rhinofest.com :: special events :: performance

The Crooked Mouth String Band

A band for the times, both good and bad. Purveyors of original acoustic music with roots in vaudeville, Crooked Mouth gives songwriters their due, pretends to the folksy but leans on the Brechtsy, and harmonizes on themes of loss and forbearance.

Elvisbride

A band that was a play and is now a band. The critically incendiary, surreal-existentialist curiosity of last year's Rhinoceros Theater Festival returns as a musical quintet (no, sextet) performing an array of speculative-musical jubilations just for you. Kurt Weill meets They Might Be Giants you say? Sure, we say.

Latinisé

Latinisé is the combination of a fascination for foreign languages with a passion for music from around the world. Vocalist Andrea Else and guitarist James Cornolo reinterpret classics as jazz tunes and present some of the most original jazz written in foreign languages; their wide repertoire is full of surprises and fresh ideas.

Midnight Moxie

The doo-wop rock'n'roll trio of Meg and Nia O'Reilly Amandes and Sarah Chang returns from a recording hiatus with a song set combining the sweet, the witty, the nitty and the gritty. Who says harmonizing in the car won't get you anywhere?

Matt Rieger

Presenting Subject Matter Created and Destroyed

A circular discussion on creation not as a means to an end in the form of a product, but as its own end per se, featuring formal wear, building blocks and a human bowling ball.

Vernon Tonges

Waging all-out undeclared covert war on precious navel-gazing self-indulgence, mildly unhinged singer-songwriter Vernon Tonges takes a well-earned sabbatical from the self-congratulatory world of contemporary rock to hone a bolder and more intimate vision for today's smaller venues. His brisk and breezy ditties often take abrupt and scary turns into alarming landscapes of casual depravity.

Plus the Billy Goat Experiment, Rory Jobst, Jamie O'Reilly and John Starrs!

Anne Calcagno

Reading from Love Like a Dog

Anne Calcagno is the recipient of NEA and Illinois Arts Council Fellowships. She has a short story collection entitled Pray for Yourself (from TriQuarterly Books, Northwestern University Press) and has published in the North American Review, Epoch, TriQuarterly and a number of other publications.

Amy England

Reading from The National Council on Dream Safety

Amy England has two books of poetry, The Flute Ship Castricum and Victory and Her Opposites: A Guide, both from Tupelo Press. She teaches classes on surrealism, detective fiction, poetics, art and politics, and ekphrasis. She will read and show announcements from her current project, The National Council on Dream Safety.

Calvin Forbes

Reading from selected work

Calvin Forbes is professor of Liberal Arts and Writing and a recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Grant, NEA Grant, and a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship. His books include Blue Monday, From the Book of Shine, and The Shine Poems. He has published in Yale Review, American Scholar, Poetry Magazine, Black World, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, and Ploughshares, among others.

Sara Levine

Reading from selected work

Sara Levine's stories have appeared in The Iowa Review, Nerve, Conjunctions, and other magazines. Her essays have been published in 9 Years: The Best of Fence and The Touchstone Anthology of Creative Nonfiction: 1970 to the Present. She is chair of the Writing Program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.