Over the past few years, researchers have found that the brain is capable of creating new connections and even new neurons all through life. While some mental processes — like working memory and the ability to quickly solve math problems — clearly deteriorate, others do not. Older people retain their ability to remember emotionally nuanced events. They are able to integrate memories from their left and right hemispheres. Their brains reorganize to help compensate for the effects of aging.
A series of longitudinal studies, begun decades ago, are producing a rosier portrait of life after retirement. These studies don’t portray old age as surrender or even serenity. They portray it as a period of development — and they’re not even talking about über-oldsters jumping out of airplanes.
People are most unhappy in middle age and report being happier as they get older. This could be because as people age they pay less attention to negative emotional stimuli, according to a study by the psychologists Mara Mather, Turhan Canli and others.
Gender roles begin to merge. Many women get more assertive while many men get more emotionally attuned. Personalities often become more vivid as people become more of what they already are. Norma Haan of the University of California, Berkeley, and others conducted a 50-year follow-up of people who had been studied while young and concluded that the subjects had become more outgoing, self-confident and warm with age.
The research paints a comforting picture. And the nicest part is that virtue is rewarded. One of the keys to healthy aging is what George Vaillant of Harvard calls “generativity” — providing for future generations. Seniors who perform service for the young have more positive lives and better marriages than those who don’t. As Vaillant writes in his book “Aging Well,” “Biology flows downhill.” We are naturally inclined to serve those who come after and thrive when performing that role.
The odd thing is that when you turn to political life, we are living in an age of reverse-generativity. Far from serving the young, the old are now taking from them. First, they are taking money. According to Julia Isaacs of the Brookings Institution, the federal government now spends $7 on the elderly for each $1 it spends on children.
Second, they are taking freedom. In 2009, for the first time in American history, every single penny of federal tax revenue went to pay for mandatory spending programs, according to Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute. As more money goes to pay off promises made mostly to the old, the young have less control.
Third, they are taking opportunity. For decades, federal spending has hovered around 20 percent of G.D.P. By 2019, it is forecast to be at 25 percent and rising. The higher tax rates implied by that spending will mean less growth and fewer opportunities. Already, pension costs in many states are squeezing education spending.
In the private sphere, in other words, seniors provide wonderful gifts to their grandchildren, loving attention that will linger in young minds, providing support for decades to come. In the public sphere, they take it away.
-- David Brooks, NYT, 3 February 2010
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Monday, December 21, 2009
WHEN HANGING BALLET SHOES
BY WILHELMINA S. OROZCO
How should we treat an artist-icon whose time is slowly eroding her capacities to perform? How should we make her still be functional and provide good presentations that are worthy of emulation of the younger set?
These are the dilemmas facing any fan of Liza Macuja who just performed her last role as Dulcinea in Don Quixote Liza pirouetted for the last 30 times on stage in perfect shape, form, and flawlessly, not even losing her balance at the end of each step. Is that not an amazing feat, for some in her 45th year.
Yet her performance left me feeling cold, knowing that she is slowly retiring from stage as a ballet dancer and the Philippines shall not have anyone who could equal her performances in many classical pieces that have brought fame to her not only locally but internationally.
And so, with that last performance of Liza, so many things cropped up in my mind. If in Tibet and outlying areas in Nepal, people could live beyond a hundred and yet still carry sacks of rice, or bundles of firewood on their backs, why can’t our inventors research on what could prolong a dancer’s muscles to make it still supple, and her bones strong enough to withstand all types of steps? Why can’t the government pour so much resources on research on how to make the human body almost un-aging so that there would not be so much need for cosmetic surgeries that have only superficially restored the self-esteem or he patients but never their respect for themselves. For how can an artificial reconstruction of the face and the human torso ever be a substitute for natural shape and form?
In our midst though, lots of herbal supplements have been imported promising many uses, among which is to retard aging. That is very good advertising but the efficaciousness of these supplements must withstood the test of time. Or else they could just be products of marketing gimmicks to waylay many gullible and insecure individuals.
Now going back to Liza, of course, she can continue being the impresario of Ballet Manila the productions of which have earned the company a good label of being the only one to produce full classical pieces like Don Q, Carmen, and most recently even Pilipino pieces like Mga Kuwento ni Lola Basyang. She can also conduct classes, deliver talks, write long pieces on dancing and being a dancer as she is now doing and which I find truly admirable as many dancers are not inclined to verbalize, much more so write about their lives. Maybe the discipline that Liza got in Russia had introduced her to the idea that an artist has to be compleat – not just honed in one skill.
However, I remember Margot Fonteyn performing Romeo and Juliet or was it Swan Lake at age 65 here in the country and her body was as light and supple as if she were only aged 28 or so. She should actually reveal her secrets for having done that feat and so impress to other dancers that age is not really a liability, so long as one is focused on her or his career.
Well, actually, even actors and actresses, more so the latter suffer from social stigma once they reach 40 and above. The roles they get are either mother, witch, or some other second-place role that could be forgettable unless the scriptwriter and director are kind enough to give a better depiction, showing more challenging scenes for them to express their skills. Actors are much more lucky as there is a social notion that they become like wine that age as the years go by. Hence, we have Eddie Garcia who is as busy as ever performing different kinds of aging men-roles, Dr. ___________, stage director whose dignified looks earn him highly regarded roles; and others, like Dante Rivero and even those legislator ex-actors who are able to wangle roles in many films showcasing their physique and ability to ride horses with agility.
But Gloria Romero suffered much as her roles are sometimes pathetic, that of being a ghost grandmother visiting an antique house; one time she was even a witch, and another time, a crazy woman amidst a family setting. Nova Villa gets forgettable roles on TV, while Dina Bonnevie hardly appears nowadays which is unfair as she is one of the intelligent actresses in town.
Anyway, Liza has been able to carve her own niche, not only in ballet, with her own studio and auditorium, but also raise the level of appreciation of the art amongst the Filipino people who are used to the regular predictable fares on TV. She has been able to get thousands of audience for her shows, mostly students who could be required to write a review for their classes.
Liza is also artistic director and producer of her many shows thus she is able to put her own stamp on her productions which after all are characterized by mostly flawless steps and complete with emotional gut-wrenching scenes most of the time. By the way, her 25th anniversary was simply unbeatable as she was able to essay excerpts from many productions including those seemingly endless pirouetting from right to left stage, and/or spinning in one place as if it were the most natural thing for a dancer to do.
Nonetheless, we hope that Liza could bring us another “Liza Macuja” look-alike approximating her perfect performances, and thus making the Filipino people continue to appreciate the art without end. For after all the art of dancing should not end at all when the ballet shoes are hanged.
(LATEST NEWS: LIZA IS TAKING ON A MOTHER ROLE IN HER LATEST BALLET PRODUCTION. SIGH, WE CAN REST ASSURED THAT WE CAN STILL VIEW HER PERFORM.)
PHOTO BY JIM KELLY
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
DANCING ICON OF THE WORLD
By Wilhelmina S. Orozco
Dancing for 25 years is no joke especially when it is ballet. Lisa Macuja-Elizalde the prima ballerina and creator of Ballet Manila (BM) celebrated her anniversary with a grand program showcasing the highlights of her ballet dancing from year 1984 when she graduated from the Russian Ballet Academy to the present.
Way back in the 70’s classical ballet was considered dance for the elite, as lessons were expensive and most of the students belonged to the middle and upper classes. Moreover, it was regarded as colonial since its roots are European, with the costumes very much un-Filipino, the tutus showing the legs, albeit stockinged, and the arms of female dancers in open display. Yet ballet was viewed as a high form of dance, compared to the rock and roll and boogie-woogie steps in vogue then. It was also considered a great ambition of dancers to study ballet in foreign countries, or to join international companies as the audience was not readily available then.
But today, through the efforts of Lisa, ballet has been introduced to the youth, especially students from public schools who are given free entrance most of the time or reduced rates of tickets in order to savor a story that has literary qualities through dance and music, and with a story.
Lisa’s story of 25 years is unfolded through screen projections of her pictures and videos together with her family, beginning with her as a toddler and then being trained to dance ballet here and in Russia. The images are well designed, not cut-and-dried projection but rather dancing on screen as well, dissolving and shifting positions as they contain Lisa dancing different characters upon her graduation from the famous Leningrad’s Vaganova Choreographic Institute in famous plays like The Nutcracker Suite, Don Quixote, and Carmen, among others, then segueing to her onstage dancing excerpts from them. Then when Lisa is on stage, the screen turns into scenes of nature, snowflakes falling on the mountains, a lake with moving swans, silhouetted trees where red petals fall, or an English scenery of that Balcony in Romeo and Juliet. Other projections include only the black and white images of pointed toes shifting from left to right, upper and lower screens.
What made ballet an easy field for Lisa is her what she calls her “deep love for the classics.” The classics would be those stories that contain complicated plots and relationships among characters which require intelligent reading as well. Translated as dance libretto, these classics would prove to be especially difficult, because instead of words, the ideas in them have to be translated physically, through dance, costumes, sets, and music – in other words, a realization of the stories onstage.
How did Lisa make ballet an appreciated art in the country? In the 80’s she dreamed of popularizing ballet, of having a wider audience. She wanted “visibility in media.” So she immersed herself in various public appearances -on TV shows, pop concerts and lately even malls. She even appeared in a print ad showing her leaping with a split. She also danced ballet to pop tunes familiar to the ears of the TV audience thus imprinting her presence, and of course her personality in their minds. Her winning ways – not looking tired after dancing, of always smiling and not showing any airs at all of being in a high class dance field, captured the hearts and minds of the public who then gathered that ballet is after all an easy and a happy field, and therefore worthwhile watching.
Eventually, she grew tired of these kinds of public exposure and so turned to more serious endeavors, that of putting up a ballet studio and a theatre where she could present the plays that she wants to be produced.
Perfect form
As a dancer, Lisa exhibits that perfect form and exact timing of steps that are sometimes too unbelievable for a petite female dancer to possess. Her movements shift without jagged lines, whether starting on toes, coming down on the floor and then leaping up to the arms of a male dancer. In one adagio, she is carried on the shoulders of one who then twirls her from his left to right shoulders and back as if she were just a plate being shifted around. In another scene she is brought up by male dancers on their shoulders and then in another, she reaches to her lover in the scene tumbling down and then with her legs on air they move together to hint at lovemaking. The most breathtaking steps that she takes are those pirouettes done 8 to 30 times on toes and even moving from one end of the stage to the other without her showing any ounce of dizziness. (These spinning steps earned her lots of applause from the audience of that presentation on October 11, 2009) In all these, Lisa appears like a feather leaping, flying, soaring, and being held by sensitive hands. Her toes falling on the floor is hardly heard nor does it create noise that could distract the attention of the audience from the story of the dance.
Now what makes Lisa a consummate artist? One can glean this from the small steps and movements that she takes to those of leaps and bounces as she dances with a male dancer or several groups. Lisa’s Carmen is full of love and sensuality, apart from her wearing a black negligee with her half-bare lover. The twist of her hip to the left indicates her sexy bearing hinting at her profession as a prostitute. In her solo dancing of an Original Pilipino Music or OPM, Lisa is able to show the angst, the hankering for involvement to the tune of “Somewhere in Time” played on the violin by Robert Atchison. She projects her desire for company in the way she wraps her arms around her body and then by the way her arms would flail in the air a few times revealing the emptiness of being without her lover yet also bearing that unrequited or requited love. She also projects that hesitancy to ask her absent lover to return in her movements showing one foot stepping forward and then back, and then the motion repeated, as if wanting and not wanting in the song “Sana’y Maulit Muli.” In all her dances, Lisa is able to present the whole gamut of human emotions from happiness (as Odine in Swan Lake), to sadness (OPM songs) to longing (as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet) and even sensual feelings (as Carmen).
Then all the other ingredients of the presentation are well chosen, from the costumes, to the screen settings, and even the souvenir program which contains not only the briefs about the dancers and guest teachers like Tatiana Udalenkova of the Russian Ballet Academy, St. Petersburg, Russia, who has come to the country to give ballet lessons at BM, and Rober Atchison, English violinist who played touching the classical and OPM music to which Lisa danced, Luz Fernandez, the Lola Basyang of radio, Gia Macuja who has acted lead roles of Nala, in The Lion King, and Gigi and Ellen in Miss Saigon, both presented in England, and other individuals who contributed to the success of the presentation. The generous spaces devoted to the artists’ biography, no matter how brief, reflect the high regard of BM to them, an aim that is worthwhile copying by every cultural presentation.
The culminating points of the anniversary show Lisa and her lover in the play, Prinsipe ng Mga Ibon, based on the story by Severino Reyes retold by Christine Bellen, and illustrated by Panch Alcaraz, standing on a box that flies from the stage to the back of the theatre with the song “Lipad” composed by Jesse Lasaten. A little later, she emerges from the same but now dressed all white and coming down as if flying to be with all the dancers on stage. There Lisa draws a standing ovation from the audience who clapped seemingly without end and stopped only when the curtains fell onstage.
Yet, Lisa is also aware of the travails of her profession, where creeping age can cramp the style and eventually deaden the dancer’s artistic aspirations. She gives this reason for being on top of her field: “One of the reasons I was able to maintain my active career in dancing is that I have a very strong constitution. I rarely get sick…get injured. I have maintained my body and a lot of it has to do with the ballet classes I take, and the training I had with the Vaganova method which begins with 1 ½ hours of strong technical combinations and steps.”
Actually her strength and perseverance are extraordinary as exhibited very well when she danced Swan Lake in Cuba after only a week of rehearsal under the direction of Alicia Alonzo. Then, in this particular presentation, she showed great stamina, dancing from scene to scene, changing costumes, getting into the emotional make-up of every character that she is supposed to portray, within 3 hours of the program. Viewing her is being with someone with a great muscle strength, strong respiratory system and a really deep love of dance and theatre, firstly, as an aesthetic endeavor and secondly, as a profession.
The repertoire of Ballet Manila include full length performances of Swan Lake, Don Quixote, The Nutcracker, Giselle, La Bayadere, Romeo and Juliet, Carmen, Le Corsaire, and “contemporary Filipino ballet pieces by some of the country’s most distinguished choreographers.” This makes the assertion of Lisa that Ballet Manila is the only Filipino company that can “capably stage a full classical repertoire in any given concert season.”
Discipline and blessings of having a supportive family and her own company have made Lisa what she is now. Her company has all the necessary facilities needed to support any production, from rehearsal studios, to ballet books and video as well as music library, a warehouse for costumes and equipment, living quarters, and of course, the administrative, logistics and marketing staff. The environment is there for any dancer to make use of to deepen one’s understanding of any role to be played and danced.
In turn Lisa shares her success by giving scholarships, free ballet education to public elementary and high school students under the Ballet Manila School. She also has directed the Artists’ Welfare Project Inc., an NGO that “guarantees welfare benefits to all its artist-members.”
Truly, the country has a gem of a dancer in Lisa, the best that the country has produced in the whole history of dance. She exhibits not only a firm grasp of the ballet techniques but also a deep understanding of the meaning of every story that is presented, every line of a song that accompanies her dance, a real “storyteller on toes,” (as Lisa would say of her company, Ballet Manila). She has shown that the Filipina dancer can excel and even garner international acclaim given proper training and in her case, Russian training, as well as preserving her roots as a Filipina. That ability to put emotions into her dances is a product of her being a “kababayan” as we are known to be sensitive to feelings and thoughts, our own and those of others’. Lisa credits her husband Fred Elizalde of being a strong pillar in her ascent to success as she expressed in her Sunday radio program over DZRH while being interviewed by Ruth Abao, “In fact I would classify my life as a dancer in this way ‘before and after Fred.” The latter has given her his wholehearted and financial support for her to give expression to her dancing talents and abilities as well as her director capabilities. Yet, despite her being onstage most of the time, she remains a devoted mother to their children and a grateful wife which she always showed by thanking Fred who happens to sit among the audience every time she plays.
Osias Barroso, BM Artistic Associate and Ballet Master, says it all, Lisa is the “ ‘Ballerina of the People’ who will dance anywhere as long as there’s a floor for her to dance on.”
Maybe there is really something about dreaming that can make an individual reach the highest of heights of success. Let us add to the accolades, Lisa is also the “Ballet Icon Dancer of the World.”
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By Wilhelmina S. Orozco
Dancing for 25 years is no joke especially when it is ballet. Lisa Macuja-Elizalde the prima ballerina and creator of Ballet Manila (BM) celebrated her anniversary with a grand program showcasing the highlights of her ballet dancing from year 1984 when she graduated from the Russian Ballet Academy to the present.
Way back in the 70’s classical ballet was considered dance for the elite, as lessons were expensive and most of the students belonged to the middle and upper classes. Moreover, it was regarded as colonial since its roots are European, with the costumes very much un-Filipino, the tutus showing the legs, albeit stockinged, and the arms of female dancers in open display. Yet ballet was viewed as a high form of dance, compared to the rock and roll and boogie-woogie steps in vogue then. It was also considered a great ambition of dancers to study ballet in foreign countries, or to join international companies as the audience was not readily available then.
But today, through the efforts of Lisa, ballet has been introduced to the youth, especially students from public schools who are given free entrance most of the time or reduced rates of tickets in order to savor a story that has literary qualities through dance and music, and with a story.
Lisa’s story of 25 years is unfolded through screen projections of her pictures and videos together with her family, beginning with her as a toddler and then being trained to dance ballet here and in Russia. The images are well designed, not cut-and-dried projection but rather dancing on screen as well, dissolving and shifting positions as they contain Lisa dancing different characters upon her graduation from the famous Leningrad’s Vaganova Choreographic Institute in famous plays like The Nutcracker Suite, Don Quixote, and Carmen, among others, then segueing to her onstage dancing excerpts from them. Then when Lisa is on stage, the screen turns into scenes of nature, snowflakes falling on the mountains, a lake with moving swans, silhouetted trees where red petals fall, or an English scenery of that Balcony in Romeo and Juliet. Other projections include only the black and white images of pointed toes shifting from left to right, upper and lower screens.
What made ballet an easy field for Lisa is her what she calls her “deep love for the classics.” The classics would be those stories that contain complicated plots and relationships among characters which require intelligent reading as well. Translated as dance libretto, these classics would prove to be especially difficult, because instead of words, the ideas in them have to be translated physically, through dance, costumes, sets, and music – in other words, a realization of the stories onstage.
How did Lisa make ballet an appreciated art in the country? In the 80’s she dreamed of popularizing ballet, of having a wider audience. She wanted “visibility in media.” So she immersed herself in various public appearances -on TV shows, pop concerts and lately even malls. She even appeared in a print ad showing her leaping with a split. She also danced ballet to pop tunes familiar to the ears of the TV audience thus imprinting her presence, and of course her personality in their minds. Her winning ways – not looking tired after dancing, of always smiling and not showing any airs at all of being in a high class dance field, captured the hearts and minds of the public who then gathered that ballet is after all an easy and a happy field, and therefore worthwhile watching.
Eventually, she grew tired of these kinds of public exposure and so turned to more serious endeavors, that of putting up a ballet studio and a theatre where she could present the plays that she wants to be produced.
Perfect form
As a dancer, Lisa exhibits that perfect form and exact timing of steps that are sometimes too unbelievable for a petite female dancer to possess. Her movements shift without jagged lines, whether starting on toes, coming down on the floor and then leaping up to the arms of a male dancer. In one adagio, she is carried on the shoulders of one who then twirls her from his left to right shoulders and back as if she were just a plate being shifted around. In another scene she is brought up by male dancers on their shoulders and then in another, she reaches to her lover in the scene tumbling down and then with her legs on air they move together to hint at lovemaking. The most breathtaking steps that she takes are those pirouettes done 8 to 30 times on toes and even moving from one end of the stage to the other without her showing any ounce of dizziness. (These spinning steps earned her lots of applause from the audience of that presentation on October 11, 2009) In all these, Lisa appears like a feather leaping, flying, soaring, and being held by sensitive hands. Her toes falling on the floor is hardly heard nor does it create noise that could distract the attention of the audience from the story of the dance.
Now what makes Lisa a consummate artist? One can glean this from the small steps and movements that she takes to those of leaps and bounces as she dances with a male dancer or several groups. Lisa’s Carmen is full of love and sensuality, apart from her wearing a black negligee with her half-bare lover. The twist of her hip to the left indicates her sexy bearing hinting at her profession as a prostitute. In her solo dancing of an Original Pilipino Music or OPM, Lisa is able to show the angst, the hankering for involvement to the tune of “Somewhere in Time” played on the violin by Robert Atchison. She projects her desire for company in the way she wraps her arms around her body and then by the way her arms would flail in the air a few times revealing the emptiness of being without her lover yet also bearing that unrequited or requited love. She also projects that hesitancy to ask her absent lover to return in her movements showing one foot stepping forward and then back, and then the motion repeated, as if wanting and not wanting in the song “Sana’y Maulit Muli.” In all her dances, Lisa is able to present the whole gamut of human emotions from happiness (as Odine in Swan Lake), to sadness (OPM songs) to longing (as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet) and even sensual feelings (as Carmen).
Then all the other ingredients of the presentation are well chosen, from the costumes, to the screen settings, and even the souvenir program which contains not only the briefs about the dancers and guest teachers like Tatiana Udalenkova of the Russian Ballet Academy, St. Petersburg, Russia, who has come to the country to give ballet lessons at BM, and Rober Atchison, English violinist who played touching the classical and OPM music to which Lisa danced, Luz Fernandez, the Lola Basyang of radio, Gia Macuja who has acted lead roles of Nala, in The Lion King, and Gigi and Ellen in Miss Saigon, both presented in England, and other individuals who contributed to the success of the presentation. The generous spaces devoted to the artists’ biography, no matter how brief, reflect the high regard of BM to them, an aim that is worthwhile copying by every cultural presentation.
The culminating points of the anniversary show Lisa and her lover in the play, Prinsipe ng Mga Ibon, based on the story by Severino Reyes retold by Christine Bellen, and illustrated by Panch Alcaraz, standing on a box that flies from the stage to the back of the theatre with the song “Lipad” composed by Jesse Lasaten. A little later, she emerges from the same but now dressed all white and coming down as if flying to be with all the dancers on stage. There Lisa draws a standing ovation from the audience who clapped seemingly without end and stopped only when the curtains fell onstage.
Yet, Lisa is also aware of the travails of her profession, where creeping age can cramp the style and eventually deaden the dancer’s artistic aspirations. She gives this reason for being on top of her field: “One of the reasons I was able to maintain my active career in dancing is that I have a very strong constitution. I rarely get sick…get injured. I have maintained my body and a lot of it has to do with the ballet classes I take, and the training I had with the Vaganova method which begins with 1 ½ hours of strong technical combinations and steps.”
Actually her strength and perseverance are extraordinary as exhibited very well when she danced Swan Lake in Cuba after only a week of rehearsal under the direction of Alicia Alonzo. Then, in this particular presentation, she showed great stamina, dancing from scene to scene, changing costumes, getting into the emotional make-up of every character that she is supposed to portray, within 3 hours of the program. Viewing her is being with someone with a great muscle strength, strong respiratory system and a really deep love of dance and theatre, firstly, as an aesthetic endeavor and secondly, as a profession.
The repertoire of Ballet Manila include full length performances of Swan Lake, Don Quixote, The Nutcracker, Giselle, La Bayadere, Romeo and Juliet, Carmen, Le Corsaire, and “contemporary Filipino ballet pieces by some of the country’s most distinguished choreographers.” This makes the assertion of Lisa that Ballet Manila is the only Filipino company that can “capably stage a full classical repertoire in any given concert season.”
Discipline and blessings of having a supportive family and her own company have made Lisa what she is now. Her company has all the necessary facilities needed to support any production, from rehearsal studios, to ballet books and video as well as music library, a warehouse for costumes and equipment, living quarters, and of course, the administrative, logistics and marketing staff. The environment is there for any dancer to make use of to deepen one’s understanding of any role to be played and danced.
In turn Lisa shares her success by giving scholarships, free ballet education to public elementary and high school students under the Ballet Manila School. She also has directed the Artists’ Welfare Project Inc., an NGO that “guarantees welfare benefits to all its artist-members.”
Truly, the country has a gem of a dancer in Lisa, the best that the country has produced in the whole history of dance. She exhibits not only a firm grasp of the ballet techniques but also a deep understanding of the meaning of every story that is presented, every line of a song that accompanies her dance, a real “storyteller on toes,” (as Lisa would say of her company, Ballet Manila). She has shown that the Filipina dancer can excel and even garner international acclaim given proper training and in her case, Russian training, as well as preserving her roots as a Filipina. That ability to put emotions into her dances is a product of her being a “kababayan” as we are known to be sensitive to feelings and thoughts, our own and those of others’. Lisa credits her husband Fred Elizalde of being a strong pillar in her ascent to success as she expressed in her Sunday radio program over DZRH while being interviewed by Ruth Abao, “In fact I would classify my life as a dancer in this way ‘before and after Fred.” The latter has given her his wholehearted and financial support for her to give expression to her dancing talents and abilities as well as her director capabilities. Yet, despite her being onstage most of the time, she remains a devoted mother to their children and a grateful wife which she always showed by thanking Fred who happens to sit among the audience every time she plays.
Osias Barroso, BM Artistic Associate and Ballet Master, says it all, Lisa is the “ ‘Ballerina of the People’ who will dance anywhere as long as there’s a floor for her to dance on.”
Maybe there is really something about dreaming that can make an individual reach the highest of heights of success. Let us add to the accolades, Lisa is also the “Ballet Icon Dancer of the World.”
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Sunday, September 20, 2009
SHAMAN IN MEDICAL PRACTICE
MERCED, Calif. — The patient in Room 328 had diabetes and hypertension. But when Va Meng Lee, a Hmong shaman, began the healing process by looping a coiled thread around the patient’s wrist, Mr. Lee’s chief concern was summoning the ailing man’s runaway soul.
Multimedia
Slide Show
Welcoming Shamans
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Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Va Meng Lee, another shaman, at Mercy Medical Center in Merced, Calif. More Photos »
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Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Paraphernalia used in a home by Ma Vue, another shaman, to ward off bad spirits for a newborn. More Photos >
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Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Ma Vue with her husband and assistant, Yong Chue Xiong, warding away bad spirits for Lance Vang, a newborn, in Winton, Calif. More Photos >
“Doctors are good at disease,” Mr. Lee said as he encircled the patient, Chang Teng Thao, a widower from Laos, in an invisible “protective shield” traced in the air with his finger. “The soul is the shaman’s responsibility.”
At Mercy Medical Center in Merced, where roughly four patients a day are Hmong from northern Laos, healing includes more than IV drips, syringes and blood glucose monitors. Because many Hmong rely on their spiritual beliefs to get them through illnesses, the hospital’s new Hmong shaman policy, the country’s first, formally recognizes the cultural role of traditional healers like Mr. Lee, inviting them to perform nine approved ceremonies in the hospital, including “soul calling” and chanting in a soft voice.
The policy and a novel training program to introduce shamans to the principles of Western medicine are part of a national movement to consider patients’ cultural beliefs and values when deciding their medical treatment. The approach is being adopted by dozens of medical institutions and clinics across the country that cater to immigrant, refugee and ethnic-minority populations.
Certified shamans, with their embroidered jackets and official badges, have the same unrestricted access to patients given to clergy members.
Shamans do not take insurance or other payment, although they have been known to accept a live chicken.
A recent survey of 60 hospitals in the United States by the Joint Commission, the country’s largest hospital accrediting group, found that the hospitals were increasingly embracing cultural beliefs, driven sometimes by marketing, whether by adding calcium- and iron-rich Korean seaweed soup to the maternity ward menu at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles, on the edge of Koreatown, or providing birthing doulas for Somali women in Minneapolis.
In Merced, about 120 miles southeast of San Francisco, the Mercy hospital shaman program was designed to strengthen the trust between doctors and the Hmong community — a form of healing in the broadest sense. It tries to redress years of misunderstanding between the medical establishment and the Hmong, whose lives in the mountains of Laos were irreparably altered by the Vietnam War. Hmong soldiers, Mr. Lee among them, were recruited by the C.I.A. in the 1960s to fight the covert war against Communist insurgents in Laos and afterward, to avoid retribution, were forced to flee to the refugee camps, with most resettling in California’s Central Valley and in the Midwest.
During a seven-week training program at Mercy Medical Center, 89 shamans learned elements of Western-style medicine, including germ theory. They visited operating rooms and peered through microscopes for the first time. Looking at heart cells, one shaman, an elderly woman, asked the pathologist to show her a “happy heart.”
Designed to defuse the Hmong fear of Western medicine, the program has “built trust both ways,” said Dr. John Paik-Tesch, director of the Merced Family Medicine Residency Program, which trains resident physicians at Mercy Medical Center.
Since the refugees began arriving 30 years ago, health professionals like Marilyn Mochel, a registered nurse who helped create the hospital’s policy on shamans, have wrestled with how best to resolve immigrants’ health needs given the Hmong belief system, in which surgery, anesthesia, blood transfusions and other common procedures are taboo.
The result has been a high incidence of ruptured appendixes, complications from diabetes, and end-stage cancers, with fears of medical intervention and delays in treatment exacerbated by “our inability to explain to patients how physicians make decisions and recommendations,” Ms. Mochel said.
The consequences of miscommunication between a Hmong family and the hospital in Merced was the subject of the book “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and The Collision of Two Cultures” by Anne Fadiman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997). The book follows a young girl’s treatment for epilepsy and the hospital’s failure to recognize the family’s deep-seated cultural beliefs. The fallout from the case and the book prompted much soul-searching at the hospital and helped lead to its shaman policy.
The Hmong believe that souls, like errant children, are capable of wandering off or being captured by malevolent spirits, causing illness. Mr. Lee’s ceremony for the diabetic man was a spiritual inoculation, meant to protect his soul from being kidnapped by his late wife and thus extending his “life visa.”
Such ceremonies, which last 10 minutes to 15 minutes and must be cleared with a patient’s roommates, are tame versions of elaborate rituals that abound in Merced, especially on weekends, when suburban living rooms and garages are transformed into sacred spaces and crowded by over a hundred friends and family members. Shamans like Ma Vue, a 4-foot, 70-something dynamo with a tight bun, go into trances for hours, negotiating with spirits in return for sacrificed animals — a pig, for instance, was laid out recently on camouflage fabric on a living room floor.
Certain elements of Hmong healing ceremonies, like the use of gongs, finger bells and other boisterous spiritual accelerators, require the hospital’s permission. Janice Wilkerson, the hospital’s “integration” director, said it was also unlikely that the hospital would allow ceremonies involving animals, like one in which evil spirits are transferred onto a live rooster that struts across a patient’s chest.
“The infection control nurse would have a few problems with that,” Ms. Wilkerson said.
A turning point in the skepticism of staff members occurred a decade ago, when a major Hmong clan leader was hospitalized here with a gangrenous bowel. Dr. Jim McDiarmid, a clinical psychologist and director of the residency program, said that in deference hundreds of well-wishers, a shaman was allowed to perform rituals, including placing a long sword at the door to ward off evil spirits. The man miraculously recovered. “That made a big impression, especially on the residents,” Dr. McDiarmid said.
Social support and beliefs affect a patient’s ability to rebound from illness, Dr. McDiarmid added, pointing out that over half of the people who respond to antidepressants do so because of the placebo effect.
One of the goals of the new policy, Ms. Mochel said, is to speed up medical intervention by having a healing ceremony coincide with a hospital stay, rather than waiting days for a patient to confer with family and clan leaders after a ceremony at home.
Attitudes toward Western doctors have begun to loosen as young, assimilated Hmong-Americans assume more powerful roles in the family. Dr. Kathie Culhane-Pera, the associate medical director of the West Side Community Health Center in St. Paul, home to the country’s largest concentration of Hmong, said she worked informally with shamans, obtaining permission from the hospital to turn off the smoke alarms for incense, for example. Signs of the growing movement in cross-cultural health care can be found on the Navajo reservation in northern Arizona, where the federal Indian Health Service has three medicine men on staff and recently instituted a training program similar to Mercy’s.
At White Memorial Medical Center in Los Angeles, Dr. Hector Flores, the chairman of the family medicine department, refers patients to, traditional Hispanic healers, curanderos, on a case-by-case basis. The facility also trains community members as “promotores de salud,” or health promoters. Dr. Flores called it a “low-tech approach in which the physician is not the end-all, but part of a collaborative team geared toward prevention.”
At the hospital in Merced, Dr. Lesley Xiong, 26, a resident physician, grew up as the granddaughter of two distinguished shamans. Though she chose to become a doctor, she said there was ample room for both approaches. “If I were sick, I would want a shaman to be there,” Dr. Xiong said. “But I’d go to the hospital.”
Multimedia
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Welcoming Shamans
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Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Va Meng Lee, another shaman, at Mercy Medical Center in Merced, Calif. More Photos »
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Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Paraphernalia used in a home by Ma Vue, another shaman, to ward off bad spirits for a newborn. More Photos >
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Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Ma Vue with her husband and assistant, Yong Chue Xiong, warding away bad spirits for Lance Vang, a newborn, in Winton, Calif. More Photos >
“Doctors are good at disease,” Mr. Lee said as he encircled the patient, Chang Teng Thao, a widower from Laos, in an invisible “protective shield” traced in the air with his finger. “The soul is the shaman’s responsibility.”
At Mercy Medical Center in Merced, where roughly four patients a day are Hmong from northern Laos, healing includes more than IV drips, syringes and blood glucose monitors. Because many Hmong rely on their spiritual beliefs to get them through illnesses, the hospital’s new Hmong shaman policy, the country’s first, formally recognizes the cultural role of traditional healers like Mr. Lee, inviting them to perform nine approved ceremonies in the hospital, including “soul calling” and chanting in a soft voice.
The policy and a novel training program to introduce shamans to the principles of Western medicine are part of a national movement to consider patients’ cultural beliefs and values when deciding their medical treatment. The approach is being adopted by dozens of medical institutions and clinics across the country that cater to immigrant, refugee and ethnic-minority populations.
Certified shamans, with their embroidered jackets and official badges, have the same unrestricted access to patients given to clergy members.
Shamans do not take insurance or other payment, although they have been known to accept a live chicken.
A recent survey of 60 hospitals in the United States by the Joint Commission, the country’s largest hospital accrediting group, found that the hospitals were increasingly embracing cultural beliefs, driven sometimes by marketing, whether by adding calcium- and iron-rich Korean seaweed soup to the maternity ward menu at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles, on the edge of Koreatown, or providing birthing doulas for Somali women in Minneapolis.
In Merced, about 120 miles southeast of San Francisco, the Mercy hospital shaman program was designed to strengthen the trust between doctors and the Hmong community — a form of healing in the broadest sense. It tries to redress years of misunderstanding between the medical establishment and the Hmong, whose lives in the mountains of Laos were irreparably altered by the Vietnam War. Hmong soldiers, Mr. Lee among them, were recruited by the C.I.A. in the 1960s to fight the covert war against Communist insurgents in Laos and afterward, to avoid retribution, were forced to flee to the refugee camps, with most resettling in California’s Central Valley and in the Midwest.
During a seven-week training program at Mercy Medical Center, 89 shamans learned elements of Western-style medicine, including germ theory. They visited operating rooms and peered through microscopes for the first time. Looking at heart cells, one shaman, an elderly woman, asked the pathologist to show her a “happy heart.”
Designed to defuse the Hmong fear of Western medicine, the program has “built trust both ways,” said Dr. John Paik-Tesch, director of the Merced Family Medicine Residency Program, which trains resident physicians at Mercy Medical Center.
Since the refugees began arriving 30 years ago, health professionals like Marilyn Mochel, a registered nurse who helped create the hospital’s policy on shamans, have wrestled with how best to resolve immigrants’ health needs given the Hmong belief system, in which surgery, anesthesia, blood transfusions and other common procedures are taboo.
The result has been a high incidence of ruptured appendixes, complications from diabetes, and end-stage cancers, with fears of medical intervention and delays in treatment exacerbated by “our inability to explain to patients how physicians make decisions and recommendations,” Ms. Mochel said.
The consequences of miscommunication between a Hmong family and the hospital in Merced was the subject of the book “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and The Collision of Two Cultures” by Anne Fadiman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997). The book follows a young girl’s treatment for epilepsy and the hospital’s failure to recognize the family’s deep-seated cultural beliefs. The fallout from the case and the book prompted much soul-searching at the hospital and helped lead to its shaman policy.
The Hmong believe that souls, like errant children, are capable of wandering off or being captured by malevolent spirits, causing illness. Mr. Lee’s ceremony for the diabetic man was a spiritual inoculation, meant to protect his soul from being kidnapped by his late wife and thus extending his “life visa.”
Such ceremonies, which last 10 minutes to 15 minutes and must be cleared with a patient’s roommates, are tame versions of elaborate rituals that abound in Merced, especially on weekends, when suburban living rooms and garages are transformed into sacred spaces and crowded by over a hundred friends and family members. Shamans like Ma Vue, a 4-foot, 70-something dynamo with a tight bun, go into trances for hours, negotiating with spirits in return for sacrificed animals — a pig, for instance, was laid out recently on camouflage fabric on a living room floor.
Certain elements of Hmong healing ceremonies, like the use of gongs, finger bells and other boisterous spiritual accelerators, require the hospital’s permission. Janice Wilkerson, the hospital’s “integration” director, said it was also unlikely that the hospital would allow ceremonies involving animals, like one in which evil spirits are transferred onto a live rooster that struts across a patient’s chest.
“The infection control nurse would have a few problems with that,” Ms. Wilkerson said.
A turning point in the skepticism of staff members occurred a decade ago, when a major Hmong clan leader was hospitalized here with a gangrenous bowel. Dr. Jim McDiarmid, a clinical psychologist and director of the residency program, said that in deference hundreds of well-wishers, a shaman was allowed to perform rituals, including placing a long sword at the door to ward off evil spirits. The man miraculously recovered. “That made a big impression, especially on the residents,” Dr. McDiarmid said.
Social support and beliefs affect a patient’s ability to rebound from illness, Dr. McDiarmid added, pointing out that over half of the people who respond to antidepressants do so because of the placebo effect.
One of the goals of the new policy, Ms. Mochel said, is to speed up medical intervention by having a healing ceremony coincide with a hospital stay, rather than waiting days for a patient to confer with family and clan leaders after a ceremony at home.
Attitudes toward Western doctors have begun to loosen as young, assimilated Hmong-Americans assume more powerful roles in the family. Dr. Kathie Culhane-Pera, the associate medical director of the West Side Community Health Center in St. Paul, home to the country’s largest concentration of Hmong, said she worked informally with shamans, obtaining permission from the hospital to turn off the smoke alarms for incense, for example. Signs of the growing movement in cross-cultural health care can be found on the Navajo reservation in northern Arizona, where the federal Indian Health Service has three medicine men on staff and recently instituted a training program similar to Mercy’s.
At White Memorial Medical Center in Los Angeles, Dr. Hector Flores, the chairman of the family medicine department, refers patients to, traditional Hispanic healers, curanderos, on a case-by-case basis. The facility also trains community members as “promotores de salud,” or health promoters. Dr. Flores called it a “low-tech approach in which the physician is not the end-all, but part of a collaborative team geared toward prevention.”
At the hospital in Merced, Dr. Lesley Xiong, 26, a resident physician, grew up as the granddaughter of two distinguished shamans. Though she chose to become a doctor, she said there was ample room for both approaches. “If I were sick, I would want a shaman to be there,” Dr. Xiong said. “But I’d go to the hospital.”
Monday, August 31, 2009
Row over Afghan wife-starving law
By Sarah Rainsford
BBC News
Critics accuse President Hamid Karzai of betraying Afghan women
An Afghan bill allowing a husband to starve his wife if she refuses to have sex has been published in the official gazette and become law.
The original bill caused outrage earlier this year, forcing Afghan President Hamid Karzai to withdraw it.
But critics say the amended version of the law remains highly repressive.
They accuse Mr Karzai of selling out Afghan women for the sake of conservative Shia support at next week's presidential election.
The law governs family life for Afghanistan's Shia minority.
Sexual demands
The original version obliged Shia women to have sex with their husbands every four days at a minimum, and it effectively condoned rape by removing the need for consent to sex within marriage.
The original bill caused outrage within Afghanistan and around the world
Western leaders and Afghan women's groups were united in condemning an apparent reversal of key freedoms won by women after the fall of the Taliban.
Now an amended version of the same bill has passed quietly into law with the apparent approval of President Karzai.
Just ahead of this Thursday's Afghan presidential election, human rights groups suggest the timing is no accident.
"There was a review process - Karzai came under huge pressure from all over the world to amend this law, but many of the most oppressive laws remain," Rachel Reid, the Human Rights Watch representative in Kabul, told the BBC.
"What matters more to Karzai is the support of fundamentalists and hardliners here in Afghanistan whose support he thinks he needs in the elections."
Women's groups say its new wording still violates the principle of equality that is enshrined in their constitution.
It allows a man to withhold food from his wife if she refuses his sexual demands; a woman must get her husband's permission to work; and fathers and grandfathers are given exclusive custody of children.
BBC News
Critics accuse President Hamid Karzai of betraying Afghan women
An Afghan bill allowing a husband to starve his wife if she refuses to have sex has been published in the official gazette and become law.
The original bill caused outrage earlier this year, forcing Afghan President Hamid Karzai to withdraw it.
But critics say the amended version of the law remains highly repressive.
They accuse Mr Karzai of selling out Afghan women for the sake of conservative Shia support at next week's presidential election.
The law governs family life for Afghanistan's Shia minority.
Sexual demands
The original version obliged Shia women to have sex with their husbands every four days at a minimum, and it effectively condoned rape by removing the need for consent to sex within marriage.
The original bill caused outrage within Afghanistan and around the world
Western leaders and Afghan women's groups were united in condemning an apparent reversal of key freedoms won by women after the fall of the Taliban.
Now an amended version of the same bill has passed quietly into law with the apparent approval of President Karzai.
Just ahead of this Thursday's Afghan presidential election, human rights groups suggest the timing is no accident.
"There was a review process - Karzai came under huge pressure from all over the world to amend this law, but many of the most oppressive laws remain," Rachel Reid, the Human Rights Watch representative in Kabul, told the BBC.
"What matters more to Karzai is the support of fundamentalists and hardliners here in Afghanistan whose support he thinks he needs in the elections."
Women's groups say its new wording still violates the principle of equality that is enshrined in their constitution.
It allows a man to withhold food from his wife if she refuses his sexual demands; a woman must get her husband's permission to work; and fathers and grandfathers are given exclusive custody of children.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
WANTED ACTORS AND ACTRESSES
Some occurrences in theatrical work are operating which hamper the development of one form -- usually theatre. Actors appearing in dramatic pieces suddenly get pirated by the more lucrative forms like tv and advertisements which give higher pay. Is there a way by which we can have an agreement among the media that those who are performing in one should finish their contract first before jumping to the other, and those companies who get them have to reimburse the previous organization to which the actor/actress used to be connected should they need their services immediately?
I think that give-and-take in the artforms have to be emphasized to really prosper and develop in our country.
EMMA S. OROZCO
WILLIE, NEXT KING OF COMEDY
Comedy is important in social life. It makes the people realize how flippant and serious life can be and therefore view it as a journey, not necessarily an end in itself. Very few comedians exist in our country because it is difficult to make people laugh.
However, comedians like Willie Nepomuceno exist tickling the audience with laughter, in order to provide a diversion from their monotonous life or to make them realize something very important without being given a sermon. They are capable of providing another angle of looking at life actually, and could make the students expand their imagination when faced with difficult problems in life, today and in the future. Moreover they show that human frailties like committing errors, being imperfect are traits that are normal to human beings and need not be sources of insecurities.
Willie Nepomuceno is the first and foremost intelligent stand-up comedian in our country appealing to all crowds, young and old, and all sexes without offending their sensibilities. His jokes do not laugh at the disabled and other weak sectors of our society. They are witty, done with finesse and exhibit etiquette, qualities that are educational for the young audience to know and most possibly to imitate later on. His stories make high class personalities human like us, fallible and not god-like that they could overpower and dominate us. He makes us feel that they are just like one of us, human and capable of making mistakes like those of FPJ and Erap.
His performances can be short or fast-paced providing a succession of humorous stories, short jokes (called "bits"), and one-liners. Sometimes he uses props but always has minus-one music for his songs. He has performed at nightclubs, bars, colleges and theaters, as well as celebrations of companies, regaling the audience with his off-beat treatment of any subject and topic. All writer, editor, performer and and director, he has staff that takes care of his technical needs.
In college, the study of drama includes tragedy and comedy distinguishing between the two and showing that both are important forms of literature and entertainment. By being introduced to comedy, the students will realize the deeper value of humour in life. They will learn to practice humour as a good defense in life.
Children would do well to know Willie Nepomuceno in person rather than as a featured tv or radio guest. Though projected as the main and only feature of this event his performance is a whole “menu” by itself rolled into one, speaking, joking, impersonating and singing directly to them.
His performance can educate on:
1. what is comedy;
2. being comical without being offensive;
3. knowing how to laugh at serious matters yet not departing from the fact that they have to be dealt with seriously;
4. knowing that comedy is as important as politics and all other fields of endeavor;
5. knowing the difference between high and low comedy and how they as students should aspire for more uplifting types of entertainment that will showcase humanity as humane yet humorous;
6. knowing what is solo performance and its being a good source of education and entertainment, and
7. Thus, raising their cultural taste as to what is good for their soul (ethics), mind and body.
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