It’s Saturday morning, which means that I have one empty email inbox and another filled mostly with messages from myself. Most of these have either the subject line “Tweet forwarded by @trailerpilot,” which are shares from my phone’s TweetDeck app; or are in an ongoing, very long thread titled “Linkage” which, as you might guess, contains links.

This Saturday’s harvest is particularly robust and, in lieu of flooding Twitter or Facebook with its crop, here we are at Ye Olde Trailerpilot Dot Com.

Select Internet I Emailed to Myself Between January 30 and February 3, 2012

@DanceUK shared this dedicated page on Göteborgsoperan’s website for Sasha Waltz’s noBody, premiering on February 25.

This BuzzFeed post about Nancy Upton, who punk’d an American Apparel model search.

Via @theballetbag, I read Ismene Brown on Cojocaru and Rojo in Ashton and MacMillan.

Via @LukeJennings1, I looked at this self-portrait by Sergei Polunin. Here’s the Google News line on Polunin’s resignation and subsequent events.

I read Claudia La Rocco on New York City Ballet on Balanchine’s choreography at the Koch, via @ClaudiaLaRocco.

Via @magickaleva, I checked out the listing for I’m Nobody! Who are You? at New York Live Arts. Carla Peterson is one of four panelists at Monday’s Chicago Dancemakers Forum Salon.

@pointe_magazine and many others shared this Joan Acocella piece about onstage injuries in ballet, occasioned by Jennie Somogyi’s unfortunate Achilles tear during Polyphonia on January 28.

@Dance_Magazine shared this Idolator roundup of the top 10 line dances on Soul Train.

@ticklepickleme was upset by this Phantom Menace trailer, narrated as if the film was a sweet breakfast cereal.

@Dance_Teacher shared this Daily Herald article about this month’s flamenco festival at North Central College.

Research for an item about Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance led me to this 1989 article in The Los Angeles Times about Tina LeBlanc and Eddie Stierle guesting in classics at Ballet Pacifica.

I realized I had completely forgotten about Ballet Pacifica.

I don’t remember where it came from but this Galleycat post about self-publishing is interesting.

I emailed myself a “Shit [person type, plural] Say” video for the last time, probably; and a Dance Magazine feature about real-life couples who perform together.

On Wednesday, there was an impromptu memorial Soul Train line in Wicker Park, in memory of the show’s creator and host, Don Cornelius, found dead earlier that day. I attended the line and danced down it myself a few times and, on Thursday, emailed myself links to photos and stories about the tribute that I found. Kristie Kahns, whose photos I often publish in Time Out Chicago, posted her images on Facebook here. Chicagoist published a few sepia-toned snaps and a video. The RedEye posted eight pictures. I’m sure there are more; feel free to drop ’em in the comments.

I sent myself this review of Margaret Jenkins Dance Company’s Light Moves, whose Chicago premiere I preview in next week’s Time Out Chicago.

Also of unknown origin but pretty great are these posters of well-known dances from television and film.

I peeped the proposals for the redesign of Navy Pier, thanks to my estimable colleague at Time Out Chicago, Art & Design editor Lauren Weinberg.

And now I have two empty email inboxes. Time for lunch.

Fresh out of the TOC oven: I pick the best and worst of the Sugar Plum Fairy’s assignments.

Noodles at Super Taste Restaurant.

My annual late-summer NYC vaykay was pushed back this year due to an unusually-crazy late-summer. A good friend was celebrating her thirtieth and I was long overdue for a visit so off we went. Thursday ruled — I got my Quickly cakes and Super Taste hand-pulled noodles right off the bat — but Friday got off to a rough start as I was robbed by a pickpocket after midnight, who took me for a wad of cash, a monthly MetroCard, and my long-in-the-tooth-but-mightily-beloved G1. Much of the following day was spent with the thorough, kind, and accomodating Detective Young of New York’s 9th Precinct (a tip of the hat to you, sir!). Then, blah blah cancel blah suspend blah yadda claim claim yadda blah please hold, etc. Not the vacation-starter I had in mind.

I saw Temporary Distortion’s fun-to-say, less-to-watch Americana Kamikaze at PS 122, wishing most of the time the narrative and sequencing were as interesting as the production and set design (I want to see it again, exactly the same except with a different script). I saw the new David Hockney paintings at PaceWildenstein, which I tweeted as “Jim Woodring landscapes under Van Gogh skies in Paschke colors” and still feel that’s the best way to describe them, besides almost-overwhelmingly absorbing and inductive of an indescribable joy at the journey of existence.

David Hockney: Paintings 2006-2009 at PaceWildenstein Gallery, New York.

Bill Viola’s Bodies of Light show at James Cohan was also gorgeous and firmed up my goal of being more familiar with his ouevre — with screen resolution, color saturation and flexibility being where they are, technology is inventing an ever-more-perfect palette for his work. A few other shows in the ‘hood caught my eye as well, although I wasn’t overly ambitious on the art-scoping this time around. Walked the High Line from bottom to top — loved it — and ate delicious meals with some of my favorite people in the whole world.

Just before leaving, we were very fortunate to catch wind of, research, and score tickets to Taylor Mac’s The Lily’s Revenge at HERE. Of its many directors was Faye Driscoll, in charge of the dance-based third of its five acts — whiffs of her style as a choreographer for the stage were visible in a “dream ballet” the main characters’ Doppelgängers enact during the nearly-five-hour extravaganza, but more interesting was how she handled the integration of a movement-based subsection into a universe that also includes film, cabaret, musical theater, Midsummer-esque iambic pentameter, high drag, low drag and no drag. If you’re in or near the city between now and November 22, believe the hype and get a ticket.

Back to work.

Hey there, dear readers: Things are going to be quiet at trailerpilot for another day or two while some exciting changes sort out. Today was my first visit to the offices of Time Out Chicago, where I’m crossfading with Asimina Chremos as Dance Editor over the next couple of issues. Asimina has done incredible work with the section since the magazine was launched here in early 2005 — it’s an honor to be stepping into her shoes. If you’re not already subscribed to TOC then now is a perfect time to get started — it ain’t like it’ll cost you much.

Stay close, lovelies — I’m looking forward to processing Hedwig Dances’ very strong triple bill at Links Hall Sunday and another Salon NOTEBOOK is just around the corner. If you’re around this weekend, do yourself a favor and drop on into DanceChance: Redux Friday or Saturday, October 30 and 31 at 8:00pm. Forty-eight [48(!)] choreographers have shown work in less than a year and a half of DanceWorks Chicago‘s emerging dancemakers’ lottery and, for two nights at Northeastern Illinois University’s Fine Arts Auditorium (FA-158), six of them will have an opportunity to present refined and developed versions of their original creations. Tickets are $20, but you can easily slice that in half by calling the NEIU box office at (773) 442-4636 and whispering ten dollars into the phone. Online purchases were said to be available through tickets.com, but as of this writing DC:R doesn’t seem to be in the system (there’s no penalty for purchasing at the door, though, so stay calm). If you happen to be enrolled, faculty or staff at NEIU then your ticket is $FREE.99 –  come in costume on Saturday and pay only 8 bucks!

Works being shown are by Andrea Deline, Jamie Salas, Matt Pardo, Autumn Eckman and Brian Gephart. Friday night, a post-show discussion will be moderated by the lovely and lively Gail Kalver, interim Executive Director at River North Chicago Dance Company; Saturday’s discussion is being helmed by yours truly. Come on out and, if we haven’t met, by all means say hi.

Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak in Stamina of Curiosity. Photo by William Frederking.

I gave myself a pat on the back for surviving the first four days of this month, but the action just won’t let up (in the best way). I’ve already told you a thing or two about Lucky Plush Productions and Hedwig Dances‘ engagements this weekend, both of which I’m checking out after a music doubleheader Wednesday of Dead Man’s Bones [Ryan Gosling (yes, that one) and Zach Shields' band] and my pop obsession of 2009, La Roux. Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago is decidedly not messing around with their fall Harris program, whose tentpole is the world premiere of Rennie Harris‘ “I Want You” but also includes a horn o’ beyond-plenty o’ new works (by Autumn Eckman, with musicians Dan Myers and John Ovnik, and Lindsey Leduc Brenner) and repertory faves. I had such a lovely time in Madison last weekend I’m going back to Wisco this Saturday for Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak’s Stamina of Curiosity: Our Strange Elevations at Alverno Presents in Milwaukee. Previous presentations from the Stamina series — three of which I danced in — have built upon/recontextualized their predecessors the way a grandmother can transfix her children’s children with the same story time and time again. How Shanahan’s research will play out on a large proscenium stage like the Pitman Theatre can’t be guessed, but you can count on every facet of the experience figuring into the ensemble’s performance.

Giordano dancers Craig Kaufman and Meredith Schultz in "Gravity." Photo by Kam Hobbs.

Now, I realize it isn’t everyone’s job to attend a performance every night of the week, but there are magical things happening in this neck of the woods and you owe it to yourself to check out at least one of them.

In today’s Windy City Times I run down what Hedwig Dances, Lucky Plush Productions and River North Chicago Dance Company have planned for their birthdays, as well as The Moving Architects’ upcoming show and other hap’nins.

In lieu of time I don’t have to follow-up in detail on shows I’ve previewed over the past few weeks, here’s a grab-bag of impressions and memorable moments of the fall season thus far:

Miami City Ballet’s Chicago debut was, overall, deserving of the fawning praise it received from the Tribune and Sun-Times. “Symphony in Three Movements,” first on the bill, wasn’t trumped by anything that followed but was alone worth the price of admission. Bart Cook and Maria Calegari’s staging thrust all the important information into the foreground and all six soloists embodied their roles clearly and confidently. My most snobbish and nit-picking side comes out when watching Balanchine abstracts, and still nothing about MCB’s interpretation of one of my favorites touched a nerve. The pas de deux, danced by Jennifer Carlynn Kronenberg and Carlos Miguel Guerra, and first movement especially won me over with their purity of delivery and disciplined service of the ballet’s intricate spatial and musical geometries. In the second act, “Valse Fantaisie 1953″ fared better than did the Black Swan grand pas, whose Mary Carmen Catoya failed to suggest the duet’s narrative crux. The swift withdrawal of Odile’s hand from Siegfried’s kiss should freeze blood in the vein — Catoya merely pulled it away with no more attention than was paid to her glissades précipités. Rolando Sarabia, however, was powerful and tastefully-restrained in the best Cuban tradition. As for “In the Upper Room,” I’m — sorry — not in the camp that believes Twyla Tharp to be a genius. The “bomb squad” duo was danced to perfection and the energy was kept high enough to keep me engaged, but Tharp’s kitchen-sink vocabulary and forced casualness have always kept me from being swept off my feet the way a piece of that length wagers I will. Still, I hadn’t seen world-class ballet dancing in a long time — I hope Villella is already planning MCB’s next Chicago visit.

Last Friday, The Seldoms held a brief, site-specific triple bill inside the main gallery at the Loyola University Museum of Art. Paige Cunningham’s duet “Inside the House of Simon,” danced by Philip Elson and Amanda McAlister and inspired by the paintings of Simon Gouverneur, ran Merce (no relation) Cunningham’s compositional procedures and forms through a poetic, acceleratory engine to an original score by Jason Geistweidt and the IAM team at Columbia College. McAlister and Elson also created original works, “Numeral Dualities” and “Wen,” respectively, that were a bit more green but considered and open. I appreciated Christina Gonzalez-Gillett and Bruce Ortiz’ centrifugal use of the room in “Dualities” — however expansive, they shared a low-frequency hostility that made the gallery feel like a cell. Diametrically opposite was Elson’s piece, which had three dancers (Damon Green, Cara Sabin and Trevor Szuba-Schneider) running, diving and carving up the space as though it were an Alpine meadow. Afterward, the audience leapt into a huge spread of tempera paints and paper and weapons-grade cocktails from a Violet Hour skeleton crew — it was a great event.

The previous Friday, during Links Hall’s 30-hour 30th anniversary celebration, I was able to swing by Jyl Fehrenkamp’s special late-night Poonie’s Cabaret. Darrell Jones premiered Bootsy, a lover spurned in a ski mask, blonde fall and combat shitkickers whose gut-wrenching solo put my heart in my throat. Tila Von Twirl classed through a burlesque routine historically-accurate enough to make me feel like I was on the set of Mad Men, Suzy Grant gave a James Brown-inspired drag king number a fierce twist ending, and Jessica Hudson read verbatim from her Judy Blume-branded grade-school diary until I damn near pissed my pants.

After interviewing her for Flavorwire, Nora Chipaumire’s gukuruhundi at the MCA was far more abstract and suggestive than the aggressive political statement I was expecting. Still, the sensory journey she and Thomas Mapfumo and the Blacks Unlimited guide the audience through speaks clearly enough. Perhaps the biggest surprise was how major a narrative role the lighting design plays in this work: loaded with tech cues, gukuruhundi uses bulbs as everything from prison doors to assault rifles to an African dawn. Projected animations created for the piece, by Joelle Dietrick and Romain Tardy, were transfixing.

October 4 I attended Epiphany Dance Experiment’s evening dedicated to the interplay between dance and sound; “Alegrias” and “Notes From a Bottle,” performed by dancer Wendy Clinard and musicians Las Guitarras de España, was a diptych of flamenco-inspired solos that both looked and sounded gorgeous in the cavernous space and on its resonant wooden floor. Synapse Arts Collective brought an excerpt from Stridulate, which I loved, that included two new performers (Charlie Univerz and Angela Watkins) in a roaming, migratory score, Cindy Brandle Dance Company performed the kind quintet it contributed to this year’s Other Dance Festival and Heather Hartley, in collaboration with Basil Abbott, Sherry Antonini, Casey Murtaugh, Helen Lee and Erica Mott premiered “O My Innocents,” a transporting, ritualisitic piece that began as a procession and spread out into a delta of penance and ablution.

I can’t really be objective about Luna Negra Dance Theater, who I saw perform Saturday — I’m a regular teacher of its company class — but they looked great last Saturday at the Harris on a triple bill marking their tenth anniversary. I was especially grateful to see Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s “Nube Blanco” again — nothing of this most recent performance made me feel like taking back any of the gushing praise I slathered upon its world premiere last March.

Finally, this past Sunday I caught up with an old friend at Pam Ann’s Harris show. Caroline Reid’s other character Lily is hardly funny and the show was an indulgent two hours with no intermission, but the first, ad-libbed half was hysterical and her ceaseless stoking of Southwest Airlines’ employees’ presumed inferiority complex (“Do you ever dream of flying over water? Do you own a passport? What’s that place you fly out of here, your hub — it’s a shed in a car park, isn’t it?”) had the largely-industry audience — and the two of us — in stitches.

Hedwig Dances on set for Arch of Repose.

Sarah Best and Hedwig Dances’ Jan Bartoszek have been putting together a two-night festival at the Chicago Cultural Center for some time now (the last time I attended I was turned on to Heddy Maalem, whose company performed at the MCA the following season). Dance for the Camera 2009 kicks off at 6:00pm this Tuesday, October 13 with a collection including a film by Alla Kovgan and David Hinton featuring Nora Chipaumire, tech-savvy and sexy Australians Chunky Move, and Belgium’s Cel Crabeels. Wednesday, same time and place, Lucia Mauro will discuss the form and process with Bartoszek, who will share an advance peek at her adaptation of “Night Blooming Jasmine” for the silver screen, Arch of Repose.

Also tomorrow and also at 6:00pm (ack!), the Museum of Contemporary Art’s excellent fall festival of dance films aligning with their stage season (Kovgan and Hinton’s is in rotation, as well as Alain Buffard’s on Anna Halprin) will have one of its key events, a screening of Patrick Bensard’s hour-long documentary on Lucinda Childs, introduced by Childs herself.

Both events are free (the latter with museum admission). It’s a little cruel to have to choose, but the good news is you can’t go wrong either way.