Chicago Blackhawks: 3 players who can redeem themselves in playoffsVincent Pariseon June 3, 2020 at 12:00 pm

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(Photo by Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)

The Chicago Blackhawks have some players who were only okay in the regular season but can redeem themselves in the playoffs.

The Chicago Blackhawks had a rough year. It was largely because the team’s defense can’t keep up with its ability to score. The goaltending has been awesome and with Corey Crawford in net, there should be a level of confidence going into the playoffs. Stars like Patrick Kane, Jonathan Toews, and Duncan Keith are also still there to lead the way in different facets of the game. With that said, they still need help from others in order to upset the Edmonton Oilers.

It was nice to see players like Dominik Kubalik and Kirby Dach step in as first-year players step in and do the best they can. Kubalik was one of the best rookies in the entire National Hockey League. Dach is still one of the youngest players in the NHL so he had a few more growing pains along the way but was overall just fine in his rookie year.

There are some players on the team who we know is capable of so much more than what they put out this season. Some of it had to do with shady decision making by the coaching staff along with some bad luck but they need to be better. If this thing is going to work they need everyone on board contributing to the best of their ability.

There can be no passengers if they are going to beat Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl, and the Edmonton Oilers team that had a really nice year. In order to win this series, these three players need to redeem themselves from having tough regular seasons:

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Chicago Blackhawks: 3 players who can redeem themselves in playoffsVincent Pariseon June 3, 2020 at 12:00 pm Read More »

Inside the intricate worlds of Polly PocketMegan Kirbyon June 2, 2020 at 8:05 pm

Oh, to quarantine inside a Polly Pocket, safe and enclosed, all the comforts of home sculpted in colorful plastic. Browsing the Instagram account @polly_pick_pocket might be the next best thing. Logan Square-based artist Julia Carusillo works as a set and exhibit designer, creating sets and displays for theaters, nature centers, and aquariums–which gives her a particular appreciation for miniature worlds. On the popular Instagram, she posts soothing ASMR “tours” of Polly Pocket interiors from her collection. Her manicured nails click against the clamshells. The cases open to reveal tiny, interactive worlds inside: an 80s-kitsch surf shack, a pastel fairy cave, a water park with a winding pink slide, a hair salon with a tiny checkerboard floor. The account’s tagline is “I bet you had the same one!”

With a shout-out from Jezebel and 21,500 Instagram followers (and counting), Carusillo has tapped into an online world of 90s nostalgia, toy collectors, and design buffs. She talked to us about the appeal of miniatures, the toys’ influence on her own art, and which Polly Pocket clamshell she’d recommend for sheltering in place.

Megan Kirby: Where do you get your Polly Pockets?

Julia Carusillo: My biggest haul that I’ve ever gotten was a woman on Craigslist who was selling about 15 of the clamshells. That’s where I got the bulk of mine, right when I began collecting again [about five years ago]. I also get them on eBay. I’ve only found them in a thrift store a few times. Those are the golden moments, when you find them out in the wild. That’s only happened to me twice. I have notifications for this estate sale website, and sometimes people will be selling them. But somehow people know that they’re valuable, and so often when I get to the estate sale they’re already gone or they’re super overpriced.

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How do you fit into the wider Polly Pocket social media world?

Well, I’m friends on Instagram with all of these accounts. I think my account is different because I don’t collect the dolls at all. I only collect the clamshells. I have probably a hundred dolls that have come with some of the kits. But I don’t seek out complete sets the way that other accounts do. I care a lot more about the architecture of the actual toy than I do about the dolls.

What draws you to the clamshell structures?

I’m a set and exhibit designer. The world of miniatures has always been super interesting to me. In school and in my professional life, I make tactile and digital models. So, I love the intricacy of the architecture of the sets. They’re so complex and detailed. It’s amazing that they can get that level of detail with the size of these things.

How do Polly Pockets fit into art history?

I love the Venus of Willendorf and all of the miniature statuettes throughout art history. They’re so cute. When you go to the Asian wing in the Art Institute and see all of the tiny little pieces there that are carved out of jade. I just love that.

It makes me think of the Thorne Miniature Rooms at the Art Institute, too.

That was always a major destination for me. I grew up in the suburbs, and we would go and visit those all the time. My mom loves miniatures too, and so does my sister. The Thorne Rooms are the best. I went a month ago–well, I guess it’s quarantine so it was more like three months ago. I went and visited them, and they’re just so beautiful.

How do Polly Pockets influence your design work?

My dream job would honestly be to design Polly Pocket worlds. I do embroidery, and I’ve done really complex embroidery of different Polly Pockets. And I guess that seeing the level of detail you can get out of molded plastic has made it clear to me that I can get that level of detail from the things that I make.

How would you describe the Polly Pocket aesthetic?

Super 80s, early 90s. Polly iconically has a short perm, which I love. The molded plastic is just so iconic to me. Not only is there molded plastic, but there are stickers for the even-more-tiny details like what you’d see out of Polly’s window. They have a ski chalet where you can see the mountains, things like that. They’re their own little worlds, and I think that’s what makes them so special, aesthetically.

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It snowed last night

What are your favorite specific details?

One of my favorite details that’s in a couple different compacts are these little marble statues, but they’re done in the style of what the Polly dolls look like. So it’ll be a classical statue but it has the same facial features as one of the dolls. I love that.

This one is probably the most popular Polly that I see for sale online, which is a really big pink star–it’s bigger than most of the other compacts–and it’s really special. The part that opens up that is perpendicular to your desk is the night sky. And it has hot air balloons and a Ferris wheel, and the stars behind them light up, and the little compartments for people move in a circle. When they have so many moving parts, it’s just like, how on earth did you design this? They amaze me.

If you had to quarantine in one Polly Pocket set, which one would you choose?

I was thinking about this a lot. Definitely the ski chalet. There are a few ski chalets, and there’s a Pollyville one that’s like a little house. There are icicles dripping off of it. Little pine trees. Stuff like that. But there’s also one I have that has a little ski slope built into it, and it comes with a sled. It’s a gorgeous little world, so cozy and warm.

Then, my all-time favorite Polly Pocket is this little pink suitcase–it’s called Polly in Paris. And it has a view of the Eiffel Tower, it has the little statue I was talking about. It has an elevator, a fainting couch, a little courtyard. It’s like, this is the place to be, for sure. v

Inside the intricate worlds of Polly PocketMegan Kirbyon June 2, 2020 at 8:05 pm Read More »

Pivot Arts Festival switches it up onlineKerry Reidon June 2, 2020 at 8:50 pm

Pivot Arts has been an incubator for multidisciplinary performance for nearly a decade, and its annual festival, which usually takes over several venues in Edgewater and Uptown, is the public culmination of those development efforts. But with the COVID-19 shutdown, the company knew they had to, well, pivot. And so this year’s festival, running June 5-30, is a virtual feast of dance, theater, music, and solo performance.

Though the recorded pieces in the festival will go “live” on the site at specific dates and times from June 5-11, the content will remain available through the end of the month.

For Pivot’s founder and director Julieanne Ehre, moving online made sense. “We produce and present adventurous and contemporary performance. So we are not a traditional theater company or dance company. Our whole purpose is to reimagine what’s possible in performance.” And though some of the festival’s previously scheduled work “made no sense to be online,” Ehre says that they will be rescheduled for next year. Meantime, the artists who are going forward with the current incarnation will be paid the same as they would have been for the live version.

One of the “silver linings” of the reimagined Pivot Festival for Ehre is the ability to bring in artists from outside Chicago, including New York-based Obie Award-winning solo performer David Cale, who has been performing at the Goodman for decades. He’s appearing as part of the (Un)touched series of short video performances, debuting on June 8 and curated by Ehre and Tanya Palmer, the former director of play development at the Goodman who currently heads the MFA program in dramaturgy at Indiana University. Palmer and Ehre asked Cale and several multigenre performers (including dancer and Reader contributor Irene Hsiao) to create short video performances reflecting on “both the absence and impossibility of touch and moments of connection during the quarantine.”

One of the rescheduled artists is Alex Alpharaoh, a solo performer and writer from Los Angeles whose work reflects the experiences of undocumented Americans. But though he isn’t presenting new work this year, the festival kicks off on Friday with a screening at 6 PM of Lidieth Arevalo’s documentary Alpharaoh, which captures the national tour of the artist’s solo piece WET: A DACAmented Journey. Alpharaoh will participate in a Zoom meet-and-greet as part of a fundraiser for Pivot. Tickets for that event are $25, but all other festival offerings are free, though of course donations are welcome.

Friday also features a livestream dance party led by artists from The Rosina Project, a collaboration between Chicago Fringe Opera and BraveSoul Movement street dance troupe that premiered in last year’s festival and that recasts Rossini’s The Barber of Seville as “a story of female empowerment and interracial friendship.” The livestream will include songs and dances from that piece and an invitation to audiences watching from home to join in.

For Vershawn Sanders-Ward, founding artistic director of Red Clay Dance Company, the festival going online provided an opportunity for her company to revisit a piece she originally created in 2017, Art of Resilience, which was further reimagined last year as a site-specific piece, Art of Resilience 2.0, for the DuSable Museum’s Roundhouse venue. That version reflected on the strength and vibrancy of Black communities in Chicago, as well as the role of segregation and violence against them. In Resilience Reimagined, Red Clay dancers embody the work they did last year from their homes and other site-specific places.

Says Sanders-Ward, “The piece is about claiming space, particularly for Black and Brown bodies. So my first thought was about how we are relating to our home spaces, being kind of confined to spaces that are our own, that we created, but that we may or may not spend that much time in.”

She adds, “I’m asking them to be vulnerable and transparent. Letting people see your home space–that’s a very sacred space.” And yet, as Sanders-Ward points out, the police slaying of Breonna Taylor in her Louisville home shows how easily that sacred space can be violated for Black citizens. While the pieces the dancers perform in the festival may not explicitly reflect on Taylor’s death, Sanders-Ward says, “It’s just a part of our lived experience that I’m sure the dancers carry with them and it will appear as it makes sense in their ideas about resilience and space.” The festival will also feature a recording of the DuSable performance, so viewers can see the new pieces (which debut on Saturday) in conversation with the earlier performance.

Director Seth Bockley and writer Drew Paryzer’s Superfluxus, originally intended as an immersive installation and performance (inspired in part by escape rooms) taking place throughout the Edge Theater building on Broadway, transformed into a choose-your-own-adventure virtual experience, set in a “surreal and sinister lunar landscape in the year 2120.”

“This is not a work that is a commentary on the present pandemic or situation,” says Bockley. “But it does inevitably reflect some of the preoccupations that we all have around isolation.” With the help of a tech team that includes video designer Tony Churchill and games designer Melissa Schlesinger, who has also designed escape rooms, Bockley and Paryzer were able to translate their original concept in a way that Bockley hopes will “plant the seeds for that future live version.”

For Ehre, the virtual festival can’t fully fill the gap left by the shutdown of museums and theaters, which is why many of the artists scheduled online this year will be returning live when it’s safe to do so. But she says, “The idea that access to the arts is no longer in existence is a complete tragedy for me. I want to make sure that people still have some access to art. And not just archival work, but to things that are being created right now.” v

Pivot Arts Festival switches it up onlineKerry Reidon June 2, 2020 at 8:50 pm Read More »