The work life of any dancer, especially a classical ballerina, is very short. While exceptional artists who’ve been able to dance in middle age do come to mind–Margot Fonteyn, Natalia Makarova–ballet is a young person’s profession. So when Glenview teenager Amy Rose knew that she wanted to pursue a dance career, she figured she’d better do it while she was still young. Her family was supportive–after all, they had started her in dance classes when she was four years old....

For months the gangs had been dealing cocaine and heroin from the weather-beaten nine-flat and the two-flat across the street, when the residents of Bucktown rebelled. “The most important element in the fight against drugs is community involvement,” adds Ronald Garcia, commander of the 14th Police District. “Drug dealers can intimidate a handful of people. But if a whole community like this one gets involved, the dealers will move. They don’t want all of the attention....

It’s the 25th anniversary of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the musicians’ cooperative organization that has carried the Chicago message (via the sounds of Abrams, Bowie, Braxton, Ewart, Freeman, Jarman, Lewis, Moye, et al.) throughout the globe. To celebrate the AACM’s quarter-century mark, the far younger Southend Musicworks has made a wise choice in inviting tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson for the weekend. Not only is he a founder of the AACM; in the 70s, Anderson’s bands also served as early proving grounds for such future movers and shakers as trombonist/composer George Lewis, reedmen Chico Freeman and Douglas Ewart, and drummer Hamid Drake....

AMERICAN BALLET THEATRE La bayadere represents the most recognizably classical side of ABT’s repertory. It’s an excerpt from Marius Petipa’s 1877 La bayadere, the “Kingdom of the Shades” scene from act two, and it epitomizes classical concerns with elegance, form, line, phrasing, and musicality. Yes, of course, the scene is wrenched from its narrative context, but the drama is not central to the dancing: this sort of classicism is far more concerned with dance than with drama....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Because of my enthusiasm for saving this facility, I must point out that Ben Joravsky may have picked the wrong paradigm. Let us not discourage the valiant citizens of Nortown by comparing this project to the “Edgewater mansions.” Only part of that project was a failure. The second mansion never went public. Instead, it became a playground for the pretentious who didn’t like the idea of having to walk in “that neighborhood” so they demanded that part of the open land be turned over to them for a parking lot....

SOURCE MATERIAL: A GLIMPSE INTO THE ARTIST’S STUDIO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The current group show at the Center for Contemporary Art takes up this theme in an unexpected way. The 14 artists were invited by CCA director Kathy Cottong to display their artworks along with other materials from their studios. What’s presented, dispersed throughout the gallery’s four rooms, with one or two installations per wall, are actual studio materials–snapshots, postcards, sketches, souvenirs–juxtaposed with a few pieces of each artist’s work....

A watchable and interesting personal documentary by James Klein, the codirector (with Julia Reichert) of Union Maids and Seeing Red, about the current lives and values of students at Kent State University and how these differ from those of Kent State students at the time of the killings 20 years ago. While none of the discoveries made by Klein are startling, the honesty and thoughtfulness of his investigation and his probing intelligence are apparent throughout....

A fascinating German documentary by Sybille Schonemann about her return to the East German penitentiary where she spent a year as a political prisoner before Germany’s reunification. In addition to restaging portions of her own arrest and incarceration, she films her confrontations with the officials who brought unspecified charges against her, the secret police who arrested her, and the prison matrons and warden. It’s as if Kafka’s Joseph K. went back and tried to conduct rational and even-tempered interviews with the bureaucrats who condemned him–most of the people she speaks to are friendly, vague, evasive, and forgetful, and something about the state apparatus they were a part of courses through the film like a chilly draft (1991)....

LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT And what a litany of sorrows O’Neill confesses on behalf of himself and his family. Alcoholism, drug addiction, sexual promiscuity, miserliness, blasphemy, even hints of suicide and murder. Drawing from his own life, O’Neill wrote Long Day’s Journey between 1940 and 1944, “in tears and blood . . . with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness” (as he said in his note dedicating the play to his wife)....

PUP TENT THEATRE Rudely Elegant Theater and Gallery Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Happily, these lusterless warm-ups were followed by one of the most ambitious long-form improvisations I’ve seen: two related pieces, the first about sleazy Hollywood producers and the ways they decide which shows make it on the air, the second an improvised pilot created to try to please these producers. In less certain hands this would have collapsed under the weight of its complexity....

Who would guess that a place called Jezebel was named after the owner’s sainted mother? Opened in July just a block south of Wrigley Field, it’s the brainchild of Farrid Nobahar, who’s half Egyptian, half Iranian, and who wanted to open a Mediterranean restaurant emphasizing Italian food. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My friend Poppy and I argued over which country the decor is meant to represent....

Paris, 1122 W. Montrose: Aimee, the love reporter, who travels all over the globe gathering stories of the human heart, had asked her friend Ann to take her to Paris, one of Ann’s former haunts. Aimee and Ann used to work together before Aimee became an internationally famous love reporter. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Aimee asked Ann to tell her love story. “About six years ago I decided it was time to have a woman,” Ann said....

Lee Budowsky sat behind the counter at his video store, staring blankly at a blaring monitor. On the screen, a bare-chested giant in a Viking helmet and a fur cloak grimaced and wrenched loud chords from a red-and-white striped guitar. Budowsky doesn’t carry Top Gun or Rockys I through IV, but if you were itching to get your hands on, say, The Cramps Live at the NAPA State Mental Hospital or Horowitz in London, Budowsky would probably have it or at least know where to find it....

Miguel del Valle flunked first grade. “All year I thought I was doing OK,” he says. “The teacher put me and a couple other kids who spoke Spanish in a corner and gave us table games to play with. She taught the rest of the class, and we had a good time. Then in June she called in me and my mother and explained that I had failed because I couldn’t speak English....

Neo-Nazi ideologue and insurance salesman Art Jones was interviewed back in 1986 by a crew of liberal filmmakers who had spent a day shooting a gathering of far-right extremists at a powwow near Flint, Michigan. Last week at the Film Center, he showed up in the front row for the film’s first Chicago screening, expecting to see himself on the big screen. He had to settle for a quick cameo in the cross-burning scene....

JAMES GRIGSBY Hard Coin exploits the tension between psychological time and running time, and with stunning results. The set for Hard Coin, designed by Lonn L. Frye, consists of a multileveled cubic structure pasted over with grossly enlarged fragments of what seem to be advertising billboards; these feature smiling, squeaky-clean all-American types. To the right of this structure, hanging from MoMing’s cavernous ceiling, is a broad wooden swing that holds an antique porcelain doll and a vase decked out with ancient artificial flowers....

THE GEOGRAPHY OF LUCK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These little excursions used to involve Shepard himself, whose True West not only helped Steppenwolf break through to a national audience but gave that audience most of its sense of what a Steppenwolf show looks, acts, and sounds like. Since then, scripts like Lynn Seifert’s Coyote Ugly have kept the tradition alive. Even Steppenwolf’s late, epic production of The Grapes of Wrath traveled somewhat the same region....

BALLET CHICAGO Martins’s Calcium Light Night, danced by Petra Adelfang and Manard Stewart, is as peculiar, angular, and pleasing as its Ives score. The brightly lit, stripped stage, with its great hanging fluorescent square, emphasizes the ordinariness of the dancers’ simple, uninflected walking between sections. But the dance–and Adelfang’s and Stewart’s dancing–is anything but ordinary. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gerard Charles’s Feral Forms also looks tentative, but seeing the dance a second time convinces me that its lack of conviction is a deliberate choreographic effect and not a problem of performance....

Friday 24 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A catalogue of Walker Evans photos in the Smithsonian identifies each photo in the collection with a short utilitarian description. Jin Lee has taken some of this prose, mounted it on a white background, and framed it in white–to force the viewer to imagine what the photo looks like. Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photos depict spectators inside movie houses; the theater and people are visible, but the screen is white....

The sixth annual edition of the Chicago Latino Film Festival runs from Friday, September 28, through Sunday, October 7. Apart from the opening night screening–which will be held at the First Chicago Center Theater, First National Bank of Chicago, 1 S. Dearborn–screenings will be held at the Three Penny Cinema, 2424 N. Lincoln; at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton; and at the Roberto Clemente High School auditorium, 1147 N. Western....