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JAN ERKERT & DANCERS In what appeared to be the evening’s “people’s choice,” Erkert paid tribute to three of Chicago’s best-known choreographers: Maggie Kast, Shirley Mordine, and Nana Shineflug. Erkert directed Minutes, Hours, Days, Decades but asked the three dancers to choreograph according to the evolution of their own personal styles. What makes this piece so engaging is its personal quality. Erkert immediately establishes a rapport with the audience in a danced introduction, describing her own evolution as an artist....

Here’s a blues and soul revue in the great tradition. Mississippi-born Little Milton Campbell is among the most-enduring contemporary bluesmen performing regularly on the black circuit: his vocal style fuses eloquent blues passion with contemporary nuances, and he’s developed a guitar technique that fits postwar King-style string bending and pop arrangements into a solid down-home blues framework. Chicago soul man Otis Clay, known for such hits as “Precious, Precious” and “Turn Back the Hands of Time” has been tottering on the verge of international stardom for what seems like forever: from his earliest Memphis recordings on the Hi label through his current Chicago work, he’s built a reputation as a deeply expressive and thoroughly professional craftsman....

ART AT THE ARMORY: OCCUPIED TERRITORY To honor the Armory’s passing and celebrate hopes for the museum’s future, the MCA opened “Art at the Armory: Occupied Territory” inside the old building last month. On view through January 23, the exhibition features 18 installations, 8 of which were commissioned for this show. Given the financial support of the Sara Lee Corporation, a growing international interest in installation, and the sprawling, history-laden facility, the MCA here has the opportunity to showcase new art on a scale unprecedented in Chicago....

OTHELLO Poor Iago. Here he is, a white racist in a once-all-white society that now accepts blacks–indeed, gives them special privileges. A society that upholds a black man’s claim to a white wife over her father’s protest that interracial marriage is “against all rules of nature.” A society that not only allows a black man to rise to military leadership but keeps a good white man like Iago lower on the ladder–and gives a helping hand to other blacks....

SMUT When Peditto’s writing is in good form and is supported by a strong and complementary production (as was the case in Igloo’s 1986 staging of A Fire Was Burning . . .), Peditto’s style can produce some moving and thought-provoking effects. When it falls short of the mark, as in Smut, the result, though still interesting, is sloppy and almost incomprehensible. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The story of a young man’s career as a clerk in a New York pornography store, Smut seeks to evoke an atmosphere of moral decay and emotional confusion....

“Whether the motivation is to control nature, bring order to chaos or to leave one’s mark on the face of this planet, we salute America’s passion for the yard–its private kingdoms,” writes Bruce W. Pepich, director of the Wustum Museum of Fine Arts (Racine, Wisconsin) in the catalog for its current exhibition, “Artists and the American Yard: Lawn Gnomes, Pink Flamingos and Bathtub Grottos.” “In fact, the decoration and maintenance of one’s yard or property is the major personal aesthetic statement most Americans make in public....

Now, let’s line up all the horses from coast to coast… According to the Hooved Animal Humane Society (national headquarters in northwest suburban Woodstock), September is “Hooves Across America” month, an occasion for promoting local “ride-a-thons” that will benefit the organization’s rescue operations. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Twelve units of scattered-site public housing in Edgewater? Fine with us, says the 48th Ward Progressive Network....

Does this story sound familiar? You make a phone call to City Hall, wanting only to learn how to register to vote, or who qualifies for the senior citizens property tax exemption, or some other mundane detail. Fifteen minutes and five transfers later, you are very, very mad. “Hey!” you wonder, “why are these people so rude to me when I pay their salaries! I’m a taxpayer, for heaven’s sake–can’t I get my money’s worth?...

WOMEN IN SHAKESPEARE at Cafe Voltaire Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Many scenes show considerable imagination. In the soliloquy taken from the end of Act IV in Romeo and Juliet, the heroine is literally of two minds–two actresses argue the wisdom of Friar Laurence’s plan for elopement. Another clever idea informs the staging of the scene at the beginning of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Hermia discloses her elopement plans to her best friend Helena in the form of confidences between two teenagers in front of the mirror in the little girls’ room....

Two of the burningest Zairian soukous acts are visiting Chicago within the next two weeks; this weekend it’s Zaiko Langa-Langa, who’ve been at it through various personnel changes since 1971. A recent LP on the Espera label from France reveals Zaiko to be a big, rich-sounding ensemble whose forte is lilting harmonies that build inexorably toward the requisite six- to eight-minute dance break. To my Western ears they share more with the old Congolese masters–Tabu Ley Rochereau (who gigged in Chicago last month) and the late Franco–than they do with more recent revved-up innovators like Diblo and the Kanda Bongo Man (coming here next week)....

On Sunday, November 17, the school board and teachers’ union agreed to a deal that averted a strike and kept 409,000 children in school. Everyone should have been happy, and yet the pictures on the front pages of Monday’s newspapers showed only somber faces. School superintendent Ted Kimbrough contends that such accusations are off target since the “central-office staff is cut to the bone.” But very few activists believe him. The consequence is a barrage of charges and countercharges that will undoubtedly hurt Chicago’s efforts to receive additional funding from the state....

The London-based Arditti Quartet is one of the most engaging and compelling interpreters of new music, and so is Ursula Oppens, the Harvard-educated pianist whose command of both the traditional and contemporary repertories is simply awesome. What’s more, judging by their recent separate appearances here, both Oppens and the Arditti are at the top of their form. Starting this year, they’ve embarked on a three-year joint venture, sponsored by the New York Composers Forum and Chamber Music Chicago, to introduce six brand-new piano quintets....

Friday 5 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » During World War I, most of the white male populace of the small town of Corbin, Kentucky, went off to battle. Upon their return, they faced another fight, this time to get back the lucrative railroad construction jobs obtained in their absence by the town’s black male residents. In 1919 the white men rounded up all of Corbin’s black men, women, and children, set their houses afire, and shoved them into train cars, literally railroading them out of town....

Cecil Neth Keeps the Lights On Cecil Neth is paralyzed from his nose down. Lying silently in bed at home, he’s fed intravenously. A ventilator handles his breathing. His wife is often uncertain of his mood. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cecil was writing editorials for the Sun-Times back in 1985 when he was told he’d acquired amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Within three months of this diagnosis he was unable to dress himself....

CROSSING DELANCEY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of course Sandler wrapped these Reagan-ish notions in a story even liberal Democrats could enjoy: somewhat yupped Isabelle Grossman thinks she’s in love with a self-absorbed WASP novelist, but eventually finds true happiness when her bubbie and a marriage broker fix her up with a nice Jewish boy from the old neighborhood who goes to shul every day and makes his living selling pickles at the company he inherited from his father....

Disarmament Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gorbachev wants to cut back on the arms race because it’s bankrupting his country. Americans would like to help, but if the defense industry collapses the only jobs left in America will be in fast foods. The answer is for the U.S. to build twice as many tanks and bombers as we do now and give half of them to the Soviet Union....

HAMLET The Defiant Theatre’s Hamlet has chutzpah. That’s not all it has, but it has more of that than anything else. It may be short on the slyly comic wordplay, the densely textured philosophical inquiry, and the cathartic tragedy that make the play a masterpiece; but its energy and brash commitment to every moment make it a lively and interesting show. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » An outgrowth of the Electric Shakespeare Company, which was formed downstate three years ago at the University of Illinois, the Defiant ensemble is directed here by Christopher Johnson, who states his intentions in a program note: “A truly bold choice requires that you open yourself up to the possibility of failure, ridicule and humiliation....

Scattered clouds threw dappled shadows on the Wisconsin River and the green bluffs beyond. It was mid-afternoon on an August Monday; I’d just arrived at the beach and was settling in for a late lunch when a young man on his way out stopped, tentatively, and asked if I hadn’t been in Madison trying to find a hotel room during the nasty thunderstorm on Saturday night. Indeed I had, and he had been the desk clerk with the bad news that there were no rooms to be had anywhere in the area–I’d ended up sleeping on a roll-away in a conference room in the Ramada Inn in Janesville, halfway back to Chicago....

NEW DANCES ’90 Melissa Thodos uses props. In her very first piece, the 1987 Reaching There (to be replaced on this weekend’s program by a new work by Barbara Stein), she uses a large cylinder, about chest height, rolling herself on top of it and inside it. In her new work, Corner Pocket, she uses pool cues, which call up a whole culture, an attitude, a characteristic way of moving. Somehow we don’t associate the pool hall with sensitive male-female relations–it’s a masculine environment women enter at their own risk....

The eighth annual edition of the Chicago Lesbian and Gay Film Festival concludes this weekend at Chicago Filmmakers, 1229 W. Belmont. Tickets cost $4-$5.50 per show or $25 for six screenings. For program information and updates, call Chicago Filmmakers at 281-8788. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » GAY EXPERIMENTAL FILMS Nine short films, all but two of them from the U.S. Tom Chomont’s Oblivion (1969), Jabbok (1967), and Razor Head (1984), Jerry Tartaglia’s A....