Word: hippolytus
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Phaedra is, says Graham candidly, "a phantasmagoria of desire." The dance tells the story of Phaedra (danced by Graham herself), who is cursed by Aphrodite with an unnatural lust for her stepson Hippolytus. The spectator is left in no doubt about the nature of her passion-Hippolytus is first seen as only a pair of spotlighted, near-naked loins. Frenzied when Hippolytus rejects her advances, she tells his father that the youth had raped her, and the dance's high point is the visionary enactment of this lie in all the vividness of Phaedra's inflamed imagination...
Christians were against abortion from the beginning, holding that the fetus is not part of the mother but a person in its own right, and they also opposed contraception. St. Hippolytus in the 3rd century criticized Pope St. Callistus for his leniency in granting absolution to ''women, reputed believers, who began to resort to drugs for producing sterility, and to gird themselves round, so as to expel what was being conceived...
...underlying story comes from Greek myth via the Hippolytus of Euripides. Hippolytus is the bastard son of Theseus, slayer of the Minotaur, and Hippolyte, single-breasted queen of the Amazons. He lives in the home of Theseus and Theseus' young bride Phaedra. An outdoors he-man sort, Hippolytus neglects the service of Aphrodite, goddess of love. The goddess puts a sex hex on Phaedra, who is consumed with a ravenous passion for her stepson Hippolytus. She is rebuffed in her advances, and in revenge tells Theseus that the boy has made attempts on her virtue. Theseus prays...
...Euripides developed it, the tragedy was nature's rebuke to pride. Hippolytus had ignored the elemental force of love. In Racine's hands, the focus is on the hysteric furor of a woman scorned, the unrequited love that becomes undiluted hate. Phaedra's pathos is to writhe vainly in a jungle of untamed instincts...