Kyle MacMillan

1 month ago | chicago.suntimes.com | Kyle MacMillan

“I figured I’d better couch my diagonals and spirals in sex and surprise,” Twyla Tharp wrote in her 1992 autobiography, “Push Comes to Shove,” explaining her early approach to dance, and that description remains apt. The 83-year-old New Yorker ranks among the influential and innovative dancemakers of her generation, creating more than 150 works that can be complex and conceptual but also cool and funky.

2 months ago | chicago.suntimes.com | Kyle MacMillan

El mejor lugar para cobertura de noticias y cultura latina en Chicago. | The place for coverage of Latino news and culture in Chicago. A veces, lo bueno viene en envases pequeños. Ese es sin duda el caso de “El mes de Frida Kahlo en París: Una amistad con Mary Reynolds”, una nueva exposición que se exhibe hasta el 13 de julio en el Instituto de Arte de Chicago.

2 months ago | chicago.suntimes.com | Kyle MacMillan

Sometimes good things do come in small packages. That is certainly the case with “Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds,” a new exhibition that runs through July 13 at the Art Institute of Chicago. This smart, compact show offers a fascinating, highly focused look at an all-but-unknown moment in art history — 4½ weeks or so in February and March 1939 that Kahlo spent with American book artist Mary Reynolds in Paris, then the epicenter of the art world.

2 months ago | chicago.suntimes.com | Kyle MacMillan

Raw and riveting, discomfiting and relentlessly contemporary. “The Listeners” is all that and more. The 2½-hour work, which opened Sunday afternoon at Lyric Opera of Chicago and runs through April 11, is Missy Mazzoli’s fourth work in the form, and it definitively establishes her as one of the major operatic composers of our time.

2 months ago | chicago.suntimes.com | Kyle MacMillan

Operas have long confronted issues that were both timely and universal: Political persecution in Beethoven’s “Fidelio.” Romantic obsession in Bizet’s “Carmen.” Imperialist indifference in Puccini’s “Madam Butterfly.”In the same way, Missy Mazzoli, one of this country’s leading operatic composers, writes works in the form that are relentlessly of their time, including her fourth, “The Listeners,” which deals with the lure of cults, epidemic of loneliness and need to belong.