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Classical and modern dance crowd Chicago playbills like belles at a ball. To rectify that, Alliance Dance Company artistic director Jennifer Gage last year launched Kaleidoscope, a choreographers’ festival that doesn’t make wallflowers of contemporary, jazz, tap, and hip-hop. This year Gage shepherds an impressive flock of 25 choreographers, seven from Alliance, the rest from other local and regional companies. The 26 pieces certainly don’t try to make people eat their vegetables; the main criterion for selection was entertainment value, says Gage, whose own mix of contemporary with jazz and ballet leans heavily on pop music and technical bravado....

I had one of those existential moments of doubt when I opened my morning Sun-Times on Tuesday and found myself facing the following headline: “TIF flap forgotten as mayor breaks ground on DePaul basketball arena.” I confess—I was one of those critics. Oh, brother. The arena’s being built at Michigan and Cermak in the South Loop, one of the hottest neighborhoods in town. This is the last Chicago neighborhood that needs a handout to stimulate development....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Master Satan’s Witchery by Bestial Raids Innermost Shrine, Heavily Gilded by Foie Gras Austra, Future Politics I’ve long admired Katie Stelmanis’s ability to combine intelligent lyricism, operatic melodies, and electronic music. Her 2011 release Feel It Break has been a constant favorite over the past six years. With each new release, her writing and production grow more sophisticated and self-­assured....

If you happened to follow the trail of well-dressed people out onto Navy Pier last night, they would have led you to Vernissage, the opening event of Expo Chicago, the biggest art fair of the year. Galleries from all over the world send their representatives here with some of their finest, or at least most salable, art, and members of the Chicago art world put on their finest clothes and go out to meet them....

The Joffrey Ballet continues to add big-ticket draws to its repertoire, most notably from young and exciting choreographers with mainstream appeal. But none of them are as prodigious as Justin Peck. At one point, an encounter between dancers Dylan Gutierrez and Jeraldine Mendoza recalls two wide-eyed lovers flirting with each other. It felt like an indie movie—I kept getting the impression that the inspiration came not from anything dance related, but from Peck’s Instagram feed....

Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s production of George Stiles and Anthony Drewe’s musical based on the J.M. Barrie classic is a captivating 75 minutes for both adults and children. The story centers on Peter Pan, played with lightness and impish excitement by Johnny Shea, who teaches the Darling children, led by Elizabeth Stenhold’s precocious and adventurous Wendy, how to fly to Neverland: “second star to the right and straight on ’til morning.” This is where things really get magical, thanks to flying effects created by ZFX....

In 2013, things were looking up at Columbia College. After several years of dicey relations between the administration and P-fac—the part-time faculty union that represents the majority of Columbia’s teachers—a new college president, Kwang-Wu Kim, was in place. It seemed to P-fac’s president, Diana Vallera, like the beginning of a new, much more congenial era. The college included faculty, staff, and students in the development of a strategic plan last year, and is changing “because the world of creative work has changed, and we must prepare our students to succeed in that world,” according to a Columbia spokesperson....

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It isn’t often that archivists get a chance to issue specific requests for historical materials. Most of the time, they’re dependent on the kindness of strangers, or at least collectors who’ve been generous enough to donate their papers and ephemera to the library. Marching this weekend? We’re collecting #ephemera as part of a living archive of modern protest! DM us for details. #womensmarch pic.twitter.com/xURxTsnz6d — Newberry Library (@NewberryLibrary) January 20, 2017...

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. The 17-year-old ended up pairing her esteemed shirt with a turtleneck she got on sale at Target a couple of years ago, vintage frames that used to belong to her mom, earrings handed down from her grandma, a belt that used to be a Gryffindor tie from a Hermione costume, and a pair of ASOS platforms, her “pride and glory,” thrifted at the Savers in Schaumburg for eight bucks....

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On a dazzling new recording for Hat Art, British soprano Juliet Fraser brings haunting beauty and weightless precision to Morton Feldman’s Three Voices (1982), an epic work simpatico with her skill for navigating pieces of exquisite delicateness. Originally composed for experimental singer Joan La Barbara, it asks the performer to sing with two prerecorded parts as a tribute to Feldman’s fellow New York School artists, poet Frank O’Hara, who died in 1966, and painter Philip Guston, who passed in 1980....

Chicago Fringe Opera shows off its cast in a warm-up cabaret act of William Bolcom songs in the Chopin Theatre’s cozy underground lounge, then moves into the adjacent black box theater for a deliciously droll production of this one-hour romp of an opera, scored for two pianos and five singers. Composed by Bolcom in 2007—and based on a 16th-century play by Machiavelli called La Mandragola—and benefiting greatly from Mark Campbell’s hilarious lyrics, it’s the story of a woman who likes sex and gets it, along with everything else she wants, by outwitting the men in her life, including her husband and lover....

Since 2014, Chicago rapper-producer Supa Bwe has celebrated Independence Day by releasing new music. The first couple years he did it as a member of coulda-been-huge experimental rap group Hurt Everybody, and then last year he dropped his solo mixtape Dead Again 3. Supa planned to follow the tradition this year with Finally Dead, but on July 3 he announced on Twitter that he was rescheduling the release for a date TBD....

Kevin Coval recites his poem “Baby Come On: An Ode to Footwork,” which appears in A People’s History of Chicago. The beat is from Chance the Rapper’s Acid Rap, and the dancer is Litebulb from the Era. On the evening of Saturday, March 4, a multigenerational crowd wrapped halfway around the block outside the Harold Washington Library; teenagers with braces waited in line alongside silver-haired senior citizens. Everyone had come to celebrate A People’s History of Chicago (Haymarket Books), a new collection by Chicago poet Kevin Coval....

The foie gras dressing is also something that Sears has been serving at the Radler, most recently on a knockwurst dish with grapes, cabbage slaw, and toasted almonds. Sears describes the dressing—made with a mayonnaise of rendered foie gras fat combined with yogurt—as “like a foie gras ranch dressing, but without the garlic and onion and herbs.” Fermented long beans: Take the long beans and place in a plastic container. Cover with a 3....

​ Jessica Koscielniak/Chicago Sun-Times On Republican Day last week at the Illinois State Fair in Springfield, Bruce Rauner arrived on his Harley. Hi folks​, great to see ya, and thanks for comin’ out. As you know, I wanna be your governor so we can shake up Springfield and bring back Illinois. I’m gonna take on the special interests, and drive those career politicians nuts. ​We’d release the full schedules, but they’re so complicated we think folks would misunderstand ’em....

Picture purrfect “It forced me to dig in deeper to think about what I cared about,” Berman says now. “I felt like, screw Starbucks, but didn’t know what the alternative was.” For friends and family outside the city who’d appreciate something quintessentially “Chicago” for a holiday gift, these elegant old-fashioned glass tumblers, featuring details of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Chicago-area buildings—the Avery Coonley Playhouse window in Riverside and the art-glass skylight in the Oak Park Home and Studio, for example—are less obvious than, say, a framed city skyline photo and considerably classier than a Chicago shot glass from Walgreens....