Tag: Dies

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Health

Emil Freireich, Groundbreaking Most cancers Researcher, Dies at 93

Emil Freireich, Groundbreaking Cancer Researcher, Dies at 93

Dr. Emil Freireich, a relentless cancer doctor and researcher who helped develop treatments for childhood leukemia that dramatically changed the lives of patients believed to have little hope of survival, died on February 1 at University of Texas Anderson Cancer Center at Houston. where he had worked since 1965. He was 93 years old.

His death was confirmed by his daughter Debra Ann Freireich-Bier. The hospital said it tested positive for Covid-19 but it has not yet been identified as a cause of death.

Dr. A transformative, magnetic, and occasionally aggressive personality, Freireich spent his career at the National Cancer Institute and MD Anderson researching new cancer treatments and training hundreds of doctors to follow him.

“He oversaw research in all cancers, directed and dictated the development of protocols, implemented them and published results that were adopted worldwide,” said Dr. Hagop Kantarjian, MD Anderson Leukemia Chairperson.

When Dr. Freireich (pronounced FRY-Rike) 1955 his work at the NCI in Bethesda, Md., Admission, acute childhood leukemia was viewed as a death sentence. As he walked into the ward where the children were being treated, he remembered their bleeding because their blood had practically no platelets, the disc-shaped cells that clot blood.

It was like being in a slaughterhouse, his boss, Dr. C. Gordon Zubrod.

“They bleed from their ears, from their skin,” said Dr. Freireich wrote to the author Malcolm Gladwell in “David and Goliath: Outsiders, Outsiders, and the Art of Fighting Giants” (2013). “There was blood on everything. The nurses would come to work in their white uniforms in the morning and go home covered in blood. “

Dr. Freireich, a hematologist and oncologist, tested his hypothesis that the lack of platelets was causing the bleeding by mixing some of his own blood with something from the children.

“Would it be normal?” He said in an interview for an NCI oral history project in 1997. “Sure enough.”

Further tests conducted to convince his skeptics at the Cancer Institute have proven him right.

But he had another problem: the blood the children had been given lacked the platelets necessary for blood to clot because it was at least 48 hours old. The platelets had deteriorated and were unusable.

Dr. Freireich successfully advocated the use of freshly donated blood that could be transfused as quickly as possible and that was not in the institute’s blood bank. A minister who was the father of one of the patients once brought 20 of his congregation to donate blood.

Dr. Looking for a more effective way to deliver platelets to his patients, Freireich began developing a machine to extract platelets from white and red blood cells. He soon found an unexpected ally in George Judson, an IBM engineer whose son had leukemia and who had turned up at the institute to offer his expertise.

Soon they were working on a continuous flow blood separator that was found to be far more efficient at delivering platelets than blood transfusions. (The separator, which used a high-speed centrifuge, was patented in 1966.)

Dr. However, Freireich’s most important and enduring achievement was using a combination of drugs to put leukemia into remission. He explored options in chemotherapy with several NCI colleagues, including Dr. Emil Frei III, who was known as Tom.

They aggressively attacked childhood leukemia by developing a cocktail of four drugs given at the same time – a technique similar to three-drug therapy used to treat tuberculosis – so that each one attacks a different aspect of the cancer’s physiology in cells.

“It was crazy,” said Dr. Free to Mr. Gladwell. “But smart and right. I thought about it and knew it would work. It was like the platelets. It should work! “

But not without danger and worry. Some of the children almost died from the drugs. Critics named Dr. Freireich was inhuman because he had experimented with his young patients.

“Instead, 90 percent went into remission immediately,” he told USA Today in 2015. “It was magical.” But temporarily. One round of the cocktail wasn’t enough to clear all of the cancer. Dr. Freireich and his team treated her monthly with the medication for more than a year.

When he and Dr. Frei received the renowned Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award in 1972, the proportion of children who lived at least five years after being diagnosed with leukemia was 30 percent. According to the American Cancer Society, survival rates today are on regimens similar to those of Dr. Freireich and Dr. Free at 90 percent. Dr. Frei died in 2013.

Emil J Freireich was born on March 16, 1927 in Chicago. His mother Mary (Klein) Freireich worked many hours in a sweat shop after her husband David died at the age of 2. He was placed in the care of an Irish maid who became his surrogate mother. Shortly after he was nine years old, his mother remarried and quit her job. She and her new husband released the maid.

“I never forgave my mother for this,” said Dr. Free to Mr. Gladwell.

He was an excellent physicist in high school, where he won first prize in a science competition. His physics teacher encouraged him to go to college where his goal was to be a general practitioner like the one who treated his family.

“He worked for nothing and always wore a suit and tie and always looked so dignified,” said Dr. Freireich the online publication of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in 2015.

After receiving a bachelor’s degree in medicine from the University of Illinois, Chicago, in 1947, he received his medical degree from the University of Chicago’s College of Medicine, also in Chicago, in 1949.

His internship at Cook County Hospital, also in Chicago, ended after confronting a nurse for taking a patient with heart failure to what is known as the “death room” instead of keeping him on the ward where Dr. Freireich had treated him. He has been called a “troublemaker,” he said.

He then served his residency at the nearby Presbyterian Hospital (now part of Rush University Medical Center) and then moved to Boston for a fellowship at a hospital where he studied anemia. There he met a nurse, Haroldine Lee Cunningham, whom he married in 1953.

He was drafted into the Army in 1953 but was able to join the United States Public Health Service and work for the NCI, a branch of the National Institutes of Health.

When they first met, Dr. Zubrod, his boss: “Freireich, what are you doing?”

“I’m a hematologist,” recalled Dr. Freireich and watched Dr. Zubrod scratched his head and said, “Freireich, you should cure acute leukemia in children.”

And I said, “Yes sir.”

After a decade of developing therapies for childhood leukemia at the NCI, Dr. Freireich (and Dr. Frei) recruited to MD Anderson in 1965. Together, they formed the Developmental Therapeutics Division and hired scientists to develop drug combinations for different cancers, including adult leukemia, lymphoma, and Hodgkin’s disease, using the same methods used to treat childhood leukemia.

Because of his larger than life personality and his magnetism, Freireich attracted people from all over the world to study with him, ”said Dr. Kantarjian.

Dr. Freireich retired in 2015, but continued to teach and advise at MD Anderson.

In addition to his wife and wife Freireich-Bier, Dr. Freireich another daughter, Lindsay Freireich; two sons, David and Tom; six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Dr. Freireich compared the early battle to cure childhood leukemia to a battle in which he and the NCI team had an alliance that was “forged under attack”.

To cure cancer, he added, “Motivate and empower people, people are naturally motivated. Nobody likes to be lazy and do nothing. Everyone wants to be important. “

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Health

Abraham Twerski, Who Merged 12 Steps and the Torah, Dies at 90

Abraham Twerski, Who Merged 12 Steps and the Torah, Dies at 90

What set Rabbi Twerski apart from many other Orthodox therapists was his willingness to look outside of his community. In one of his works, “The Shame Worn in Silence: Spouse Abuse in the Jewish Community” (1996), he highlighted a problem that many Hasidic leaders argued should be treated discreetly within the island community, without inform the police or outside authorities.

Abraham Joshua Heschel Twerski was born on October 6, 1930 in Milwaukee, where his parents immigrated in 1927 after leaving Russia. His father Jacob, the sixth generation descendant of the Grand Rabbi of Chernobyl, was the rabbi of the Beth Jehudah Synagogue in Milwaukee. His mother, Devorah Leah (Halberstam) Twerski, was the daughter of a chief rabbi of Bobov, one of the largest Hasidic sects.

Abraham was the third of five brothers, each of whom became rabbis but also received advanced secular training and college and university degrees, something very few Hasidim aspire to do. He attended Milwaukee public schools and played in a Christmas game in second grade. When his mother went to school, the headmaster thought she was there to complain. Instead, she told the headmaster that if her son’s Jewish upbringing wasn’t strong enough to survive a second grade game, it was his family who had abandoned him.

He received his rabbinical ordination in 1951 at the Hebrew Theological College in Chicago (now in Skokie, Illinois). While serving as an assistant rabbi with his father’s synagogue, he enjoyed counseling others, but recognized that ward members always turned to his father for advice on their most intimate personal problems. In a 1988 interview with the National Council of Jewish Women, he stated that studying psychiatry could help develop his own talent.

“So I went to medical school to become a psychiatrist and do what I wanted to do as a rabbi,” he said.

He received his medical degree from Marquette University in Milwaukee, a Jesuit institution. When actor Danny Thomas, a practicing Catholic who grew up in the Midwest, learned during lunch with Marquette officials that a student who was an Orthodox rabbi said it would take up to $ 4,000 to complete his medical degree he told the officials, “He has it,” and he did well.

Rabbi Twerski was trained as a psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh. He was due to take up a teaching position at the university, but after Sister Adele of St. Francis Hospital informed him of the hospital’s needs for a stronger mental health program, he became its director of psychiatry. He stayed there for 20 years.

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Entertainment

Christopher Plummer, Actor From Shakespeare to ‘The Sound of Music,’ Dies at 91

Christopher Plummer, Actor From Shakespeare to ‘The Sound of Music,’ Dies at 91

He played Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard III, Mark Antony, and others of Shakespeare’s towering protagonists on prominent stages, and he starred in “Hamlet at Helsingör,” a critically acclaimed 1964 television production directed by Philip Saville and set in Kronborg Castle The film was shot in Denmark, where (under the name Elsinore) the play is set.

But he also accepted roles in a whole series of clinkers, in which he brought some clichés to life – like the evil fanatic who hides behind religiosity in “Skeletons” (1997), for example in one of his more than 40 television films. or as the gloomy emperor of the galaxy, who appears as a hologram in “Starcrash”, a rip-off of “Star Wars” from 1978.

A measure of his stature were his leading actresses, which included Glenda Jackson as Lady Macbeth and Zoe Caldwell as Cleopatra. And even leaving Shakespeare aside, one measure of his reach was a list of the well-known characters he played fictional and non-fictional on television and in the films: Sherlock Holmes and Mike Wallace, John Barrymore and Leo Tolstoy, Aristotle and F. Lee Bailey, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Alfred Stieglitz, Rudyard Kipling and Cyrano de Bergerac.

Mr. Plummer’s television work began in the 1950s, during the heyday of live drama, and lasted for half a century. He starred as archbishop in the popular 1983 miniseries “The Thorn Birds”, appeared regularly as an industrialist in the 1990s action-adventure series “Counterstrike” and won the Emmy Awards – 1977 for portraying a sensible banker in miniature Series “Arthur Hailey’s The Moneychangers” and in 1994 for the narration of “Madeline”, an animated series based on the children’s books.

In the films, his appearance in “The Sound of Music” as von Trapp, a strict widower and father whose heart was warmed and won over by the woman he hires as governess, triggered a parade of distinctive roles, more character changes than main roles across an impressive range of genres. These included a historical drama (“The Last Station” about Tolstoy and “The Day That Shook the World” about the beginning of the First World War); historical adventure (as Kipling in John Huston’s boisterous adaptation of The Man Who Would Be King, starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine); romantic comedy (“Must Love Dogs” with John Cusack and Diane Lane); political epic (“Syriana”); Science Fiction (as Chang, the Klingon general, in Star Trek VI); and Crime Farce (“The Return of the Pink Panther,” in which he played a retired version of the Debonair jewel thief originally portrayed by David Niven to Peter Sellers’ incompetent Inspector Clouseau).

Mr. Plummer won a belated Oscar in 2012 for the role of Hal, a man who enthusiastically emerges as gay in the bittersweet father-son story “Beginners” after decades of marriage and the death of his wife.

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Politics

Eugenio Martínez, Final of the Watergate Burglars, Dies at 98

Eugenio Martínez, Last of the Watergate Burglars, Dies at 98

They were spearheaded by James W. McCord Jr., a security coordinator for the Nixon campaign, whose confession to the judge shortly before his conviction sparked the White House revelations of crimes and cover-ups that culminated in Nixon’s resignation in 1974, which followed Mr McCord on scandal senior advisor to the president and has been reduced to less than four months’ imprisonment from one to five years.

In 1977, the four Cuba-born burglars each accepted an out-of-court settlement of $ 50,000 from the Nixon campaign. They said they were misled into believing they had acted with state sanction on behalf of a White House administration that was concerned about American security and sympathized with Cuban refugees.

In 1983, after his pardons were denied by Presidents Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter, Mr. Martínez, who was still with the CIA at the time of the Watergate break-in, found himself pardoned by President Ronald Reagan.

The pardon granted because Mr Martínez was considered the least guilty of the defendants restored his right to vote. Despite the ordeal, he was proud of a Watergate souvenir – a golden lucky clover with the words “Good luck Richard Nixon” in Spanish written on it.

Eugenio Rolando Martínez Careaga was born on July 7, 1922 in what is now the Artemisa province in western Cuba. Before Castro’s rise, he was exiled as a critic of the dictator Fulgencio Batista. He later returned to Cuba, but left the country again in 1959 to oppose Castro’s newly established regime.

“My mother and father were not allowed to leave Cuba,” he wrote in a memoir published in Vanity Fair. “It would have been easy for me to get them out. That was my specialty. But my bosses at the company – the CIA – said I could be caught and tortured, and if I talk I could jeopardize other operations. So my mother and father died in Cuba. This is how orders go. I follow the instructions. “

He is survived by three daughters, Alicia Garcia Bernaza, Eneida Lopez and Yolanda Toscano; one son, Danny Martínez; and four grandchildren.

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Entertainment

Ricky Powell, 59, Dies; Chronicled Early Hip-Hop and Downtown New York

Ricky Powell, 59, Dies; Chronicled Early Hip-Hop and Downtown New York

Ricky Powell, the zelig from downtown New York who used his camera to document the early years of hip hop’s rise as well as a host of other subcultural scenes and the celebrities and marginalized figures who populated the city, was found dead Monday in his West Village apartment. He was 59 years old.

The death was confirmed by his manager and archivist Tono Radvany, who said a cause was still pending. Mr. Powell learned that he had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease last year and that he had ongoing problems with his heart.

Mr. Powell – often affectionately referred to as “The Lazy Hustler” – exuded New York charm and courage. As a die-hard hiker, he hit the sidewalk with his camera and took photos of everything he liked: superstars, well-dressed passers-by, animals.

Crucially, he was about to form the Beastie Boys, which catapulted him into an unexpected career as a tour photographer and key member of the entourage, earning him a front-row seat in the global hip-hop explosion that began in the mid-1980s.

“Even though Ron Galella was his hero – he was the original paparazzi – I always told Ricky that you had a taste for Weegee, too,” said the once ubiquitous New York street photographer Fab 5 Freddy, the early hip-hop impresario and a longtime friend and photo subject of Powell. “He was always in the inner circle, one of the few – if not the only one – who took photos.”

Mr. Powell’s photographs were intimate and casual, a precursor to the spontaneous hyperdocumentation of the social media era. They often felt completely in the moment and lived it instead of watching it. His subjects were varied: Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, who were captured on the street before a gallery opening; Francis Ford Coppola and his daughter Sofia at one of their early fashion shows; Run-DMC poses in front of the Eiffel Tower; a pre-superstar Cindy Crawford in a nightclub bathroom; People who sleep on park benches.

“He wasn’t trained, he didn’t know how to compose a recording, he didn’t know what an aperture was,” said Vikki Tobak, editor of the photo anthology “Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop”. (2018) and curator of a traveling exhibition of the same name, which also included the work of Mr. Powell. “But you could feel his curiosity about the people he was photographing, so none of that really mattered. He made people laugh and felt good; you can see all of this in his photos. “

Ricky Powell was born in Brooklyn on November 20, 1961 and grew up primarily in the West Village. He attended LaGuardia Community College in Queens and graduated from Hunter College in Manhattan with a degree in physical education.

His mother, Ruth Powell, was a schoolteacher – he didn’t know his father – but it was mostly a habit of downtown clubs like Max’s Kansas City, which Ricky brought with her when he was a kid. She is its only immediate survivor.

“I grew up fast, dude. Fast, ”Powell says in Ricky Powell: The Individualist, a life documentary that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last year but was delayed by the coronavirus pandemic. It is now planned for this year’s festival in June.

Josh Swade, director of the documentary, said Mr. Powell had raw social and cultural intelligence “because he was just out on the streets of New York defending himself in the 60s and 70s”.

Actress Debi Mazar met Mr. Powell while both teenagers were riding bikes around downtown Manhattan. They are “children of the city”. Together they went to the Paradise Garage, the Mudd Club and other hot spots. “Every door opened to Ricky,” said Ms. Mazar. “When we went to a club, we were the cool kids. He had this savoir faire, this electricity. “

Fab 5 Freddy recalled that “New York was a polarized place when we met,” but that Mr. Powell “was comfortable with black kids in a time when people weren’t just going to other places.”

He became a staple of the Fun Gallery, Danceteria, Roxy, and more, alongside graffiti writers, rappers, punk rockers, artists, and other creative eccentrics who populated New York’s vibrant, jagged downtown area. He played on the softball team of graffiti artist Futura 2000, the East Village Espadrilles.

“It was almost like he was invisible too,” said Futura, as he is now called. “He was always looking for a picture to take.”

After graduating from college, Mr. Powell sold ice cream from a street cart for a while and offered to add rum to the treat for an additional dollar. During his shift he photographed people on the street, including stars of the scene like Basquiat. He was already friends with the Beastie Boys, who had just signed a record deal with Def Jam, and one day he bought a plane ticket to accompany them on the street – they opened up to Run-DMC on the Raising Hell Tour – and never looked back.

Mr. Powell became a vital part of the Beastie Boys ecosystem – he partied hard, chased luggage at times, played one of the nerdy protagonists in the video “(You Must) Fight Your Right (To Party!)” And more. He was name checked on “Car Thief,” a track from the group’s 1989 album “Paul’s Boutique,” and was well known enough to have his own groupies.

“When he showed up, the party started,” said Radvany.

As he took photos, they quickly became essential artifacts. Mr. Powell was a documentary filmmaker for a demimonde who was often too busy living aloud to stop and think. Over the years his pictures have appeared in Paper, Ego Trip, Mass Appeal, Animal and other magazines. He also published several books, including “Oh Snap! Ricky Powell’s Rap Photography ”(1998),“ The Rickford Files: Classic New York Photographs ”(2000), and“ Public Access: Ricky Powell Photographs 1985-2005 ”(2005).

“I liked being part of the crew, just hanging out. The entourage itself, but also a photographer who takes relevant pictures at the same time, ”Powell says in the documentary. “I think you have to get a degree in humanistic behavior before you can master the two together.”

Futura said, “He had the gift of being very much a New Yorker. He embodied that for me. I know my own way. “

For several years in the 1990s, Mr. Powell had a public television show called “Rappin ‘With the Rickster,” in which he swapped a still camera for a video camera, but retained the loose, unpredictable energy it both attracted and generated his own. (A DVD of the show’s biggest hits was released in 2010.)

He had been by the Beasties’ side for a decade, but he split with them in 1995 when the group left their old noisy, disruptive, and rude ways behind. “It got ripe,” says Mr. Powell in the documentary. “They did what they did, but I still stayed me.”

After returning to New York, Mr. Powell struggled to find meaning and for a time struggled with drug addiction.

He hadn’t always been sure how to use his crucial archive of an under-documented era. “He could have turned the connections into a profitable operation,” said Swade. “But you have to show up for that.”

Eventually, he began working with Mr. Radvany, who set about organizing his archives, and partnering with brands that licensed his old work or hired him on new projects that channeled his eau de New York energy. He also shared live slide show presentations of his old pictures and told the stories behind the photos.

“When I started with him he was down and I had to help him build an income,” said Mr Radvany. “He loved social media. He was the lazy hustler – he could sit on his futon and sell prints. “

And he never moved out of his little West Village apartment, which was bursting with the vibe of life in the epicenter of the city: contact sheets, sneakers, basketball jerseys, vintage magazines and records, endless memories of the development of contemporary New York creative culture. Even after all these decades, he was one with the scene he was capturing.

“You didn’t see him as a photographer,” said Fab 5 Freddy. “He was a cool kid in the mix who took the camera out, took a few pictures, put it down and said, ‘Pass that joint over here.'”

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Health

Andrew Brooks, Who Developed a Covid Spit Check, Dies at 51

Andrew Brooks, Who Developed a Covid Spit Test, Dies at 51

After four years at the University of Rochester Medical Center, he returned to New Jersey to accept a position at Rutgers, and in 2009 joined the Cell and DNA Repository, a university-owned company that provides data management and analysis for biological research.

Updated

Jan. 31, 2021, 9:01 p.m. ET

Dr. Brooks was named the company’s chief operating officer, finding he had a flair for the business side of science. He expanded the company from just a few dozen employees to almost 250 and worked with almost all large pharmaceutical companies, among others.

The coronavirus outbreak>

Things to know about testing

Confused by Coronavirus Testing Conditions? Let us help:

    • antibody: A protein produced by the immune system that can recognize and attach to certain types of viruses, bacteria or other invaders.
    • Antibody test / serology test: A test that detects antibodies specific to the coronavirus. About a week after the coronavirus infects the body, antibodies start appearing in the blood. Because antibodies take so long to develop, an antibody test cannot reliably diagnose an ongoing infection. However, it can identify people who have been exposed to the coronavirus in the past.
    • Antigen test: This test detects parts of coronavirus proteins called antigens. Antigen tests are quick and only take five minutes. However, they are less accurate than tests that detect genetic material from the virus.
    • Coronavirus: Any virus that belongs to the Orthocoronavirinae virus family. The coronavirus that causes Covid-19 is known as SARS-CoV-2.
    • Covid19: The disease caused by the new coronavirus. The name stands for Coronavirus Disease 2019.
    • Isolation and quarantine: Isolation is separating people who know they have a contagious disease from those who are not sick. Quarantine refers to restricting the movement of people who have been exposed to a virus.
    • Nasopharyngeal smear: A long, flexible stick with a soft swab that is inserted deep into the nose to collect samples from the space where the nasal cavity meets the throat. Samples for coronavirus tests can also be obtained with swabs that do not go as deep into the nose – sometimes called nasal swabs – or with mouth or throat swabs.
    • Polymerase chain reaction (PCR): Scientists use PCR to make millions of copies of genetic material in a sample. With the help of PCR tests, researchers can detect the coronavirus even when it is scarce.
    • Viral load: The amount of virus in a person’s body. In people infected with the coronavirus, viral loads can peak before symptoms, if any.

“Most of the scientists I meet are not or otherwise interested in commercializing their activities,” said Dr. Jay Tischfield, Rutgers Professor and Executive Director of the Repository. “Andy understood that if you want something to come out and be used, you have to be a gamer. You can’t rely on other people. “

In 2018, the company, previously known as Rutgers University Cell and DNA Repository Infinite Biologics, decided with Dr. Brooks to go private as the new managing director. The university agreed, but held a significant stake in the new company called Infinity Biologix.

The resources and experience he gained in the repository made it Dr. Brooks was relatively easy to develop the Covid spit test, which he conducted in collaboration with two other companies, Spectrum Solutions and Accurate Diagnostics Labs.

Dr. Brooks was used to doing genetic testing through saliva, and Dr. Tischfield said “it wasn’t rocket science” to adapt these techniques to extract RNA from the coronavirus. The company even had thousands of tubes that could be used to collect samples.

After the FDA granted approval, Dr. Brooks faces another challenge: scaling. He immediately needed significantly more equipment and personnel to create the tests and process the results. A cheap call from the White House for help and a call from Dr. Multi-million dollar loan arranged by Tischfield allowed the company to quickly add additional analytical equipment and nearly double its workforce almost overnight.

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Entertainment

Robert Cohan, 95, Dies; Exported Up to date Dance to Britain

Robert Cohan, 95, Dies; Exported Contemporary Dance to Britain

Robert Cohan, a New York born dancer and choreographer who changed the course of British dance by helping found a renowned contemporary dance company and school in London in the late 1960s, died there on January 13th. He was 95 years old.

His nephew Roy Vestrich confirmed the death.

Mr. Cohan’s journey to running the London company began in 1954 when, as a key member of the Martha Graham Company, he met Robin Howard in New York, a wealthy grandson of former Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and a great fan of Graham’s work.

Almost a decade later, Mr. Howard sponsored a company trip to the Edinburgh Festival and a subsequent season in London, and was so encouraged by the success of the visit that he suggested Ms. Graham set up a studio there.

Mr. Cohan had taught at the Graham School although he had continued to dance with it, and both Mrs. Graham and Mr. Howard agreed that he should be the director of the London Outpost. In May 1966, in a studio on Berner’s Place near Oxford Street, Mr. Cohan began teaching Graham Technique – with an emphasis on weighted movements emanating from the spine and pelvis.

Over the next year, in a 2019 interview with The Guardian, Mr. Cohan said he and Mr. Howard spoke “every night with good wine” about expanding the company and finding a permanent home for it.

They settled in a former British Army drilling hall near Euston Station in central London and called it The Place to house both a school and a new company they founded, the London Contemporary Dance Group, later London Contemporary Dance Theater to accommodate.

The company debuted in 1969 at the Adeline Genée Theater in East Grinstead, Sussex, south of London, and received good critical reviews. Mr. Cohan, who commuted between New York and London while continuing to perform with the Graham Company, decided to devote himself exclusively to the British company.

The London company initially performed pieces from the works of Graham and other choreographers, but Mr. Cohan soon decided that in future they would only offer works that had been specially created for their dancers. As part of this new policy, The Place became a greenhouse for nurturing local talent and spawned major choreographers such as Richard Alston, Siobhan Davies, Darshan Singh Buller, Robert North and Aletta Collins.

The company toured the UK under Mr. Cohan, exposing audiences to contemporary dance for the first time in many cases.

“He started a school, founded a company, introduced the Graham technique in the UK, choreographed and bred a new generation of modern dance style choreographers, and promoted a contemporary dance boom in the 1970s,” said Debra Craine, chief executive officer Dancer critic of the London Times said in an interview. “Its importance and influence are almost incalculable.”

Handsome and charismatic, with long hair and the platform shoes that were trendy in the late 1960s and 1970s, Mr Cohan made The Place a creative hub not only for dancers and choreographers, but also for musicians, artists and filmmakers with common interests in dance. Composer Peter Maxwell Davies, photographer Anthony Crickmay and filmmaker Bob Lockyer, who recorded a number of Mr. Cohan’s dances for the BBC, were among the artists in Mr. Cohan’s circle.

Mr. Cohan was a prolific choreographer whose work was popular with audiences. Perhaps his most important piece was “Cell” (1969), which was created with two of his frequent collaborators, the designer Norbert Chiesa and the lighting designer John B. Read, and based on Richard Lloyd’s music. He encouraged his dancers to work on both experimental and mainstream creations.

The London Contemporary Dance Theater gave its first American tour in July 1977. “During the two-day debut engagement of this young British company at the American Dance Festival, there was never a dull moment,” wrote Anna Kisselgoff in the New York Times in her review from New London, Connecticut, in which Mr. Cohan as “the highly individual choreographer of unusual scope and depth “.

Allen Robertson and Donald Hutera wrote in their authoritative survey “The Dance Handbook” in 1989 that Mr. Cohan’s “pragmatic commitment to promoting dance and nurturing new talent in Britain was as important as the work of Ninette de Valois and Marie Rambert” , the founders of the Royal Ballet and Ballet Rambert.

Robert Paul Cohan was born in Manhattan on March 26, 1925. (Arrived just before midnight, he had an official birth date of March 27th, shared his family so he could later say he had two birthdays and was happy to celebrate both.) He was the eldest of three children from Walter and Billie (Osheyack) Cohan and grew up in Brooklyn. His mother worked for the US Postal Service and his father was a printer.

Robert took dance classes from a young age and was a fan of Fred Astaire, but he wasn’t seriously interested in dance until he was transferred to the UK to develop technical skills as part of the Army Specialized Training Program during World War II.

In London he saw Sadler’s Wells Ballet (the forerunner of the Royal Ballet) perform Robert Helpmann’s “Miracle in the Gorbals”. Inspired by this experience, he began his education at the Martha Graham School after leaving the army in 1946.

“I had this revelation,” he said in the Guardian interview, “that I would do it for the rest of my life.” His decision to turn down a job with the Veterans Administration and become a dancer sparked a two-year conflict with his family.

Within a few months, Graham had asked him to join their company, and he was soon one of their regular partners. Mr. Cohan’s appearance as Poetic Lover in Graham’s Deaths and Entrances “gave new meaning to the whole work,” wrote John Martin in a Times review. He added, “He dances admirably and acts with an engaging simplicity.”

When the Graham Company was not performing, Mr. Cohan danced on Broadway in the musicals “Shangri-La” and “Can-Can” and in 1957 worked in cabaret in Cuba with Jack Cole’s jazz dance company. (He described the experience as dancing “in a G-string for the mafia. ”)

Mr. Cohan began choreographing in the early 1950s and made his debut at the American Dance Festival with the solo “Perchance to Dream”. He wanted to teach and choreograph independently and left the Graham company in 1957, which infuriated Graham. According to one report, she scratched his back with her nails when they parted; Not a weakling, he should have scratched her back.

In 1962 he returned to the company, although in the same year he founded his own small troupe and from 1961 to 1965 headed the dance department of the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.

In 1966, Mr. Cohan became co-director of the Martha Graham Dance Company, and he continued to dance with it until he officially left in 1969 when he dedicated himself to his role as director of the school and company at The Place.

In the next two decades he created more than 30 works for the London Contemporary Dance Theater, including “Stages” (1971), “Stabat Mater” (1975), Nympheas (1976) and “The Phantasmagoria” (1987) working for the dance companies Batsheva and Bat-Dor in Israel.

However, its success in generating a new contemporary dance audience in the UK, as well as new groups of choreographers, dancers and companies in the genre, meant that the London Contemporary Dance Theater now had to compete for funding in a far more diverse and crowded sector, as well the International Dance Umbrella Festival in London.

Mr. Cohan resigned from the company in 1989, returned to head the company in 1992 and left the company in 1994 in a dispute with the British Arts Council, the company’s main funding agency. The company was later wound up and a new downsized force from Mr. Alston took its place.

Mr. Cohan retired to a farmhouse in the Cevennes region in south-central France and restored it and shared it with his colleague, Mr. Chiesa. He continued to choreograph for the Scottish Ballet and the Yorke Dance Project, for which he created a series of solos via Zoom last year during the pandemic.

He became a British citizen in 1989 and knighted in 2019

In addition to Mr. Vestrich, his nephew, his nieces Lee and Lesley Vestrich and their children and grandchildren, Mr. Cohan, survive.

When asked in 2019 if he wanted to continue choreographing, Mr. Cohan replied: “Absolutely. That’s what I live for. “

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Entertainment

Pauline Anna Strom, Composer of Enduring Digital Sounds, Dies at 74

Pauline Anna Strom, Composer of Enduring Electronic Sounds, Dies at 74

Ms. Strom did not address her blindness (“Blindness is more of a nuisance to me than anything,” she once said), although mastering her synthesizers was an experimental process, since in the 1980s when the instruments were still relatively new ‘There were no user manuals for the blind. Ultimately, she thought, her poor eyesight made her music worse.

“In my opinion, my hearing and my inner visualization have developed to a higher level than might otherwise have been the case,” she said in 1986 in a rare interview in her early career to the publication Eurock, also technical standpoint. It is entirely possible to program synthesizers and effects devices, precisely record your own work, and use a mixer. I do all of this with sound. “

“Indeed,” she added, “I prefer to work in the dark.”

Pauline Anna Tuell was born on October 1, 1946 in Baton Rouge, La., The daughter of Paul and Marjorie (Landry) Tuell. Growing up in Kentucky in a Roman Catholic household, she said chants and other types of church music influenced her musical ideas, as did the works of Bach, Chopin, and others.

She was married twice, to Bob Strom and then to Kevin Bierl, but the dates of these marriages and how they ended, like many details of their life, are hard to come by. She moved to San Francisco when her husband – it is unclear which one – was stationed there during the military. Withdrawn by nature, she lived in the same apartment in San Francisco for decades. (“Thank goodness this town is in control of the rent,” she told the listentothis.info website in 2018.)

Her early musical endeavors included some do-it-yourself sound effects like in “Emerald Pool,” but she gradually became more adept at using the multiple synthesizers she had accumulated to get the sound she wanted. She was influenced by the work of the German band Tangerine Dream and the German composer Klaus Schulze, pioneers of electronic music.

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Entertainment

Cicely Tyson, an Actress Who Shattered Stereotypes, Dies at 96

Cicely Tyson, an Actress Who Shattered Stereotypes, Dies at 96

“It’s easy,” she said. “I always try to be true to myself. I learned from my mother: “Never lie, no matter how bad it is. Never lie to me, OK? You’ll be happier that you told the truth. ‘That stayed with me, and it will stay with me as long as I am lucky enough to be here. “

Cicely Tyson was born in East Harlem on December 19, 1924, the youngest of three children to William and Theodosia (also known as Frederica) Tyson, immigrants from the Caribbean island of Nevis. Her father was a carpenter and painter and her mother was a domestic worker. Her parents separated when she was 10 years old and the children were raised by a strictly Christian mother who did not allow movies or dates.

After graduating from Charles Evans Hughes High School, Cicely became a model and has appeared in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and elsewhere. In the 1940s she studied at the Actors Studio. Her first role was on NBC’s Frontiers of Faith in 1951. Her disapproving mother threw her out.

After small film and television parts in the 1950s, she appeared in 1961 with James Earl Jones and Louis Gossett Jr. in the original New York cast of Jean Genet’s “The Blacks”. It was the longest-running off-Broadway drama of the decade, earning 1,408 performances. Ms. Tyson played Stephanie Virtue, a prostitute, for two years and won a Vernon Rice Award in 1962 that kicked off her career.

She helped found the Harlem Dance Theater after the murder of Dr. King in 1968. In 1994, a building in East Harlem where she lived as a child was named after her. it and three others were rehabilitated for 58 poor families. In 1995, a magnet school she supported in East Orange, New Jersey, was renamed the Cicely Tyson School of Performing and Fine Arts.

Her later television roles included that of Ophelia Harkness in half a dozen episodes of the longstanding ABC legal drama “How to Get Away With Murder,” for which she was repeatedly nominated for Emmys and other awards for outstanding guest or supporting actresses (2015) -19 ) and in the role of Doris Jones in three episodes of “House of Cards” (2016).

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Health

Christina Crosby, 67, Dies; Feminist Scholar Wrote of Turning into Disabled

Christina Crosby, 67, Dies; Feminist Scholar Wrote of Becoming Disabled

Christina Crosby, an athletic woman who had just turned 50, was three miles on her cycling program near her Connecticut home when her front spokes caught a branch. The bike stopped and threw Dr. Crosby on the sidewalk. The impact hit her face and snapped at her neck. Immediately she was paralyzed for the rest of her life.

That was in 2003. She lost the use of her leg muscles and much of her upper body. But over time, she regained limited function in her arms and hands. And two years after the accident, she returned to work part-time as a professor of English literature and feminist studies, gender and sexuality studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn.

Finally – by dictating with speech recognition software – she was able to write a treatise: “One body, undone: Live on after great pain” (2016). It was an unsentimental examination of what she called the “surreal neurological wasteland” that she was poured into, and that forced her to search for her self-esteem.

In bottomless grief over everything she had lost, Dr. Crosby preserved her intellect and her ability to speak. Yet sometimes her pain was beyond the reach of language.

“I feel an unassailable loneliness,” she wrote, “because I will never be able to adequately describe the pain I am suffering, nor can anyone accompany me into the realm of pain.”

Late last month she was hospitalized in Middletown with a cystitis and learned she had pancreatic cancer, her partner Janet Jakobsen said.

Dr. Crosby died a few days later, on January 5th. She was 67 years old.

In her book, Dr. Crosby, to learn proper lessons about overcoming difficulties, or to come wiser from their disastrous injury. That made it a prominent text in disability studies and activism.

The typical disability narrative “leads the disturbed subject through painful exams to livable accommodation and lessons learned, and all too often the note sounds triumphant,” she wrote. “Don’t believe it.”

Christina Crosby was born on September 2, 1953 in Huntingdon, rural central Pennsylvania. Her father, Kenneth Ward Crosby, was a professor of history at Juniata College, where her mother, Jane (Miller) Crosby, taught home economics.

Christina was athletic as a child. She and her older brother Jefferson were age-related and physically competitive.

Christina attended Swarthmore College, where she majored in English and graduated in 1974. She wrote a column for the student newspaper called “The Feminist Slant” and helped found Swarthmore Gay Liberation. As a strange feminist, she remained committed to social justice and sexual liberation throughout her life.

She studied at Brown University in Providence, RI, where she completed her PhD in English in 1982. There she was part of a socialist feminist caucus that dealt with issues such as domestic violence. She and the caucus set up a hotline for abused women and established a women’s shelter called Sojourner House in 1976, one of the first of its kind in the country.

During this time she met Elizabeth Weed, then director of the Sarah Doyle Women’s Center in Brown, where the feminist caucus was holding its meetings. They were partners for more than 17 years and continued their relationship long after Dr. Crosby went to Wesleyan in 1982. Dr. Crosby’s papers are said to be kept at the Pembroke Center in Brown.

Dr. Crosby’s dissertation with Brown became her first book, “The Ends of History: Victorians and ‘the Woman Question'” (1991), which examined how Victorian literature excluded women from public life and raised questions about how history is told .

Though hired by Wesleyan’s English department, Dr. Crosby became a central part of the university’s women’s studies program, which she established as a major and later redesigned as a feminist, gender and sexuality study.

“She was the heart and soul of this program for decades,” said Natasha Korda, an English professor at Wesleyan University, in an interview.

“She was also a rock star on campus,” she added. “She was charismatic and lively, she had so much energy and she cut a very dashing figure.”

The students loved her, said Dr. Korda because she could make complex theoretical arguments “crystal clear” and because “she was not only an incredible storyteller, but also a great conversationalist”.

In the early 1990s, one of her students was the writer Maggie Nelson, whom Dr. Crosby advised on her thesis on denominational poetry. Dr. Crosby initially had little regard for denominational writing, but she later credited Ms. Nelson for opening her eyes to her worth when she began writing her memoir.

In 2003 the university faculty selected Dr. Crosby as chairman of the faculty. She chaired meetings and represented her colleagues in meetings with the President and the Board of Trustees.

She had just started her year-long tenure in this position when she had her bicycle accident. “Your life was brilliant,” said Dr. Jakobsen, Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard, who has been Dr. Crosby’s partner and is her only immediate survivor. “Christina was a person who burned very brightly.”

In an eerie parallel, Dr. Crosby’s brother Jeff, an attorney with whom she was always closely associated, was multiple sclerosis in his twenties and quadriplegic in his late 40s. She wrote in her memoir that after her accident, her childhood fantasy of being her brother’s twin – Dr. Weed had once referred to them both as “beautiful physical specimens” – “was maliciously recognized because there we were, each with seriously incapable damage to the central nervous system, each in a wheelchair. “

Mr Crosby died in 2010 at the age of 57. It was his death, seven years after her accident, that Dr. Got Crosby to begin her memoir. It was unanimously chosen by a committee of Wesleyan students, faculties, and staff as the book all incoming students would read in 2018.

Towards the end of the book she wrote about the struggle between the fear that she would stop to mourn her past life, which would mean that she would “have come to terms with my deeply changed body” and the fear that she would not stop to grieve, a sign that she refused to move on and perhaps didn’t want to live.

“To move on, I have to actively forget who I was,” she concluded. “I am no longer what I used to be – and yet I no longer think about it. All of us who continue to live are not what we were, we will, always will. “