When the Ritz Theatre Company raises the curtain on Trolls and Men on Friday, October 9, the audience will be watching something no one has seen before: a world premiere about a small Norwegian theatre company that refused to be silenced during the Nazi occupation. The play's director, Lori Aleixo-Howard, is also the Ritz's full-time Director of Development, and she wears both hats with evident pleasure.

Long before actors had a stage of their own, carved figures were already speaking for the gods, and four thousand years later they still know how to make us cry. Every art form has its embarrassing relatives, and for the theatre that relative has long been the puppet.

How a scholarly experiment in a Florentine drawing room became the most extravagant art form on earth, and why, four centuries and countless obituaries later, it is still singing. Opera has a reputation problem, and it has had one for most of its life.

How a riding master's circle of sawdust in Georgian London grew into the big top, the flying trapeze and the theatrical spectacle we now call contemporary circus. The circus is one of the few art forms whose birthday we can name.

The performing arts are the ones that need you in the room. Everything difficult about them, and everything worth defending, follows from that requirement.

Dance is the only art whose instrument dies. That single fact explains almost everything about how it is made, taught, lost and fought over.