Fly with me, Peter Pan

Last night is a trip back to childhood memory land. A romance with the little boy  who dances without tripping,  sings without getting offkey,  flies around as if he owned the sky. He gets to have all the fun in the world and enjoys every single day of his life like there’s no tomorrow. More importantly, he doesn’t grow up and never stops believing in his dreams.

   With the sprinkling of some pixie dust, playing of  some swashbuckling music, and  of course flying, i watched   last night Ballet Philippines'  dance retelling of the beloved children’s classic Peter Pan at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) Main Theater. Delighting young and old for more than 100 years, Peter Pan is based on the tale by Sir James Matthew Barrie. The story revolves around the boy who never grew up and his magical, fun-filled adventures with the Darling children — Wendy, John, and Michael — as they meet Captain Hook, Smee, Tinkerbell, Tiger Lily, the Lost Boys, and the other denizens of Neverland.

Yes, there’s a lot of Peter Pan’s qualities that we admire and envy. Even as we grow up, we replay that one episode of our childhood wherein we believed in dreams and fairies and sunshine and clouds and green fields. Whether we admit it or not, we were once like Peter Pan. At one point in our lives, we felt invincible, ready to take on the world and to win the challenges ahead. We felt powerful, like a raging bull that never faltered in the face of its enemies. In more ways than one, Peter Pan will always be a part of us, a reminder of what and who we once were. He taught us to believe, to dream, and to live life to the fullest.

Nevertheless, there is one side of his character that is not-so-perfect. The so-called Peter Pan Syndrome or Puer aeternus is Latin for eternal boy, used in mythology to designate a child-god who is forever young; psychologically it refers to an older man whose emotional life has remained at an adolescent level, usually coupled with too great a dependence on the mother. The puer typically leads a provisional life, due to the fear of being caught in a situation from which it might not be possible to escape. He covets independence and freedom, chafes at boundaries and limits, and tends to find any restriction intolerable. Mythologically, Peter Pan is linked to...the young god who dies and is reborn...as well as to Mercury/Hermes, psychopomp and messenger of the gods who moves freely between the divine and human realms, and, of course, to the great goat-god Pan.... In early performances of Barrie's play, Peter Pan appeared on stage with both pipes and a live goat. Such undisguised references to the chthonic, often lascivious and far from childlike goat-god were, not surprisingly, soon excised from both play and novel.

  
My favorite lines from the 2003 Peter Pan film: 

Wendy: We must leave at once... before we, in turn, are forgotten.

Captain Hook: If I were you, I'd give up!

Peter: If you were me, I'd be ugly.

Wendy: Peter. You won't forget me, will you?

Peter: Me? Forget? Never.

Wendy: Will you ever come back?

Peter: To hear stories... About me.

Peter: Well I will not grow up! You cannot make me! I will banish you like Tinkerbell.

Wendy: I WILL NOT BE BANISHED!

Peter: Then go home. Go home and grow up. And take your feelings with you!

Wendy: My parents wanted me to grow up.

Captain Hook: Growing up is such a barbarous business, full of inconvenience... and pimples.