Black hair. A jilted woman. A sacrifice. Snow. “She’s a geisha who falls in love with a samurai. They have their one secret night together, but she realizes the future of the clan depends on his marrying this other woman, so she says, ‘Go.’ It’s their wedding night. She’s alone and undoing her hair. It’s black hair–a symbol of youth, the strength of a woman, resilience, beauty,” says choreographer Rika Lin on Kurokami (“Black Hair”), an excerpt from the now-lost 18th-century kabuki play Oakinai hirugakojima. “If you listen to the lyrics, it sounds like she was this innocent girl, and he went, ‘We’ll be together forever, baby!’ But if you know the play, she’s in anguish and bitter because she chose this sacrifice.”

Now Lin, in collaboration with musicians Matsuya Nozawa and Tatsu Aoki, calligrapher Hekiun Oda, director Subhash Maskara, user interface designer Derrick Fields, and software engineer Michael Flood, is developing Kurokami e{murge}, a contemporary rendition of this classical work for virtual reality presentation–the latest project in a body of work that examines gender and tradition through the lens of Japanese classical dance.

Born in Chicago to first-generation immigrants from Japan, Lin began dancing after her younger sister, Rina, got a taste of Japanese classical dance one summer in Japan. Upon her return, Rina continued at Shubukai, the Chicago school of Japanese classical dance founded by grandmaster Fujima Shunojo in 1976–and their mother took Rika, a self-described “tomboy” who practiced martial arts, along. “Japanese classical dance in the conventional older ways was one more line in your ‘I’m going to be a good wife’ resume,” says Lin. “Can you do the tea ceremony? Do you do flower arrangement? Do you dance? I’m sure my mom was thinking, ‘Here’s my butch daughter who likes karate; I better get her something so she’s presentable.’ So I went and had my lesson, and it was this rare thing, a male dance teacher. [Japan is] a male-dominated society, but all the Japanese classical dance teachers were women.”

“There are five major schools of Japanese classical dance,” she says. “The Fujima school is known for having very intricate, complex choreography and a strong connection to kabuki.” When Fujima Shunojo began his apprenticeship in Japan, as the youngest of a cohort with several boys, it was decided that he would learn the female dances. “It was an unusual thing that there were so many male apprentices in his teacher’s school. So it was fate.”

Lin continued training in both Japanese classical dance and Shotokan karate. “The dojo [JKA Chicago Sugiyama Dojo, founded by Shojiro Sugiyama] was on the second floor, and my dance teacher worked on the first floor,” she recalls. “In karate, my teacher would say, ‘You’re dancing! This is karate!’ And I’d go to dance, and it would be, ‘You’re doing karate–this is dance!’ And I’d be like, ‘What am I doing?'”

Yet Lin was drawn to dance in spite of herself. “The characters and the dances had a complete story. You knew your character. It was comforting to know. You are dancing a woman, and you’re selling your flowers, and this is how a woman moves, this is her class, this is what she’s wearing. It’s a comforting security that there’s this path, this is what you do, and you try to do it as best you can. I always figured, growing up, you have this track to follow. This expectation, you’re supposed to have ‘osmified’ into you by your family: you get good grades, undergrad, med school. It was planned. It was secure. So dance was a way to not worry about the real world. It was an escape,” she says. (An escape that looks just like the trap, I suggest. I never thought about it that way, she laughs.)

Dance was also a connection to Japanese culture as Lin grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood in Warrenville. “My first language was Japanese, but in the ‘burbs, there were no other Japanese people at all. My father [a radiology physicist] would moonlight at checking MRI machines in hospitals. We would go to Iowa–a big family vacation!–and we were across from the hospital in a playground, and I distinctly remember a Caucasian boy in a station wagon with a window open and he’s standing on his seat, and he goes, ‘Chinese!’ I go, ‘Where?–oh, he’s talking about us!'” she recalls.

Yet, as a result of American hostility towards Japan and those of Japanese descent before, during, and after World War II, relationships even among Japanese Americans can be complex: “During the internment, there was a line drawn between nationals, people who come from Japan, and families who were interned and went through the camps. Typically they don’t speak Japanese because they were trying to assimilate. So nationals were kind of deemed the enemy,” notes Lin. On the other side, her Japanese teachers expressed ambivalence about becoming American. “My karate teacher, we always used to ask him, ‘You’re not going to get your green card?’ He experienced the war in Japan. He would say, ‘If women, the bodies float downwards, and men they float upwards.’ He was giving an explanation after a firebombing or something. We were stupidly lighthearted, like, ‘Why won’t you become an American citizen? Go, America!’ And he’d start telling these stories. He saw that.”

In college at Northwestern, Lin found herself surrounded by Asian friends for the first time (“everybody was premed”)–yet her activities set her apart. “I scheduled my classes to make sure I could hit my dance teacher’s classes Monday, Friday, Saturday, and my karate classes Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. While I was going to karate and dance, my friends were studying their butts off. They’d go out while I was studying, so my path diverged from everyone else’s.” One day, in frustration, she said, “Why do I have to be a doctor, Mom?” Her mother replied, “No one told you you had to be a doctor.”

So Lin became a physical therapist instead–and continued to dance. “The only time I missed the annual performance was in grad school, because there was no way. When I became a physical therapist, half the time to break the ice with my patients, I’m talking about dance. It’s this ‘super hobby’ that’s all you do. When you go home, you’re doing dance.” As she rose through the ranks at Shubukai, she assumed more responsibilities–“coordinating performances or calling and making arrangements or stage managing”–and eventually sought her professional stage name with the intention of continuing her teacher’s school.

“The Fujima school operates under a headmaster system, like most cultural arts in Japan. Usually it’s a family. The headmaster controls the knowledge and certifies the teachers that then teach that style. When you receive your professional stage name, you’re a representative of the school.” Following a training process that can only be completed in Japan, recipients of the Fujima name acknowledge their professional status with the performance of one of three hour-long dances–the white heron maiden, the lion dance, or the temple maiden (“your teacher will choose according to your personality”). “I didn’t realize it cost a lot of money. My parents were against it because there’s no future in it. I refinanced my condo and I got my professional name against my parents’ wishes. But, being stubborn, I was like, ‘Well, I guess I’m just going to do it,'” she says. “I’m still paying off my stage name”: Fujima Yoshinojo, which acknowledges the lineage of her training by combining the name of the school with the names of her teachers.

But before Lin could officially teach or choreograph, she still needed to acquire a grandmaster license, which requires years more training and an arduous exam before the headmaster. “When I got my grandmasters license, then I was able to do Beyond the Box“–her first self-produced show at Links Hall in 2017, which included duets with Ayako Kato (Swathe) and Lenora Lee (Anger and the Bell), a piece with her students in collaboration with composer Eric Leonardson (Quantum Monk II), and a solo (Mai Ougi). Beyond the Box 4.3, an iteration of Kurokami developed in collaboration with puppeteer Tom Lee, continues at Links Hall this May.

The ten years between stage name and grandmaster license–during which she “scrambled and had different grants and begged and borrowed”–allowed Lin’s choreographic voice to simmer to the surface. “I don’t have the typical body type to be a Japanese dancer–to even be Japanese,” she says. “I remember when I was 5, they’d be like, ‘You’re kind of fat!’ When I started training for the exam, they’d say, ‘You’re sweating too much!’ That’s a dealbreaker, if you’re sweating. But I’m living! If I think about it, I’m going to sweat! Seeing all these boundaries and all these walls and having things told to me about my body type and my natural stance–‘Why are you dancing it that way?’ ‘What do you mean? I’m as small as I can get!’–all these questions throughout my training, I thought, ‘What if I do it in a way that’s more applicable to myself, to the times, to differences?’ My body type is my body type. I excelled more in the male dances. And I did karate and all that, too. It was an opportunity, as fate would have it, that my male teacher who excels in women’s dances was teaching me when I’m good at male dances.”

These observations of boundaries, boundary-crossings, and the ingenuity of necessity began with and extend to her teacher Fujima Shunojo and the Shubukai school, prompting her to launch Revitalizing Tradition, an annual program in its 14th season this April (with a year skipped for the pandemic).

“If you’re in Japan, you have a professional wig maker, costume maker, makeup artist, musicians. But I grew up watching him do everything. Traditionally, the teacher does the first and last dance. Here, he does the first and last dance and changes everybody in between. I started helping with the dressing, makeup, wigs, and props–and thought, ‘Good grief, I wish I could just watch my teacher dance for once!’ So I proposed to him, ‘How about we do a program where only you dance, and we have some time to talk about it?'” For the first program, her teacher performed two dances, one “male” and one “female” (she notes that these performances of gender were invented by men: “The classical dance aesthetics were coming from kabuki, the male ideal of a woman”). After the first year, her teacher invited Lin to dance as well–he would continue to perform female roles, and she would dance male roles–and guests including lecturers, calligraphers, and students could contribute to the program as well. “This year we’re flipping it for the first time–he’s going to dance a male [role]; I’m going to dance female.”

Lin views the virtual reality edition of Kurokami (scheduled to premiere in summer 2021) and its continuing evolution with a particular focus on the freedoms and constraints of the futuristic medium. Virtual reality, like film, “makes you focus on certain things,” she says. “You are given a sense of freedom, but it’s not really there. You’re forced to perceive and think of [certain] things, even as you might not realize you don’t have a choice. I think it’s a good example of the model of life. One of our hashtags is #chooseyourreality.” It’s a revealing perspective for an Asian American choreographer bridging centuries of tradition with emerging technology in a lifetime of navigating choice and fate. “How you live your life appears in your dance.”

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“Art helps to free people even while incarcerated,” Renaldo Hudson says in the new book Carving Out Rights from Inside the Prison Industrial Complex. Hudson should know. In September 2020, he was released from Danville Correctional Center, after spending 37 years behind bars. “There’s a tremendous amount of freedom when you can say what you want to say with your art, do what you want to do with it,” Hudson continues. “Prison may restrict the tools you use to express yourself, but it can’t restrict your expression.”

The importance of art to the incarcerated is made plain in Carving Out Rights, published in February by Hat and Beard Press, as well as in another recent book Prisoners’ Inventions, published in December by Half Letter Press. Carving Out Rights is built around a class taught at Stateville Prison where student artists created block prints for each of the 30 articles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Prisoners’ Inventions takes a more off-the-wall approach. It’s composed of drawings and descriptions of the ingenious improvisations that incarcerated people undertake to meet their wants and needs in the purposely grim, inhospitable environment of prisons. While these books look at the creativity of incarcerated people in completely different ways–the former taking a sober, more legalistic viewpoint, the latter taking an often humorous tack–both highlight the lack of access to even the most basic human rights: adequate food and shelter, proper health care, not being held in servitude, or subjected to cruel or inhuman treatment.

The class at Stateville was taught by artist Aaron Hughes, as part of the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project (PNAP). PNAP is a wide-ranging organization that connects teachers with incarcerated students at Stateville Maximum Security Prison in Crest Hill, Illinois, about an hour’s drive southwest of Chicago. Hughes borrowed the idea for the printmaking project from Meredith Stern, a Providence, Rhode Island-based artist, and a colleague of Hughes’s from the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative.

The PNAP version of the project was rudimentary, due to the prison’s rules around materials. Block printing is typically done using wood or linoleum. First, you draw an inverse image of what you want your print to look like. Using transfer paper, you then trace your design onto the block. Next you carve out the image on the block, before finally applying your ink or paint and stamping your image onto the paper or other material. In Hughes’s class, the images were carved into Styrofoam blocks using pens and pencils, the sharpest tools the prison would allow. The ink was rolled onto scraps of cardboard, and the artists pressed the prints onto the paper by hand. Knowing the bare-bones way these prints were made makes them all the more remarkable.

Article 12, which touches on one’s right to privacy, is portrayed in an incredibly detailed print by Alex Koehler. The text of the article takes up the top half, clearly laid out in all caps, while the bottom half shows a pair of eyes staring out of a desktop computer, set atop a table which reads “Your Privacy is Our Own.” Similarly, the illustration for article 20, by Charles McLaurin, is impeccable; the lettering looks almost computer-generated. Below the text, on the right to peaceful assembly, are three split scenes of people gathering, while in the foreground spectators look on.

The book does not consist solely of these prints. There are also poems and essays from teachers and students at Stateville, among others. An essay by Barbara Ransby, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, on her experience teaching at Stateville was particularly affecting. In it, she candidly walks the reader through her preconceived ideas of what teaching incarcerated men will be like, as well as what the process really is: the pat downs, the surveillance, the chipped walls, but also, the engaged, thoughtful students who all seemed to truly cherish the time they were able to spend engaged in learning and debate. Though Ransby makes it clear that any growth the students experienced behind bars occurred “despite the prison environment, not because of it.”

It was then striking to read, in Hudson’s interview in Carving Out Rights with Alice Kim, the director of human rights practice at the University of Chicago’s Pozen Family Center for Human Rights, that people sentenced to life without parole don’t get access to education privileges like taking classes or getting a GED. As Hudson tells it, those with shorter sentences take precedence for such privileges. Hudson, who served 13 years on death row, then had his sentence commuted to life without parole before receiving clemency, can speak directly to the experience of being told you have no hope of being free. “No one should be placed in a state of mind in which they have no hope,” Hudson tells Kim. “The inhumanity of having a life sentence is that you don’t belong to yourself. You’re telling me that the only way my family will have possession of me again is through me dying.”

Throughout the interview, the two discuss how life without parole is increasingly regarded as a violation of article 5 of the UDHR (“No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”). Even so, arguing for an end to such inhumane treatment can be difficult, as the declaration isn’t legally binding in the U.S. It exists more as a guidepost, or an ideal to strive for, though it has paved the way for the fight for human rights around the world and was instrumental in shaping our understanding of human rights following World War II.

The UDHR, though largely shaped by western thought–Eleanor Roosevelt spearheaded the committee–was drafted in 1948 by representatives from all regions of the world. Its creation followed closely behind the formation of the United Nations, which was necessitated by the desire to maintain peace during and after World War II. That the U.S. could back such a sweeping statement of human rights while still maintaining draconian Jim Crow laws was not lost on African Americans. An essay by Christophe Ringer notes how the National Negro Congress and the NAACP both mounted international campaigns in the 40s aimed at highlighting the human rights abuses against Black people. (Ringer also notes that Eleanor Roosevelt, then an NAACP board member, did not support this effort.) Two subsequent efforts to bring these abuses to light had more success. In 1951, activist William Patterson delivered a report to the U.N., titled “We Charge Genocide,” which documented the racial and state-sanctioned murders against Black Americans. This act led the way, in 2014, to a new report documenting a pattern of police torture by the Chicago Police Department. Written by a Chicago-based group dubbed We Charge Genocide, in homage to Patterson’s earlier work, the document was presented to the U.N. in Geneva, and eventually resulted in a historic reparations package for survivors of police torture. Including this history of agitation, this incremental progress is crucial not only to this book, but to PNAP’s mission, to ensure that the most impacted people must be at the center of any fight for rights.

The violation of human rights is just as apparent in Prisoners’ Inventions, though here the violations make themselves apparent in more commonplace ways. The book is a collaboration between Half Letter Press, the publishing imprint of Temporary Services, and a formerly incarcerated artist who went by the moniker Angelo. (Angelo passed away in 2016.) Angelo started as a pen pal to Marc Fischer, who runs Temporary Services along with Brett Bloom. Angelo often sent along detailed illustrations that depicted historical scenes, and sometimes included descriptions of inventions he had seen in prison. Eventually, Temporary Services had the idea to put together a booklet illustrating these inventions, resulting in numerous exhibitions as well as an earlier version of this book that was published in 2003 by WhiteWalls, but has long since been out of print. The new book is completely re-envisioned and includes new drawings, a new foreword, and blueprints Angelo drew of his cell.

Bloom and Fischer had long fielded calls to reprint the book, and felt it was important to reissue in part to keep Angelo’s memory alive. “I do think that we felt an underlying urgency with the murder of George Floyd and the exploding discussion around police and prison abolition, that now was an important time to reprint this,” Bloom told me over e-mail. “Our thinking as a group has moved from where it was with the initial printing to a solidly abolitionist understanding of prison and its overwhelming disservice to our society.”

In the new printing, Temporary Services could be more explicit with their anti-carceral politics. When Angelo was still incarcerated, there was a need to avoid explicit politicization in order to maintain his safety.

The inventions are organized by category–home furnishings, personal maintenance–and each is depicted with a detailed technical illustration and a brief description. In an introduction, written for the first edition, Angelo marvels at both the inventions themselves and at the resiliency of inmates to undertake such projects in the first place. The materials for these objects must be either painstakingly acquired over time, such as emptied cigarette lighters or the glue from pastry containers, or cobbled together by whatever raw materials are around. He notes that anything that can be altered is considered contraband, and “can be confiscated on sight.” Thus, many inventions are made, confiscated, then made all over again in a never-ending cycle. As Angelo notes, “The prison environment is designed and administered for the purpose of suppressing such inventiveness.”

As the reader will come to see, many inventions do in fact seem essential. Take, for example, the need to make an ad hoc pillow, as most inmates don’t receive one. Angelo recommends a plastic bag filled with air, or a pillowcase stuffed with clothes. Both of these are out of the question, however, if one is in the even more spartan “administrative segregation,” where, due to the cold temperature, Angelo resorts to rolling one end of the mattress and curling into a fetal position, which is “a warmer way to sleep.” Similarly, there are multiple designs for air vent covers, needed so you have some degree of control over the temperature of your room. These range from plugging each individual vent hole with paper to creating an elaborate, removable cardboard cover.

Several seem incredibly dangerous, and in fact, the publishers include a cautionary tale not to try these at home. There are “toilet paper bombs,” which involves setting fire to rolls of toilet paper, putting them under a metal object that conducts heat, such as a shelf, and then putting whatever food you are trying to heat on the metal. In this way, meals like grilled cheese can be made. Others involved making impromptu appliances, such as an immersion heater or a cigarette lighter, using paper clips or razor blades as makeshift electrical plugs.

Many more were purely fanciful or for personal enjoyment. Angelo describes the popularity of homemade picture frames, stipple-brushed portraits, and a cottage industry of embellished pages for stationery. He creates neat containers to house his drawing pencils and narrows the tips of paint brushes with masking tape in order to get more use out of them. He uses paper to make a game of memory based on an Atari game he played at home. One of the most heartbreaking descriptions is for “An Ad. Seg. Christmas,” where Angelo’s cellmate wants some sort of Christmas tree. “These words immediately triggered a flashback to a time when I was about five, and my mom wowed me by making a Christmas tree out of rolled newspaper,” Angelo writes. The men decide to use “inmate 602 Appeal forms,” which are on green paper. You roll the paper up the long way, tear it lengthwise about halfway down, and then gently pull on the center strips. The resulting drawing resembles more of a palm tree, but it seems to have satisfied the cellmate’s desire for a holiday.

Article 27 of the UDHR reads, in part, “Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.” It is notable that the arts were considered important enough to enshrine in this document. A 2019 report from the World Health Organization found evidence on the value of the arts in the promotion of good health and well-being. While it is clear from these books that at least some incarcerated people do enjoy the arts, they are not doing so freely. To echo Barbara Ransby, any enjoyment or cultural participation is undertaken despite the realities of incarceration, not because of them. Or as one of Angelo’s cellmates, Ron, put it, “It’s the cops’ job to keep us down, and ours to show them that they can’t.”

What these books also make clear is the extent to which the human rights of those behind bars is violated every day in this country. In ways large and small, we send the message that the incarcerated are less than human. Despite that constant degradation, those inside prison walls fight everyday to carve out rights, to resist their dehumanization. But they can’t succeed without the support of those of us on the outside, which is why projects like these are crucial as tools of education and awareness, as ways to bring to our attention what has been purposely put outside of our fields of vision. Just as PNAP’s students learn to build alternative modes of autonomy in their classes at Stateville, we can learn to disentangle what we’ve been taught about what justice and healing look like, what it means to be human and deserving of dignity. v

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A 25-year-old man is facing murder charges in connection to a January shooting in West Garfield Park.

Dwayne Mason was arrested Tuesday after he was identified as the person who fatally shot Jonathan Robinson Jan. 22 in the 300 block of South Pulaski Road, Chicago police said.

That day, Mason allegedly walked up to Robinson, 51, who was sitting inside his vehicle and fired shots, police said. Robinson was struck on the side and was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Mason was charged with one felony count of first-degree murder and is expected to appear in court Thursday.

Chicago police

Read more on crime, and track the city’s homicides.

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Celebrate Latino cinema

The 37^th annual Chicago Latino Film Festival presents its always-impressive roster of 45 features and 36 short films this year in both virtual and drive-in screenings. The opening night drive-in film is Lissette Feliciano’s “Women Is Losers” (April 8), about a Catholic schoolgirl facing an uncertain future in 1960s San Francisco, followed by Mariem Perez Riera’s salute to a great Broadway/Hollywood icon in the documentary “Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It” (April 12), and Marcos Carnevale’s “El cuartito” (April 17), a high-stakes comedy-drama about immigration policy. Along with a long list of streaming films, the festival also offers a series of pre-recorded and live conversations with filmmakers. The festival runs April 8-18. Virtual tickets: $12, $100 (10 films). The drive-in films are screened at ChiTown Movies, 2343 S. Throop. Tickets must be purchased in advance: $55 per car. For a complete list of films, visit chicagolatinofilmfestival.org/films/.

Browse the art

Image courtesy of the artist and Corbett vs. Dempsey Gallery

The free spring edition of Expo Chicago is a curated online event featuring a diverse list of 80 plus galleries and lots and lots of great contemporary and modern art. The five days of programming includes an evening with Theaster Gates (6:30 p.m. April 9), performances (including Jeff Tweedy, Glenn Kotche and Nels Cline of Wilco at 7 p.m. April 10), curator-led digital tours, an arts funder’s forum, artist talks, panels and much more. Expo Chicago takes place April 8-12. For more information, visit expochicago.com.

Make Bach proud

Kaja Smith

Iranian musician Mahan Esfahani performs Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” as they were composed on harpsichord. The pre-recorded concert captures Esfahani’s interpretation of this iconic piece performed at the Bach Archive in Leipzig, Germany, the city where Bach composed the piece 280 years ago. Esfahani has dedicated himself to performing historically accurate harpsichord pieces as well as performing work from contemporary classical music. The concert streams at 7 p.m. April 9. Tickets: $15. Visit chicagopresents.uchicago.edu.

Visual migration

Nat Geo

The Auditorium Theatre presents National Geographic Live’s “Women and Migration,” which looks at how social, economic, political and climate issues are affecting women, a group that in 2019 made up nearly half of the more than 270 million displaced people worldwide. Joining in conversation are photographers Danielle Villasana, Miora Rajaonary and Salyna Bashir along with Jennifer Samuel, photo editor of The Everyday Projects, a global community of visual storytellers –documentary photographers, journalists, artists — that recognizes the need for multiple perspectives in portraying the cultures that define us. Streams at 6 p.m. April 13. Tickets: $20. Visit auditoriumtheatre.org.

Pride films

Courtesy PrideArts

PrideArts Spring Film Festival screens ten short LGBTQIA films that include stories of people dealing with issues such as the aftermath of violence, the COVID-19 pandemic, aging, war and romance. Among the films in the international lineup are “Eve,” a comedy-drama about a young woman recently married to her long-term boyfriend but now having doubts; “cancer is gay,” which follows a 17-year-old fresh out of the closet and going through cancer treatment, and Chicago-based director Luzzo’s “I Used to Write with My Left Hand,” about the youngest member of a South Side Irish family who works to change the inherited pattern of shame and violence within his family. The films screen at 7 p.m. April 12 at the Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport. Tickets: $10. Visit pridearts.org/pride-spring-film-festival-april-12/.

Celebrating the Black experience

Courtesy Black Beauty Festival

The 5^th annual Black Beauty Festival returns this year with a two-day online event created in partnership with Victory Gardens Theater, the Black Women’s Expo and Black Owned Chicago. The festival kicks off with “The Black Monologues” created by Tanikia “Nikki” Carpenter and directed by Deanna Reed-Foster and featuring a showcase of solo performances that celebrate the Black experience through generations. Also included during the fest is a jam session with up-and-coming artists, a yoga hour, a paint and sip afternoon and more. The free online festival runs April 10-11. For more information, visit victorygardens.org.

Classical concerts

Courtesy of the Chen Family

The Music Institute of Chicago’s free online chamber music series begins with a performance of Beethoven’s “String Quartets, Op. 18” by the Chen String Quartet featuring at 3 p.m. April 11. Visit musicinst.org/nch-live. … The Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra presents a concert featuring works by American modernist composer Ruth Crawford and Jewish Austrian-American composer Arnold Schoenberg. Streams April 9-23. Tickets: $15. Visit ipomusic.org.

Virtual stage

Kane Repertory Theatre stages the world premiere of Hammaad Chaudry’s “Security,” starring Academy Award nominee Eric Roberts and Chicago actor Harsh J. Gagoomal. As a 17-year-old Riaz arrives in the United States and is stopped at the airport by a Homeland Security officer an experience that will change his life. Thirteen years later he returns to confront the man and interrogate him. “Security” streams April 10-May 2. Tickets: $5-$25. Visit kanerepertorytehatre.com. … New American Folk Theatre launches its season of new audio recordings of past productions with Ed Howard’s “The Summer of Daisy Fay,” based on the novel “Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man” by Fannie Flagg. Charlie Irving returns to her 2016 Jeff Award-nominated role of Daisy Fay Harper, a spunky young woman from small town Mississippi who dreams of something more. Available in an open-ended run. Tickets: $10. Visit newamericanfolktheatre.org.

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Like every other hitter in a struggling Cubs lineup, newcomer Joc Pederson tells himself it’s early, there’s no reason to panic — just keep grinding and eventually his stroke will come.

But in his eighth season in the big leagues, that’s still easier said than done.

“I think everyone feels a lot of pressure,” Pederson said after the Cubs were held to three hits in a 4-2, 10-inning loss to the Brewers on Wednesday at Wrigley Field. “Speaking for myself, it’s a lot. You come to a new place, a lot of fans. I just had a really good spring. I had a high expectation for myself and I’m assuming they do as well. And you’re not getting the job done in situations where you can audit just kind of adds up.”

Pederson’s predicament exemplifies the lineup-wide hitting slump that marked the opening homestand of the 2021 season. He was the Cubs’ hottest hitter in spring training — a .387 batting average (17-for-45) with eight home runs and 19 RBIs. But everything changed once the bell rang.

In previous years, Pederson got his first hit of the season early — the second at-bat as a rookie in 2014; then the third, third, second, seventh, first and second at-bats of the season the following six years with the Dodgers. With the pressure of impressing new teammates and new fans, he was 0-for-15 after a strikeout in the first inning and fly out to the edge of the warning track in center against dominant Brewers starter Brandon Woodruff.

Pederson felt he was getting close with the deep fly out, and sure enough he was right. In his next at-bat in the eighth inning, Pederson crushed a 96-mile-an-hour fastball from standout Brewers reliever Devin Williams for a no-doubt-about-it home run to right field for a 1-1 tie.

No matter how sure he was that he would eventually find his groove, he admitted the homer — just the safe hit — was “a big relief.”

“It was huge,” Pederson said. “There was … just grinding to start the season, just to get the first one, especially in front of the fans — it’s a little more pressure than normal. It was a big relief just to get on the board and tie the game up and give ourselves a chance to win. It felt good.”

The Cubs lineup as a whole could use the same sense of relief. While their early slump is certainly a small sample size, it’s also historically poor. After becoming the first team in modern baseball history to get three-hit, two-hit and one-hit in their first five games, they were no-hit for six innings by Woodruff on just 56 pitches.

At that point, the Cubs were 0-for-34 since Kris Bryant’s double in a 4-0 loss Tuesday night and 1-for-45 since the seventh inning of Monday’s 5-3 victory in the series opener. Nothing was working.

“We tried to jump on the fast ball — didn’t have a lot of success,” manager David Ross said. “But we continued to fight.”

Ian Happ’s single to right field past diving second baseman Daniel Robertson to lead off the seventh inning broke up the no-hitter. Pederson’s homer matched Lorenzo Cain’s homer off Alec Mills in the top of the eighth. After Cain’s three-run homer off Brandon Workman (0- 1) in the 10th, the Cubs rallied for a chance to steal it. Jason Hayward hit an RBI single and walks to Tony Walters and pinch-hitter Willson Contreras loaded the bases with two outs before Happ flied out to left to end it.

That left the Cubs 3-3 on the opening homestand but with a lineup in need of an infusion. The Cubs’ .124 team batting average is the second-lowest through six games in modern big-league history, according to research via baseball-reference.com. Their leading hitters are batting .200 — Kris Bryant (4-for-20) and Eric Sogard (2-for-10).

But Pederson’s big hit provided some hope.

“Everybody’s just trying to get comfortable,” Pederson said. “Hitting’s contagious. We all can be a little bit better. But it’s still super early. We have some really talented [hitters] and when we get clicking, it’s going to be fun to be a part of, and it’s coming soon. So just enjoy the show.”

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An Aurora man accused of beating his girlfriend and shooting the back of her vehicle last month in the west suburb was ordered held on $500,000 bail Monday.

Elyas Taha, 29, is charged with felony counts of armed violence, aggravated discharge of a firearm and aggravated domestic battery in the March 25 incident, the DuPage County state’s attorney’s office said in a statement.

Taha and his girlfriend were arguing that day about 9 a.m. in the 2600 block of Country Oaks Court when he allegedly hit her several times and choked her, prosecutors said.

After Taha released her, he allegedly fired two shots into the driver’s side taillight of her car and one into the back bumper, prosecutors said. She was standing next to the driver’s side of the car while he allegedly opened fire.

Taha fled on foot, and police found him still in the neighborhood 20 minutes later and took him into custody, police said.

He was scheduled to appear back in court May 13.

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A man who test-fired a gun he found on a Far South Side railroad line — leading two responding Chicago police officers to be struck and killed by a commuter train — was sentenced to a year in prison Wednesday.

Edward Brown had found the gun in a fanny pack on Dec. 17, 2018 and decided to test it out on the South Shore Line tracks near the 600 block of East 101st Street, Cook County prosecutors said.

The shots were picked up by Chicago police Shotspotter devices, leading Calumet District Officers Conrad Gary, 31, and Eduardo Marmolejo, 36, to respond.

Chicago police

The officers radioed that they saw someone running on the tracks and then started chasing Brown, prosecutors said. During the chase, the officers were struck from behind by a South Shore Line train, killing them both.

On Wednesday, Judge Diana Kenworthy sentenced Brown, 26, to prison after he pleaded guilty to one count of aggravated unlawful use of a weapon, court records show.

Chicago police

In exchange for his plea, prosecutors agreed to drop four other gun-related charges against Brown.

Brown, a prep cook at a Boeing International Headquarters-based restaurant, found the gun in an alley near his home after the weapon’s owner dropped it while taking out the garbage.

Brown had taken the gun to the tracks — thinking it would be safer — to see if it worked, and was devastated to learn the officers had been killed, his defense attorney had said at his bond hearing.

Brown’s lawyer called the incident “the worst of luck,” pointing out that his client had never been arrested before and that no one could have predicted what had happened.

Both officers were fairly new to the police department: Gary for 18 months and Marmolejo for less than three years. Both men were fathers of young girls and their deaths were followed by an outpouring of public support.

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WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden will unveil a series of executive actions aimed at addressing gun violence on Thursday, according to a person familiar with the plans, delivering his first major action on gun control since taking office.

He’s also expected to nominate David Chipman, a former federal agent and adviser at the gun control group Giffords, to be director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Two people familiar with the matter told The Associated Press that Chipman’s nomination is expected to be announced Thursday. The people could not discuss the matter publicly ahead of an official announcement and spoke to The AP on condition of anonymity. If confirmed, Chipman would be the agency’s first permanent director since 2015.

Biden has faced increasing pressure to act on gun control after a spate of mass shootings across the U.S. in recent weeks, but the White House has repeatedly emphasized the need for legislative action on guns. While the House passed a background-check bill last month, gun control measures face slim prospects in an evenly-divided Senate, where Republicans remain near-unified against most proposals.

Biden is expected to announce tighter regulations requiring buyers of so-called “ghost guns” to undergo background checks. The homemade firearms — often assembled from parts and milled with a metal-cutting machine — often lack serial numbers used to trace them. It’s legal to build a gun in a home or a workshop and there is no federal requirement for a background check.

The president’s plans were previewed by a person familiar with the expected actions who was not authorized to publicly discuss them. Biden will be joined by Attorney General Merrick Garland at the event.

The ATF is currently run by Acting Director Regina Lombardo. Gun-control advocates have emphasized the significance of the ATF director in enforcing the nation’s gun laws, and Chipman is certain to win praise from them. During his time as a senior policy adviser with Giffords, he spent considerable effort pushing for greater regulation and enforcement on “ghost guns,” reforms of the background check system and measures to reduce the trafficking of illegal firearms.

Prior to that, Chipman spent 25 years as an agent at the ATF, where he worked on stopping a trafficking ring that sent illegal firearms from Virginia to New York, and served on the ATF’s SWAT team. Chipman is a gun owner himself.

Chipman and a White House spokesman both declined to comment.

During his campaign, Biden promised to prioritize new gun control measures as president, including enacting universal background check legislation, banning online sales of firearms and the manufacture and sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. But gun-control advocates have said that while they were heartened by signs from the White House that they took the issue seriously, they’ve been disappointed by the lack of early action.

Biden himself expressed uncertainty late last month when asked if he had the political capital to pass new gun control proposals, telling reporters, “I haven’t done any counting yet.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said last month, however, that executive actions on guns were coming as well, calling them “one of the levers that we can use” to address gun violence.

For years, federal officials have been sounding the alarm about an increasing black market for homemade, military-style semi-automatic rifles and handguns. Ghost guns have increasingly turned up at crime scenes and in recent years have been turning up more and more when federal agents are purchasing guns in undercover operations from gang members and other criminals.

It is hard to say how many are circulating on the streets, in part because in many cases police departments don’t even contact the federal government about the guns because they can’t be traced.

Some states, like California, have enacted laws in recent years to require serial numbers be stamped on ghost guns.

The critical component in building an untraceable gun is what is known as the lower receiver, a part typically made of metal or polymer. An unfinished receiver — sometimes referred to as an “80-percent receiver” — can be legally bought online with no serial numbers or other markings on it, no license required.

A gunman who killed his wife and four others in Northern California in 2017 who had been prohibited from owning firearms built his own to skirt the court order before his rampage. And in 2019, a teenager used a homemade handgun to fatally shoot two classmates and wound three others at a school in suburban Los Angeles.

Plans for Biden’s announcement Thursday were first reported by Politico.

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AP Writer Lisa Marie Pane in Boise, Idaho contributed reporting.

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MINNEAPOLIS — Officer Derek Chauvin had his knee on George Floyd’s neck — and was bearing down with most of his weight — the entire 9 1/2 minutes the Black man lay facedown with his hands cuffed behind his back, a use-of-force expert testified Wednesday at Chauvin’s murder trial.

Jody Stiger, a Los Angeles Police Department sergeant serving as a prosecution witness, said that based on his review of video evidence, Chauvin applied pressure to Floyd’s neck or neck area from the time officers put Floyd on the ground until paramedics arrived.

“That particular force did not change during the entire restraint period?” prosecutor Steve Schleicher asked as he showed the jury a composite of five still images.

“Correct,” replied Stiger, who on Tuesday testified that the force used against Floyd was excessive.

Chauvin attorney Eric Nelson countered by pointing out what he said were moments in the video footage when Chauvin’s knee did not appear to be on Floyd’s neck but on his shoulder blade area or the base of his neck. Stiger did not give much ground, saying the officer’s knee in some of the contested images still seemed to be near Floyd’s neck.

In other testimony, the lead Minnesota state investigator on the case, James Reyerson, agreed with Nelson that Floyd seemed to say in a police body-camera video of his arrest, “I ate too many drugs.”

But when a prosecutor played a longer clip of the video, Reyerson said he believed what Floyd really said was “I ain’t do no drugs.”

Chauvin, 45, is charged with murder and manslaughter in Floyd’s death May 25. Floyd, 46, was arrested outside a neighborhood market after being accused of trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill. A panicky-sounding Floyd struggled and claimed to be claustrophobic as police tried to put him in a squad car, and they pinned him to the pavement.

Bystander video of Floyd crying that he couldn’t breathe as onlookers yelled at Chauvin to get off him sparked protests and scattered violence around the U.S.

Nelson has argued that the now-fired white officer “did exactly what he had been trained to do over his 19-year career,” and he has suggested that Floyd’s drug use and his underlying health conditions are what killed him, not Chauvin’s knee, as prosecutors contend. Fentanyl and methamphetamine were found in Floyd’s system.

Breahna Giles, a state forensic scientist, testified Wednesday that pills found in the SUV Floyd was driving contained methamphetamine and fentanyl. Remnants of pills discovered in the back of the squad car also were found to contain methamphetamine. Earlier testimony revealed that one of those pills contained DNA from Floyd’s saliva.

Earlier, Nelson asked Stiger about uses of force that are commonly referred to by police as “lawful but awful.” Stiger conceded that “you can have a situation where by law it looks horrible to the common eye, but based on the state law, it’s lawful.”

Nelson has argued, too, that the officers on the scene were distracted by what they perceived as an increasingly hostile crowd of onlookers.

But Stiger told the jury, “I did not perceive them as being a threat,” even though some bystanders were name-calling and using foul language. He added that most of the yelling was due to “their concern for Mr. Floyd.”

Nelson’s voice rose as he asked Stiger how a reasonable officer would be trained to view a crowd while dealing with a suspect, “and somebody else is now pacing around and watching you and watching you and calling you names and saying (expletives).” Nelson said such a situation “could be viewed by a reasonable officer as a threat.”

“As a potential threat, correct,” Stiger said.

Chauvin’s lawyer noted that dispatchers had described Floyd as between 6 feet and 6-foot-6 and possibly under the influence. Stiger agreed it was reasonable for Chauvin to come to the scene with a heightened sense of awareness.

Stiger further agreed with Nelson that an officer’s actions must be judged from the point of view of a reasonable officer on the scene, not in hindsight. Among other things, Nelson said that given typical emergence medical response times, it was reasonable for Chauvin to believe that paramedics would be there soon.

In other testimony, Stiger said that as Floyd lay pinned to the ground, Chauvin squeezed Floyd’s fingers and pulled one of his wrists toward his handcuffs, a technique that uses pain to get someone to comply, but Chauvin did not appear to let up.

“Then at that point it’s just pain,” Stiger said.

Prosecutors stopped and started videos during the testimony from Reyerson, the state investigator, in an attempt to show the jury how long Chauvin held his position. Reyerson testified that Chauvin’s knee was on Floyd’s neck for two minutes after Floyd stopped talking, and for two minutes after he ceased moving.

Stiger was asked by prosecutors whether Chauvin had an obligation to take Floyd’s distress into account as the officer considered how much force to use.

“Absolutely,” Stiger replied. “As the time went on, clearly in the video, you could see that Mr. Floyd’s … health was deteriorating. His breath was getting lower. His tone of voice was getting lower. His movements were starting to cease.”

“So at that point, as a officer on scene,” he continued, “you have a responsibility to realize that, ‘OK, something is not right. Something has changed drastically from what was occurring earlier.’ So therefore you have a responsibility to take some type of action.”

Webber reported from Fenton, Mich.

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A Galesburg man pleaded guilty to a federal arson charge Wednesday for setting fire to a Sprint store in Minneapolis during the unrest that followed the police killing of George Floyd.

Rupert agreed to plead guilty in exchange for prosecutors dropping charges of civil disorder and rioting.

“I plead guilty,” Rupert, 28, said during the brief hearing before U.S. District Judge Nancy E. Brasel in Minneapolis.

After entering the Sprint store on May 29, Rupert and others knocked over a pile of boxes before Rupert doused them in lighter fluid, prosecutors said.

Rupert then encouraged a 17-year-old who had accompanied him to the protests to set the boxes on fire.

“I lit it on fire,” Rupert posted on Facebook, prosecutors said. The fire caused damage to the building, at 3009 Nicollet Ave.

Authorities were able to track Rupert through his social media posts during the unrest. In a more than two-hour long Facebook Live video Rupert filmed showed him handing out explosive devices and encouraging others to use them against police officers, prosecutors said.

“I’ve got bombs if you all want to throw them back,” Rupert could be heard saying in the video, according to the criminal complaint filed against him last year. When an explosion took place after a rioter lit and threw one such device, Rupert said, “good shot my boy.”

Family members had told the Chicago Sun-Times that the explosives were fireworks — albeit large ones — and said Rupert had an affinity for setting them off in Galesburg, which had led to run-ins with local police officials.

Rupert was arrested in Chicago two days after the Minneapolis fire for violating Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s citywide curfew order. Officers found “several destructive devices,” a hammer and a flashlight inside the car he had traveled in to participate in the George Floyd demonstrations downtown.

Rupert faces between 5 to 20 years in prison.

A sentencing date has not been set.

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