outlaw the procedure completely. We can’t yet know all the harm done by these bans, but the U.S. has already seen climbing rates of infant and maternal mortality. The incoming Trump administration has a national abortion ban on its wish list—despite research suggesting that it would result in a 24 percent increase in maternal deaths nationwide. So there’s no time like the present to rally for reproductive justice in our communities and beyond. That’s the inspiration behind Ground Control Touring’s Abortion Access Beneﬁt Series, which launched in January 2023 and presents simultaneous concerts in multiple cities across the country to champion bodily autonomy and

support those working on the ground to keep abortion safe and legal.

In its first two years, the series raised more than $110,000 for regional abortion funds at eight sold-out events—and this year it’s expanded to include eight more shows. The third edition of the Abortion Access Benefit Series brings a compelling local lineup to Sleeping Village: The show is headlined by Accessory, the lo-fi indie-rock project of Jason Balla (Dehd, Ne-Hi, Earring). Also on the bill are Owen (aka American Football front man Mike Kinsella playing mathy emo), Perfect Skin (the father-son duo of guitarists Brian and Asher Case, better known from Facs and Lifeguard, respectively), and Tim Kinsella & Jenny Pulse (formerly known as Good Fuck). These artists could easily fill a room even without the worthy benefit angle, so buy your tickets early.

—JAMIE LUDWIG

THIRD ANNUAL ABORTION ACCESS BENEFIT SERIES, PRESENTED BY GROUND CONTROL TOURING

Accessory headlines; Owen, Perfect Skin, and Tim Kinsella & Jenny Pulse open. Sat 1/25, 8 PM, Sleeping Village, 3734 W. Belmont, $30.90. 21+

Two acts at the Abortion Access Beneﬁt Series: Mike Kinsella of Owen (L) and Tim Kinsella & Jenny Pulse ALEXA VISCIUS / COURTESY GROUND CONTROL TOURING

Yves COURTESY THE ARTIST

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continued from p. 30

Thankfully, her new music is just as addictive as her work in Loona. “Loop” is a moody two-step scorcher whose shape-shifting instrumentation adds emotional heft to the wordless hook. “Viola” sounds like a Charli XCX track reduced to its sparest elements, though not without a K-pop touch: It meets its steely chorus with so er moments of R&B balladry. On “Dim,” which throws in an extended breakbeat outro, Yves sings atop glacial synth pads: “You feel it slipping out of control, but it’s everything you know,” she coos, while the track’s muscular beats feel like her long-awaited, well-earned reprieve.

—JOSHUA MINSOO KIM

SATURDAY25

Dust Bunnies Lundsurk and Girls on Film open. 8 PM, Fallen Log, 2554–2556 W. Diversey, $10. b

When I first stumbled across Dust Bunnies’ music, I thought I’d found a long-running local alt-rock group that’d been flying below my radar. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Though Dust Bunnies’ songs reveal an affection for classic alternative and indie-rock artists (Wilco, Elliott Smith, Yo La Tengo), half the members of this north-side four-piece aren’t old enough to vote, and none of them can legally drink. Guitarists and vocalists August Betke and

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/musicreviews

Ecclesine, bassist Matthias Leisen, and drummer Thalia Kouchoukos met in 2023 through the Senn Arts magnet program at Senn High School. A er arriving at the present Dust Bunnies lineup, they released two singles, the melancholy “Itasca” and the angsty “Waste,” by the end of that year. In April 2024, they dropped Downstairs Demos , a lively ﬁve-track collection whose title nods to their pizza-fueled basement practice sessions. As they’ve started gigging around Chicago, they’ve enmeshed themselves in a rising all-ages scene that includes noise-rock trio White Orchid and shoegazy sibling duo Twin Coast. Kouchoukos graduated last spring (she’s now studying audio engineering in college), but her departure from Senn didn’t break up Dust Bunnies. In June, they released their debut EP, Milwaukee District North , whose catchy, reflective songs contemplate universal themes such as navigating relationships and struggling to avoid repeating past mistakes. Dust Bunnies plan to share more tunes in 2025, but like lots of young bands, they’re a DIY operation—they cover all the expenses of recording and releasing their music themselves. So every time you pay a cover charge at one of their shows, you’re helping make their dreams happen.

—JAMIE

LUDWIG

Third Annual ABortion Access

Benefit Series See Pick of the Week on page 30. Presented by Ground Control Touring. Accessory headlines; Owen, Perfect Skin, and Tim Kinsella & Jenny Pulse open. 8 PM, Sleeping Village, 3734 W. Belmont, $30.90. 21+

Yakuza Performing a live score to the silent horror ﬁlm Der Golem, Wie Er in die Welt Kam 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, $22.50, $35 front-of-hall seating. 17+

It’s always impressive to see a group who’ve been together for decades continue to evolve. Case in point: Chicago avant-garde psych-metal band Yakuza, who’ve been going strong since 1999. Their 2000 debut full-length, Amount to Nothing, exhibits their beginnings in thrashy posthardcore and grind. Soon

a erward, bassist Eric Clark and guitarist Eric Plonka le the group, but singer, horn player, and manabout-town Bruce Lamont and drummer Jim Staffel have remained constants—and since joining for Yakuza’s second album, 2002’s Way of the Dead, so has guitarist-vocalist Matt McClelland.

Yakuza have since recorded five more albums and shared the stage with metal and hardcore greats such as Opeth, Dillinger Escape Plan, and Mastodon. They continue to push their exploratory heavy aesthetic, and to that end they’ve collaborated with a diverse cast of Chicago players, including several jazz artists (among them reedist Ken Vandermark and percussionists Michael Zerang and Hamid Drake) and art-rock cellist Helen Money. In 2018, Yakuza cemented their current lineup when Jerome Marshall replaced longtime bassist Ivan Cruz. And in 2023, they released Sutra , their first album in more than a decade, demonstrating their commitment to dense soundscapes and blistering psychedelic crunch.

This month, the four-piece will spread their sonic wings in a new way when they present their firstever live film score at Thalia Hall to kick off the venue’s new film and performance series with WBEZ, for which local artists create music for public-doman movies of their choosing. (WBEZ has previously hosted similar events with guitarist Marc Ribot and Maxx McGathey of Chicago cinematic funk band Gramps the Vamp, among others.) The film they’ve chosen is 1920 silent horror flick Der Golem, Wie Er in die Welt Kam (“The Golem: How He Came Into the World”), one of my favorites of the German expressionist era. (It ain’t all Nosferatu, people!) The film is inspired by a centuries-old Jewish myth about a human shaped of mud or clay and animated by magic—and by imagining what could go wrong if a golem were created in modern times. “The Golem’s tale of a ‘protector gone rogue’ resonates pretty universally,” Lamont says. “The timeless themes of power, control, and unintended consequences are concepts that remain relevant.”

Yakuza had long dreamed of doing a ﬁlm score, so when WBEZ extended the invitation, they quickly began sketching arrangements. Lamont says the band wrote distinct pieces for each of the film’s five chapters and its introduction, while weaving

Jonah

Yakuza COURTESY SVART RECORDS Dust Bunnies COURTESY THE ARTIST

MUSIC

in recurring themes to maintain cohesion and support a narrative structure. Hearing the band’s frosty riﬀage in the majestic acoustic space of Thalia Hall while watching an eternally pertinent and beautifully dark ﬁlm feels perfect for the gray throes of January. —STEVE KRAKOW

SUNDAY26

Marcus Drake Pile headline; Marcus Drake, Bursting, and Sen Morimoto (DJ set) open. 8 PM, Sleeping Village, 3734 W. Belmont, $25.75. 21+

In the span of a few years in the 2010s, Chicago multi-instrumentalist and video-game composer Marcus Drake produced enough music, using a variety of pseudonyms, to power several DIY scenes. He was a pillar of the wildly creative underground rock community surrounding Grandpa Bay, a label he helped run with sometime bandmate Nate Amos (now of Water From Your Eyes and This Is Lorelei). By 2017, though, Drake had burned out, and for years he all but abandoned music. He ﬁnally returned this past November, releasing his ﬁrst album under his given name, Save Point 1, through Sooper Records. It sounds like he’s tried to work in every idea he had during his long silence, and because Drake’s hiatus overlapped with the emergence of COVID-19, it’s also tempting to hear the record as a cathartic reaction to an isolating pandemic and the country’s mismanagement of its collective health. I wish the future was as bright, colorful, and triumphant as Save Point 1. Drake melds hyperactive electronic percussion, acrobatic prog rock, and glistening video-game synths into an astounding, otherworldly sound that’s polished and lucid but emotionally raw. When he hits the first chorus on “Heaven’s in the Rot (Director’s Cut),” his voice feels free of whatever dragged down his spirit

and drove him out of music—and as the song barrels through its screwy twists and turns, he sounds nourished by every one. —LEOR GALIL

WEDNESDAY29

Lazer Dim 700 Slimesito opens. 7:30 PM, Avondale Music Hall, 3336 N. Milwaukee, $22, $32 express entry. b

Atlanta rapper Lazer Dim 700 raps like he’s already thinking about his next three song ideas, and that impatience enriches his performances. He’s an unpredictable MC who shi s his flow to lock onto a pulse it seems like only he can hear. Sometimes he sounds lost in the woods of the beat, stumbling to find his way out; at other times, the rhythmic quirks in his delivery seem stitched directly onto the zigs and zags of the instrumental. According to a 2024 profile in Complex , he usually records his verses by freestyling, o en rapping directly onto a phone using a free digital audio workstation called BandLab. Whatever comes out, he’ll use, no matter how unpolished the assembled track seems. He’s partial to dark, nasty-sounding instrumentals, often with bass so blown out you’ll worry for the safety of your speakers. I can end up feeling disoriented a er listening to just one Lazer Dim 700 song, and his ever-growing body of work is downright overwhelming. The album format doesn’t necessarily benefit him: On December’s self-released fulllength, Keepin It Cloudy , heaters such as “Fast & Furious” (which sounds like a drill track run through an Atari 2600) can get lost amid lo-fi filler. I prefer visiting his YouTube channel and randomly clicking on just one or two videos, because it’s easier to see the sparks of ingenuity when I focus like that.

—LEOR GALIL v

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Direct and coordinate sales and distribution, formulate policies, staffing, purchasing, sales and promotion activities, operational records, security measures and procedural changes. 2 yrs. exp as General Manager or Management required. Salary offered $57,200.00. Mail resume: KSK Inc. II;Attn: K. Merchant, 2004 Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. North, Chicago, IL 60064 KSK Inc. II; Attn: K. Merchant, 2004 Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. North, Chicago, IL 60064

Health Care Service Corp has openings for Senior Analytics & Reporting Analyst (Chicago, IL) to create reports, insights, and analytics in support of the business; Create specifications for reports and analysis based on business needs. REQS: Bach’s or frgn equiv in data analytics, informatics, statistics, health administration or rltd field. Telecommuting permitted 2 days a week. Rate of pay: $71,594 - $104,456/ yr. Email resume to hrciapp@bcbsil.com and refer R0039415

Projct Mgmt Spcialst (Northbrook, IL): Monitr bioscience compny’s medical diagnstc test kit devlpmnt, prodction & distrbtion projcts from planning to closng. Reqs: 4 yrs exp as Projct Mgmt Spcialst, Projct Coordntr, Projct Leadr or rel pstion. Mail resume to HR, AFG Bioscience LLC, 1818 Skokie Blvd, Ste 112, Northbrook, IL 60062. Mail resume to HR, AFG Bioscience LLC, 1818 Skokie Blvd, Ste 112, Northbrook, IL 60062

Sr Site Reliability Engineer w/ McKinsey & Co., Inc. US (Chicago, IL). Responsible for crafting the design, architecture, & delivery of mid/large size products. Telecommuting permitted. Req’s Bachelor’s in Comp Sci, S/W Engg, or rel field, or foreign degree equiv + 5yrs of DevOps or Site Reliability Engg industry exp. Salary $197,500$233,100/yr. Email your resume to CO@mckinsey.com & refer to Job# 7433229.

TransMarket Operations LLC seeks Fixed Income Model Operations for Chicago, IL, as lead team member, analyze & develop quantitative trading

strategies by developing electronic trading applications. Master’s in Math/Stat/Financial Eng/ related field +2yrs exp OR Bachelor’s in Math/Stat/Financial Eng /related field+5yrs exp req’d. Req’d Skills: Bloomberg, Latex, Python, derivative pricing & trading, bonds trading, fixed income trading, back testing simulations, yield curve fitting tech, U.S. treasury trading, building financial models, risk mgmt, financial mathematics. $140,000150,000/yr. Apply online: https://job-boards. greenhouse.io/tmg-nep/ jobs/4617134007? gh_src=6d435ec87us Ref: 33009

University of IL seeking Assistant Professor The Department of Information & Decision Sciences, at the Univ of IL Chicago, located in a large metro area, is seeking a full-time Assistant Professor to assist the department with the following responsibilities:

Under direction and supervision, teach both undergraduate and graduate students, mentor graduate students in Information and Decision Sciences and MBA programs, serve as a liaison between the business community and the university, and conduct research in the areas of business analytics, computing/ technology, and operations. Other duties and University service, as assigned. Travel for conferences and professional development may be required. This position minimally requires a PhD or its foreign equivalent in Information & Decision Sciences, Computer Science, Business Administration, or a related field of study. For fullest consideration, please submit resume, cover letter, and 3 professional references by 2/19/25 via email to uicbizhr@uic.edu.

The salary range for this position is $172,000 - $228,565. The pay offered to the selected candidate will be determined based on factors including (but not limited to) the experience and qualifications of the selected candidate including equivalent years in rank, training, and field or discipline; internal equity; and external market pay for comparable jobs. The University of Illinois offers a very competitive benefits portfolio. Click for a complete list of Employee Benefits:

https://www.hr.uillinois. edu/benefits/. The University of Illinois System is an equal opportunity employer, including but not limited to disability and/or veteran status, and complies with all applicable state and federal employment mandates. Please visit Required Employment Notices and Posters to view our non-discrimination statement and find additional information about required background checks, sexual harassment/ misconduct disclosures, and employment eligibility review through E-Verify. The university provides accommodations to applicants and employees. Request an Accommodation: https://jobs.uic.edu/request-and-accomodation/ uicbizhr@uic.edu

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Notice: Rosetta Lowery (owner) and Sensible Auto Lending (lienholder). This publication serves as notice that said owner and lienholder has unclaimed/ abandoned a 2019 Hyundai Santa Fe Vin# 5NMS2CAD2KH079535 amount due $9025.98 repairs and $85.00 per day storage. This notice serves intent to enforce a Mechanics Lien pursuant to Chapter 770ILCS 45/1 et seq. and 90/1 et seq. sale to take place at Adam’s Auto Rebuilders located 7346 S. Halsted St. Chicago, IL 60621 on February 3, 2025 at 9:00 am adamsautoreb@ yahoo.com

Lazer Dim 700 COURTESY THE ARTIST

Marcus Drake DENNIS LARANCE

GOSSIP WOLF

CHICAGO PHOTOGRAPHER and music writer Vicki Holda has been documenting local concerts for so long that Gossip Wolf can’t even remember when she started. Now she needs help with medical bills, and the scene she’s done so much to celebrate is helping her with a beneﬁt show.

Holda’s photos are all over the music site Underground Voice , which she cofounded in fall 2021 as its editor in chief. The site has been a bit quiet lately, but her work there has included a proﬁ le of Americana group Family Vacation and live photos of indie act the Darling Suns and pop-punk band Four Stars Holda’s concert photography became her calling card when COVID shutdowns ended, and her recent shots of Cocojoey at Subterranean, Edging at Sleeping Village, and Run & Punch at Live Wire Lounge buzz with the electricity that’s the whole point of going to a live show instead of staying home with the album.

In November, Holda went to the hospital suffering from dehydration and learned she has stage four kidney disease. (At stage ﬁve, her doctor tells her, she’d need dialysis or a transplant to survive.) Her rock ’n’ roll friends will come together at the Hideout on Sunday, January 26, to help her battle this aﬄiction.

Holda’s aﬃnity for music goes back to her high school years, when she focused on vocal performance. “I have terrible stage fright,” she says, “so being able to photograph musicians is as close as I can get to being back onstage.” Her parents didn’t support her artistic dreams, which sharpened her desire to support anyone else pursuing their creative passion. In 2018, she says, she began photo-

graphing shows regularly, juggling those gigs with full-time work and raising her daughter.

“It was just something I did as a hobby,” Holda says. “When I started to notice that people were starting to like my photos, I had a thought: ‘I could maybe start a business.’ I bought all this equipment to set up an in-home studio; I upgraded my camera. Two weeks later, COVID hit, and everything got shut down here. I put all the gear away—I never touched it again, because I just looked at it as a bad omen.”

Fortunately, “never” only lasted till July 2021. That’s when Holda returned to going out to take photos at shows, doing her best to stay COVID safe by testing and wearing two masks. And more bands took notice of her photography: She quickly attracted commissions, which continue today.

“I don’t know if it’s because they really want to be able to remember being on the stage,” she says, “and they want to have physical memories of that—and they realized, during COVID, how precious it was for them to be able to perform in front of an audience. But since July [2021], I will typically book three to ﬁve shows in one week. Then on top of that, I’m also doing promotional work.”

When Holda got her diagnosis, she didn’t share it with many people immediately. But she ended up telling Michael Hanna , who fronts pop-rock group Naked Brunch , because they were working together.

“I did a promotional shoot with his band shortly a er I got out of the hospital,” Holda says. “My mentality was, ‘Never stop working.’ Whenever I’m dealing with any kind of traumatic experience, I throw myself into my

Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or email gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com. A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene

work, because it’s very distracting. I privately broke the news to him. He was like, ‘We’re gonna put on a fundraiser. I don’t know when, but we’re gonna do it. You can’t pay these bills by yourself.’”

Holda announced the fundraiser earlier this month, which is also when she went public with her diagnosis. She hadn’t been involved in booking the show, so seeing the poster for the first time hit her hard. “I was fortunately at home alone,” she says. “I was sitting on my couch, sobbing, ’cause I was like, ‘I can’t believe that there’s this many people who care about me.’ It’s very overwhelming, and I did not expect to get so much love from the community. It made me feel very embraced— by everyone.”

At Holda’s beneﬁt, called “I Get By,” Naked Brunch shares the bill with Four Stars, folky songwriter Em Grace, and jaunty indie band Midcentury Llama . Tickets cost $20, $15 in advance; the show starts at 6 PM.

THE YEAR IS YOUNG , but Gossip Wolf has already found a contender for the best Chicago album of 2025. The early singles from Ptchwrk, the debut album by R&B singer Moyana, have this wolf over the moon—even without hearing the whole record. On “Rainbow,” Moyana ﬂoats her silken vocals into the cosmos over a melange of horns and a stumbling drum loop with a hip-hop vibe, which she plays to by dropping a few bars. Moyana will self-release Ptchwrk on Friday, January 24, and on Thursday night she’ll headline a record-release show at Beat Kitchen. Tickets are $15, and the show starts at 8 PM.

LAST FRIDAY, the label run by Bucktownvia-Cincinnati record shop Torn Light dropped the cassette compilation Percussive Resistance, which beneﬁts the National Network of Abortion Funds. Its 29 tracks emphasize the sounds of drums and other objects that can be thwacked, banged, rubbed, bowed, or otherwise pressed into service as percussion instruments. Some of the musicians take this to an extreme—parts of Matt Weston’s “Dodge Travco” sound like lengths of rebar in a commercial tumble dryer. Tortoise drummer John Herndon contributed a track (as well as the J-card art), and other participating percussionists include Gino Robair , Sarah Hennies , David Hurlin , and Lisa Schonberg . Physical copies will be for sale till the end of the month, and the digital version will remain on Bandcamp indeﬁnitely. —LEOR GALIL

Vicki Holda (L) and a Holda live photo of Chicago band Totally Cashed

HOLDA

LEFT, TOP TO BOTTOM: Miguel Gutierrez, rehearsal for Super Nothing, 2024. Photo: Amelia Golden; Wafaa Bilal, Domestic Tension, 2007.

Wafaa Bilal, courtesy of the artist.

RIGHT: Opening day of The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970–2020, MCA Chicago, November 9, 2024. Photo: Ricardo Adame.