Taking the Reins

The genesis of the present-day director-choreographer, starting with de Mille’s role as director-choreographer on Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ill-fated Allegro (1947), is explored. How she employed dance as a narrative and metaphorical device in support of the allegorical structure of the libretto, and how her artistic vision conflicted with her collaborators is investigated. De Mille’s directorial oeuvre is considered in the context of the male-dominated world of Broadway. Robbins’ ascendance as the most influential director-choreographer of twentieth-century musical theater is examined in a close analysis of his choreography for and direction of Pajama Game (1954 [co-directed with George Abbott, co-choreographer Bob Fosse]), Peter Pan (1954), Bells Are Ringing (1956 [in which he collaborated with Bob Fosse]), Gypsy (1959), and Fiddler on the Roof (1964). West Side Story (1957) will be discussed here as an anomaly in Robbins’ musical theater career. I argue that Robbins’ interest in movement innovation in relation to his choreography for the “Jets” in West Side Story (1957) differs from his previous musical theater works. In addition, I will examine Robbins’ West Side Story collaboration with co-choreographer Peter Gennaro.

Second-Hand Risk Health Tragedies and Human Right Violations due to Ethanol Consumption. Biochemical basis for metabolic and behavioral Tragedies due to Ethanol Consumption

Everywhere a nonsmoker who is an alcohol consumer, complains of secondhand smoke, without being aware of second-hand risk health tragedies and human rights violations provoked by alcohol consumption. Here we analyze the concept, mainly unexplored, of dramatic adverse health effects and of human rights violations against third parties generated for alcohol consumption by others; and also, the harm due to the chemical transient prefrontal lobotomy generated by alcohol consumption. Alcohol consumption has been a part of the everyday human diet for centuries, especially because of the fact that alcoholic beverages are a safe means of hydration wherever clear water has not been available [1]. Old patients could, simultaneously be part of the alcohol consumers and/or secondhand victims. Before deciding to analyze the geriatric problems, we propose the allegorical model, based on Scott, Ellison, and Sinclair, as it was published in Nature Aging, in July 2021. We divide the theoretical analysis with four fundamental alternatives [2]: The extension of life (Struldbrug case). In Jonathan Swift's 1726 novel “Gulliver's Travels”, the struldbrugs were humans born apparently normal. The Struldbruggs, however immortal however they age normally, live in continuously deteriorating health. This takes us to the philosophical alternative of: “living or lasting” [2]. To lower morbidity (Dorian Gray case). Narratively, in “The Picture of Dorian Gray” a philosophical novel by Oscar Wilde, Dorian Gray owns a portrait of himself and while the picture ages, Dorian Gray does not change, maintaining his health and appearance until death [2]. Slowing aging (Peter Pan case), In this extreme case, where aging is not just slowed but canceled, the mortality and the health become independent of the age, and thus the individual is ‘forever young’. This constitutes the ‘Peter Pan’ case, after the play and novel about a boy who never grows old. This closely corresponds to the Hypocaloric diet claiming that it slows aging [2]. To reverse aging physical damage is repaired instead of slowed. This is a close analogy to the “Theseus Boat” as well as the regeneration of salamanders and lizards and transplants from donors. Desiderative, this is the future of organoids and the engineering of the pluripotent cell [2].

Theater for Children and Young People

The relationship between theater and children has a long and evolving history, mirroring the evolving conceptualization of childhood itself. Children have featured as performers, or had a presence within audiences, far earlier than the emergence of anything specifically labeled as theater for children. For much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, whether a performance was for children was rarely clearly delineated. For example, while J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan is now considered the most famous single piece of “theater for children” it is contested as to whether it was specifically intended for children when first performed in 1904. In the modern guise of theater for children (often also titled theater for young audiences, or TYA), a central tension exists, echoing that in literature for children, in the work being made for children, but created, performed, and written by adults. Among other elements, this often results in theater for children having a close educational ethos or moralistic focus, reflecting and reinforcing adult conceptualization of childhood and adult/child social relationships. Over the last several decades, however, theater for children and young people has entered a period of increased vitality in which some of these relationships have started to change. This vitality is manifested in professionalization, the growth of festivals, dedicated venues, and the increased commitment of innovative artists who have sought to develop the practice in new directions, including through participatory and applied theater practices that seek to give voice to and explore the lived experiences of young people. Accompanying these developments, the field has also received far greater critical and scholarly attention in the last several decades. Historically the study of theater for children has struggled to assert a strong independent identity, often subsumed into literary studies. What is emerging today, however, is something much broader and more vibrant, often interdisciplinary and embracing performance and literature studies, education and child development, psychology and politics. It engages with the core issues of our times, including a growing focus on inclusivity, whether in relation to race, sexuality, or disability. Nonetheless, theater for children has much work to do to decolonize and decenter itself from white and Western dominances. There is also a strong thread of research interest in audiences, which seeks to understand children’s lived experiences of theater and in creative and participatory research methodologies. Finally, and interconnecting all these elements, theater for children is often political and frequently deeply ambitious, driven by a strong sense of idealism that is perhaps childlike in the very best of senses.

And did those hooves: Pan and the Edwardians

<p>A surprisingly high number of the novels, short stories and plays produced in Britain during the Edwardian era (defined in the terms of this thesis as the period of time between 1900 and the beginning of World War One) use the Grecian deity Pan, god of shepherds, as a literary motif. Writers as diverse as Somerset Maugham, E.M. Forster, Frances Hodgson Burnett and G.K. Chesterton made Pan a fictional character or alluded to the god of shepherds in more subtle ways. The mystery of why the Edwardians used an ancient Greek god as a symbol requires a profound interrogation of the early twentieth century British soul. The Edwardian era was a narrow corridor of time between the Victorian age and the birth of modernism with the First World War, a period characterised by vast social and political transition, as a generation began to comprehend change they equally feared and desired. Pan was an equivocal figure: easily portrayed as satanic due to his horns and goatish nature, but as the kindly god of shepherds, also a Christ-like figure. Such ambiguity made Pan an ideal symbol for an age unsure of itself and its future. Writers like Maugham and Machen, afraid of social and sexual revolution, portrayed Pan as diabolical, a tempter and a rapist. E.M. Forster, a homosexual man hopeful about the possibility of change, made Pan a terrifying but ultimately liberating figure for those ready to accept the freedom he represented. Kenneth Grahame, desiring the return of a Luddite, Arcadian past that had never truly existed, wrote of Pan as Jesus on the riverbank, sheltering the lost and giving mystic visions to the worthy. Pan represented a simultaneous craving in the Edwardians to flee to the past and to embrace the future, an idealism of the primitive coupled with hope for the future. What he also symbolized was anxiety about the future and the desire to not return to the horrors of the past, fears of the primitive suggested in the nightmarish atavism of Saki’s “The Music on the Hill” and the fears of what society might become expressed in Forster’s “The Machine Stops”. The Edwardian Pan eventually reached its culmination in J.M. Barrie’s twentieth-century fairy tale Peter Pan, in which the eponymous character, seeming at first so different from the ancient Greek mythological figure, became an embodiment of everything the Edwardian Pan phenomenon represented. With the nightmarish yet fascinating figure of Peter Pan, the Edwardians had created a new Pan, reborn for their age. With the beginning of World War One, the Pan figure would begin to fade into insignificance, with only one major work later published which could justifiably be called part of the phenomenon; Lord Dunsany’s The Blessing of Pan, a fitting elegy for the Edwardian Age.</p>

And did those hooves: Pan and the Edwardians

<p>A surprisingly high number of the novels, short stories and plays produced in Britain during the Edwardian era (defined in the terms of this thesis as the period of time between 1900 and the beginning of World War One) use the Grecian deity Pan, god of shepherds, as a literary motif. Writers as diverse as Somerset Maugham, E.M. Forster, Frances Hodgson Burnett and G.K. Chesterton made Pan a fictional character or alluded to the god of shepherds in more subtle ways. The mystery of why the Edwardians used an ancient Greek god as a symbol requires a profound interrogation of the early twentieth century British soul. The Edwardian era was a narrow corridor of time between the Victorian age and the birth of modernism with the First World War, a period characterised by vast social and political transition, as a generation began to comprehend change they equally feared and desired. Pan was an equivocal figure: easily portrayed as satanic due to his horns and goatish nature, but as the kindly god of shepherds, also a Christ-like figure. Such ambiguity made Pan an ideal symbol for an age unsure of itself and its future. Writers like Maugham and Machen, afraid of social and sexual revolution, portrayed Pan as diabolical, a tempter and a rapist. E.M. Forster, a homosexual man hopeful about the possibility of change, made Pan a terrifying but ultimately liberating figure for those ready to accept the freedom he represented. Kenneth Grahame, desiring the return of a Luddite, Arcadian past that had never truly existed, wrote of Pan as Jesus on the riverbank, sheltering the lost and giving mystic visions to the worthy. Pan represented a simultaneous craving in the Edwardians to flee to the past and to embrace the future, an idealism of the primitive coupled with hope for the future. What he also symbolized was anxiety about the future and the desire to not return to the horrors of the past, fears of the primitive suggested in the nightmarish atavism of Saki’s “The Music on the Hill” and the fears of what society might become expressed in Forster’s “The Machine Stops”. The Edwardian Pan eventually reached its culmination in J.M. Barrie’s twentieth-century fairy tale Peter Pan, in which the eponymous character, seeming at first so different from the ancient Greek mythological figure, became an embodiment of everything the Edwardian Pan phenomenon represented. With the nightmarish yet fascinating figure of Peter Pan, the Edwardians had created a new Pan, reborn for their age. With the beginning of World War One, the Pan figure would begin to fade into insignificance, with only one major work later published which could justifiably be called part of the phenomenon; Lord Dunsany’s The Blessing of Pan, a fitting elegy for the Edwardian Age.</p>

Faces of the Captives: Aesthetic Distance and Emotional Absorption in Young Children's Engagement with Theatre

<p>When Captain Hook has the lost boys tied up on his ship he cannot recognise that the sparkle on the ‘faces of the captives’ is the thrill of mimesis. It has been suggested that if young children cannot distinguish between reality and illusion then instead of suspending disbelief in the stage world, they will actually believe and therefore experience a dangerous level of emotional absorption. Using Peter Pan as a frame of reference, this thesis examines responses to three contemporary theatre works, Capital E National Theatre for Children’s Songs of the Sea and Boxes and Scottish company Catherine Wheels’ White to challenge the idea that aesthetic distance provides a necessary protective function. Instead, it will be argued that the imagination, empathy and emotion contagion provide the conditions in which children can capably enter the aesthetic space of fictional worlds on stage.</p>

Faces of the Captives: Aesthetic Distance and Emotional Absorption in Young Children's Engagement with Theatre

<p>When Captain Hook has the lost boys tied up on his ship he cannot recognise that the sparkle on the ‘faces of the captives’ is the thrill of mimesis. It has been suggested that if young children cannot distinguish between reality and illusion then instead of suspending disbelief in the stage world, they will actually believe and therefore experience a dangerous level of emotional absorption. Using Peter Pan as a frame of reference, this thesis examines responses to three contemporary theatre works, Capital E National Theatre for Children’s Songs of the Sea and Boxes and Scottish company Catherine Wheels’ White to challenge the idea that aesthetic distance provides a necessary protective function. Instead, it will be argued that the imagination, empathy and emotion contagion provide the conditions in which children can capably enter the aesthetic space of fictional worlds on stage.</p>

Queering “The Children's Movement”

This essay argues that the queer figure of the child that crops up curiously in (post–)Umbrella Movement Hong Kong is a defining political signifier for characterizing the city's youthful protesters and imagining alternative futures for Hong Kong. In many mainland Chinese media outlets, the youthfulness of the Hong Kong demonstrators is often emphasized to critique their fixation on the Western ideology of democracy. For the young resisters and their sympathizers, childishness connotes a different script of identity: it entails a narrative of temporal suspension in the face of assimilation into a Chinese homogeneity. By, for example, comparing the political star Joshua Wong to Peter Pan, who refuses to grow up, or by assigning uniform-wearing grade-school students the role of “the keepers of the Umbrella Movement,” prodemocratic cultural narratives keep alive the possibility of a political alterity that resists the neoliberal, temporal mandates of Hong Kong's government and mainland China. Theorizing that possibility in the context of temporal, queer, children's, and postcolonial studies, this essay contends that the future of resistance in Hong Kong will follow a lateral horizon, a sideways course that will put minor dissenters into new and nonheteropatriarchal relations with the existing order of the city.