Jerome Robbins on Broadway: 1944–1951

Jerome Robbins’ surpassing of de Mille as the primary and most influential choreographer of his period is acknowledged. His training with Gluck Sandor and actors from the Group Theatre exposed him to Constantin Stanislavski’s early acting methods and his creative years at Camp Tamiment honed a brand of humor that he would use throughout his Broadway career. I consider Robbins first musical, On the Town (1944), developed from his ballet Fancy Free (1944), in the context of de Mille’s Broadway success and argue that he was at first imitative of her but ultimately found his voice and surpassed her in terms of success and output. The chapter includes analysis of selected Robbins’ choreography in what I consider the first phase of his Broadway career: On the Town (1944), Billion Dollar Baby (1945), High Button Shoes (1947), Look, Ma, I’m Dancin’! (1948), Miss Liberty (1949), Call Me Madam (1950), and The King and I (1951). I explore how Robbins developed a system for creating dance in musicals that employed the early acting techniques of Constantin Stanislavski as well as Lee Strasberg’s Method Acting. Both techniques embraced theatrical realism and informed Robbins’ creation of dances that were seamlessly embedded into musical theater librettos. His meticulous attention to the where, when, and why of his dance creations and his comic sensibility established a model for the generations of choreographers that followed him.

Pengungkapan Diri Anak Tunarungu dalam Kelompok Teater Tujuh di Jakarta

Human beings are social beings that coexist. Ideas or a message to others are conveyed through communication. In performing communication, a hearing sense is needed to hear the message delivered.Good hearing makes it easier for the creation of a meaning by a person. Things are different when one's condition cannot hear or be deaf. Disturbances on hearing experienced by deaf children will impact verbal abilities so that they use sign language and body language to communicate. Deaf children experience problems of their own especially on communication, it impacts their confidence and tends to shut down. Self-disclosure required deaf children who applied when they were in a social setting. The author conducts research relating to the self-disclosure of deaf children in the group Theatre Seven in Jakarta. The theory the author uses is group communication theory and self-disclosure theory. The author uses a qualitative research approach and case study research method. In this study the author selected five informants for information and data with regard to research topics. The criteria chosen from the author were deaf children in the 8-12-year-old group of Theatre Seven. The results show that there was a self-disclosure of deaf children in the group Theatre Seven. That is confidence, believing in others, sharing information about him or her to others such as experience, feelings, and ideas as well as there is the effectiveness of communication with Indonesia Sign Language (Bisindo) and making communication more efficient. Manusia merupakan makhluk sosial yang hidup berdampingan. Gagasan atau suatu pesan kepada orang lain disampaikan melalui komunikasi. Dalam melakukan komunikasi, indera pendengaran dibutuhkan untuk mendengar pesan yang disampaikan. Pendengaran yang baik memudahkan terciptanya suatu makna oleh seseorang. Hal berbeda terjadi bila kondisi seseorang tidak dapat mendengar atau tunarungu. Gangguan pada pendengaran yang dialami anak tunarungu akan berdampak pada kemampuan verbal sehingga mereka menggunakan bahasa isyarat dan bahasa tubuh untuk berkomunikasi. Anak tunarungu mengalami masalah tersendiri terutama pada komunikasi. Hal tersebut berdampak pada kepercayaan diri mereka dan kecenderungan menutup diri. Pengungkapan diri diperlukan anak-anak tunarungu ketika mereka berada di lingkungan sosial. Penulis melakukan penelitian yang berkaitan dengan pengungkapan diri anak tunarungu dalam kelompok Teater Tujuh di Jakarta. Teori yang digunakan penulis adalah teori komunikasi kelompok dan teori pengungkapan diri. Penulis menggunakan pendekatan penelitian kualitatif dan metode penelitian studi kasus. Dalam penelitian ini, penulis memilih lima informan untuk mendapatkan informasi dan data yang berkaitan dengan topik penelitian. Kriteria yang dipilih dari penulis adalah anak tunarungu dalam Kelompok Teater Tujuh yang berusia 8-12 tahun. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa terjadi pengungkapan diri anak tunarungu dalam kelompok Teater Tujuh yaitu dengan percaya diri, percaya dengan orang lain, berbagi informasi mengenai dirinya kepada orang lain seperti pengalaman, perasaan dan ide. Selain itu, terdapat efektifitas komunikasi dengan Bahasa Isyarat Indonesia (Bisindo) dan membuat komunikasi menjadi efisien.

Odets, Clifford (1906–1963)

One of the foremost American playwrights of the first half of the twentieth century, Clifford Odets is best known for his social realist plays and screenplays, of which Waiting for Lefty (1935), Awake and Sing! (1935), Golden Boy (1937), and Rocket to the Moon (1938) have attained canonical status. A committed leftist and briefly a member of the Communist Party, his meteoric trajectory from actor in the experimental Group Theatre in New York to Hollywood screenwriter has been narrated, first by Harold Clurman in The Fervent Years and then by generations of subsequent critics and biographers, as the tragedy of a tormented and politically ambivalent visionary who struggled to reconcile his radical beliefs with the rapid celebrity that took him to Hollywood. During his later life, his reputation was tainted as a result of his voluntary if ambivalent testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the McCarthy inquisitions. Odets’ importance to theatrical modernism rests on his first play, Waiting for Lefty, which enacted the cultural politics of the Popular Front by absorbing the militancy of agitprop in the social humanism of dramatic realism.

Group Theatre (1931–41)

Founded in 1931 by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, and Lee Strasberg, the Group Theatre was conceived as a company dedicated to staging socially relevant plays, with a permanent ensemble of actors trained in a new, shared technique. Its legacy can be located in the contributions it made to modern American drama, particularly through the works of member-playwright Clifford Odets, and through its practice of the Stanislavsky System, which revolutionized American acting, developing into a psychologically realistic approach widely known as "the Method."

Workers’ Theater Movement

The Workers’ Theatre Movement (WTM) was an international project, largely promoted by the Workers International Relief, to conjoin left militant radical theaters during the period of Stalin’s "Third Period" militant class struggle; it was also briefly the name of a workers’ troupe in London. The historical shape of the WTM follows the ideological progress of the Communist International (Comintern), from the hard left turn in 1929 to the collaborative politics of the Popular Front in 1933–1934. As proposed by its ideological leaders and principal activists, the Workers’ Theatre Movement was evidence of the transnational emergence of a proletarian culture derived from the universal modernity of industrialism. In practice, the movement was an aggregate of practices and theories drawn into the semblance of an organization through the cultural apparatus of the Comintern. The Workers’ Theatre Movement was both a loose international alliance and a range of local experiences that varied greatly. In metropolitan centers, the workers’ troupes occupied a gradient ranging from militant street theaters, such as Ewan MacColl’s Red Megaphone in Birmingham, UK and the Shock Troupe of the Workers’ Laboratory Theatre in New York, to the radical edges of the professional theater, such as the Group Theatre in New York and Unity Theatre in London. Outside of major theatrical centres, WTM troupes were more often organized by radical unions, or, as in the case of the Toronto Workers’ Experimental Theatre, by Communist Party cultural clubs.