RECOMMENDED
The Museum of Contemporary Art has a stiff one for the innovative use of sound these days and I’m loving it. Fresh off last weekend’s engagement by imaginative pop duo The Books, this week the MCA will present the North American premiere of Norwegian composer Rolf Wallin’s “Strange News, ” performed by the Grammy-nominated Chicago Chamber Musicians. In 2006 Wallin, along with director Josse de Pauw, took a reporter and cameraman to Uganda and The Democratic Republic of Congo to meet with child soldiers. The result is a kind of chamber opera telling one boy’s story through video footage, war audio and electro-acoustic landscapes. Wallin describes the work as, “An artistic parallel to a TV or radio documentary: a small, but informative window onto a particular matter, where the empathy with those involved is more important than dry information.” The piece is anything but dry. Bone-chilling might be a better description if images of children with automatic weapons make you squirm. Sharing the bill with “Strange News” will be George Crumb’s 1970 anti-Vietnam War quartet “Black Angels for Electric String Quartet.” (William Scott)
May 8 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago, (312)397-4010.
Related Stories
Exploring the Digital Wilderness: A Review of Annie Dorsen’s “The Great Outdoors” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Annie Dorsen's performance sparks a line of ontological inquiry about the nature of how our digital and corporeal existences dovetail begets more and more questions.- Of the Shameful and Strange: A Preview of Lie Through My Skin by Same Planet Performance Project Sensuality and disgust drip through the opening of "Lie Through My Skin," setting an ambivalent tone that becomes increasingly surreal as the piece unfolds.
- One For Art and Art For All: Tony Santiago on the Necessity of Keeping Art Accessible A profile on actor and arts activist Tony Santiago, program manager of Chicago Arts Access and co-founder of The Chicago Theater Accountability Coalition.
- Stranded in a Strange Land: A Review of Come From Away at Broadway In Chicago This Tony Award winner mines its parochial material for outstanding humor, showing these small-town residents as far more open-minded than their mostly big-city counterparts.
- A Little Bit of This, A Little Bit of That: Harvest Chicago Contemporary Dance Festival Provides a Sampling of Indie Work from… This festival's sampler-style short performances make it an un-intimidating point of entry for folks unfamiliar with contemporary dance and the many things that can mean.
- Home Is Where The Art Is By Jay Van Ort Where is art? Museums, galleries, big stages, temples designed to hold capital-A “Art”? While many of these spaces are supposedly public, they’re not always accessible to everybody: theater tickets in Chicago typically range anywhere from $15 to $90. Their locations are relatively centralized, with the majority in Lincoln Park, Wicker Park and the Loop. If you head to…
