“traditional history offers a view from above…a number of the new historians are concerned with ‘history from below’, in other words, with the views of ordinary people and with their experience of social change.” (Burke 4)

So let me get this straight.  My story is “from below” if I’m not one of the privileged, straight, white, western men?  Yes, it’s a charming tweet-sized binary constructed to portray a simple difference between traditional history and new history, and I certainly appreciate the impulse to include and uncover histories that have not, thus far, been deemed worthy of the canon, but there’s something in it that feels so condescending.  Even in deconstructing the established hierarchy, he pays homage to it.  He does concede problems with the term, both in connotations and in definition of which “below” to choose in any given scenario.  E4r3\ (My new kitten Matilda felt like assisting with this post, so I figured I would leave in her contribution.  Where, after all, is the kitten’s-eye view of history to be written if not here?  She is awfully small, so perhaps “from below” is fairly literal in her case.)   Later, Burke addresses the everyday – and perhaps this is a place to draw a less divisive binary.  Traditional history deals with the exceptional while new history concerns itself with the everyday?  No, there is still the implication of a higher value for the material of the traditional approach.  Yes… even the deconstruction needs deconstructing.  Just another in a string of readings this week that seem designed to remind me of my interest in semiotics, structuralism and (especially) poststructuralism.  While some see a dark and uneasy nihilism in the uncertainty of poststructuralism, I find a reassuring freedom.  If no meaning is fixed or ultimately, definitively knowable, then change is always possible.  And if other people won’t accept the change, it doesn’t particularly matter: “Our minds do not reflect reality directly.  We perceive the world only through a network which varies from one culture to another.” (Burke 5)  Context, context, context.  Reality isn’t a fixed point, so why feel hamstrung by it?  When I look at the comedies of Bekah Brunstetter, an interesting and energetic young playwright, I see an impulse that seems to fit in this discussion.  She sets up old tropes and signposts of femininity, only to turn them on their ear or squoosh them under the heel of her characters’ sensible shoes.  In one play – You May Go Now – she introduces us to Dottie, “a bake-from-scratch throwback to the halcyon TV mom days of Donna Reed and June Cleaver, complete with a starched apron over her pleated dress,”[1] and her daughter Betty, whom she is attempting to raise to be the perfect housewife.  Together they make icing and talk about how to please a man:

“When he arrives home, be gay and a little more interesting for him.  His boring day may need a lift and one of your duties it to provide it… Catering for his comfort will provide you with intense personal satisfaction.  Speak in a low, soothing voice.  Don’t ask him questions about his actions, or question his judgment or integrity.  Don’t dare judge him.  Don’t neglect to – don’t neglect him.  If you have your own goddamn wishes for yourself, for your future, push them deep inside and make dinner.  Keep them to yourself…Remember, he is the master of the house.” (Brunstetter 15)

Of course, as we go along, we discover that Dottie is not all she seems.  In fact, she was a driven career woman who never cooked and who had no intention of having children; a fact that led her husband to commit suicide.  So she kidnapped a child, called her Betty and has been raising her in this hermetically sealed, Donna Reed bubble for fifteen years.  As the truth comes out, both Dottie and Betty are left completely out to sea, and the structure of the blissful domestic goddess (a distinctly patriarchal construction… constructed “from above,” one might say) is irreversibly shattered.  Though destructive, there is a playfulness in the way she points out the absurdities of the accepted too-neat-and-tidy narrative, replacing it with a fractured set of questions about her characters’ places in the world.   This sort of using narrative to break the narrative could prove itself to be a useful tool in attempting to write a history that incorporates some of these viewpoints “from below.”

Okay… so apparently this blogging site isn’t great in terms of getting access to older posts… so I’m posting a post with chronological links to my Russia posts… instead of writing my lectures.  There is just so much efficiency here, I could scream.

1) Learning Russian

2) Packing

3) Starting to Begin

4) Looks Like We Made It

5) Ya Chaika

6) Saturday

7) Russian Dopplegangers

8) Drinking Out of a Fire Hydrant

9) Our First Full Week - GO!

10) Just Another Manic Tuesday

11) Be the Shoelace

12) Technical Difficulties

13) Read Your Tickets Well

14) Die Dreigroschenoper

15) The Cow Says

16) Russia Day

17) Panda Porn

18) Now is the Winter of Something Russian

19) My Russian Dreamboat

20) Russian Dumpling

21) Bears on Unicycles

22) Stanislavsky and the Bolshoi

23) Long Arm Tourist Photos

24) Chekhov Fail

25) Ya Chaika…For Realsies

26) Clever Blog Title Here

27) Beginning of the End

28) St. Petersburg

29) The Master and Margarita

30) Canada Day

31) Last Day

I did that all in my own HTML… so hopefully all the links work.  Anyway, if you’re interested… there they are.  I wanna go back.  Perhaps if I put on a kerchief and click the heels of my fuzzy boots together three times muttering "Никакое место как Москва" (There’s no place like Moscow)…

This morning we left the dorm at 10:30 am and dragged 20 people through the metro to the Novodevichy Cemetery where people like Stanislavsky, Nemirovich-Danchenko and Chekhov are buried (among countless other super cool people).  I always feel weird in historical cemeteries like this – taking pictures of grave sites and such, wandering around these monuments to remarkable people who are just gone (and in this cemetery, these people are grouped according to what they did in life – so the theatre and literature folks are together, the politicians are together, etc.) makes you feel so temporary.  But it was still nice to go pay our respects to the guys whose work brought us all there.

After taking a little time to contemplate and wander, we went back to the metro and headed to the flea market.  Yup.  Cemetery… flea market.  It was one of those days.  But we’ve all been waiting for this fabled flea market.  You have to pay 10 rubles to get in, and then you just wander through booths and booths and booths… it’s frickin’ ginormous!  I found all kinds of ridiculous kitschy, touristy things there… and I’m fairly certain that many of you blog readers will be getting to know some of these items extremely well.  We spent about two hours wandering around and haggling with vendors (I didn’t get as into the haggling as some people did – for some people it became an all-out mission).  Then we headed back to the dorm, at which point Aaron, JT and I headed out to the park for one last scholarly session over cigars and beer (no cigar for me… but I did enjoy the beer!).  I went to a hotel to exchange my rubles into Euros (so I’ll have something while we’re in the Paris airport tomorrow) and then I slowly worked toward packing.  In fact, I’m still slowly working toward packing right now.  I’m sure you’ll note how much my blog writing is assisting in the packing process.  Ah well.  The bus will be here to take us to the airport at 4:30am… so I’ve got about eight hours to get my act together.  I’m sure I can procrastinate that long!

July 1 is Canada Day, so over on my side of the dorm (dubbed Canada for the 5 Canadian students living here) it was a pretty big deal.  Plus, it was one of the Canadians’ birthday, so there was just all kinds of merriment starting first thing in the morning.  I branched off on my own for most of the day, doing some last minute touristing.  I went to the Kremlin around noon, and it was so damn hot I could hardly see straight by the time I got into the fortress.  But I managed to find an overpriced water bottle and I was back in business.  I visited all the cathedrals in the main part of the Kremlin, saw a giant bell and a giant cannon… it was all a pretty good time.  Then I headed over to this contemporary art gallery we had heard about on the other side of town.  I hopped the metro, walked and found the place.  It used to be a wine bottling factory, and it has been turned into what seems like sort of an artists’ collective.  There are still a bunch of buildings and they all seem to house different galleries and such.  Unfortunately, the signs are almost all in Russian, and there’s almost nothing directional, so I couldn’t quite figure out how things worked.  After walking into about 4-5 wrong doors (offices, closed exhibits, weird basements), I finally lost my nerve and just left.  It’s too bad that little excursion didn’t work out, but the place itself seemed pretty cool and dynamic – for Greenville folks: maybe kinda like Artbomb on steroids.

Having had enough of wandering around in the sweltering heat, I hopped the metro back to the dorm, took a shower, made dinner and generally vegged out for a little bit.  In the evening we headed out to a bar for a little birthday/Canada Day celebration.  I stayed long enough for one large beer and a little conversation before again returning to the dorm where I made the extreme sacrifice of helping some friends polish off their vodka.  It was a sweaty, though perfectly lovely day.

On the 30^th, I told myself that I could sleep until I couldn’t sleep anymore, which was a lovely experience after the last couple of days of late nights, early mornings, and weird sleep.  I still didn’t sleep as late as I probably would have liked, but I did end up a little more rested, so I settled for that.  I spent a little time at Starbucks doing the internet thang before we headed down to the MXAT for our 2:00 “graduation.”  It was fairly anti-climactic, but it was fun nonetheless.  We just gathered in the American studio with JT, the head of the school (who was also our theatre history lecturer) and our two liaisons for some light munchies and champagne.  We each received a letter confirming our participation in the MXAT program as well as a pin for the Month in Moscow program with the MXAT logo on it.  Then they brought in a stack of posters for us to dig through.  Sadly, only two of the posters were for plays we had seen (they were both for Three Penny… and I didn’t get either of them… so sad), so most of us just got random MXAT posters that we can’t really put up anywhere since we didn’t see the plays and it would be weird.  But still, they say MXAT, so that’s cool. 

After the reception part of the group went to a cat circus (I know you’re shocked, but I was not part of that half) and the other half just sort of did their own thing.  I did a little shopping and wandering for a few hours – pretty low key actually.  Then eight of us met at the theatre to go see the final preview night of their newest show: The Master and Margarita.  There are a few crazy things about this.  1) This play is an adaptation of the novel by Bulgakov which is considered one of the most important Russian books of the 20^th century.  On a friend’s recommendation (thanks Michael!) I read it before I came, so I was pretty jazzed to see it on stage.  2) This production was directed by a Hungarian director who doesn’t speak Russian.  But he does speak English, so he thinks in Hungarian, speaks in English and then has a translator make it into Russian.  That just amazes me.  3) The way they do previews here is crazy.  In the States, the previews are the performances that run immediately preceding the show’s official opening.  Here, they did three preview performances this week… and then they won’t perform again until their official opening in September!  And what’s even more amazing is that I am absolutely certain that all of the people who were in this standing room only audience will be back to the see the official opening in September.   

So, the show ended up being wonderful.  We had to sit on the stairs in the upper balcony, which was fine.  It was actually less uncomfortable than I’ve been in some of the smaller theatres when I actually had seats.  The technical aspects of the play were above and beyond almost anything we’ve seen – walls coming in and out, a full subway car entering and revolving on stage, live and pre-recorded video on the screens – everything was so epic.  It really did feel like watching a movie on stage.  And I was so glad that I had read the book, since the story is a pretty complex one, and I know a lot of other people in the group had a hard time following it.  But I recognized most of the scenes and characters, and I think I even got some of the jokes by virtue of my familiarity with the text.  It was a really wonderful production, and I can’t imagine how much more wonderful it will be in a couple of months.  It was crazy that we were essentially getting a midway peek into a newly rehearsed piece.  There were some hiccups along the way – some things didn’t feel as polished as some of the other things we’ve seen, but that somehow made it even cooler.  And it was pretty great to have the last show we saw in Russia be something so quintessentially Russian, and something still in the process of being developed. 

After the show, two of us stuck around and took our pictures with different photos of MXAT greats in the lobby.  We just geeked out in a big way.  I mean, it wasn’t just Stanislavsky and Chekhov – the predictable ones.  Oh no.  It was Michael Chekhov, Olga Knipper, Maria Knebel, Vsevelod Meyerhold, Mikhail Bulgakov… yeah… it was really nerdy.  But it was way too much fun.

I hardly even know how to begin writing about everything we crammed into the three-ish days we spent in St. Petersburg. Buckle up, this is gonna be a long one.

Well… Sunday night ten students and our MXAT liaison Nastya boarded a sleeper train bound for St. Petersburg.  The whole experience was a little bit weird – the tiny cabins, the tiny beds, the bunks.  We chatted for a little while, but mostly, we just slept.  I guess that’s what you do in a sleeper car.  I had the top bunk, which was an odd feeling.  For the most part, though, I slept pretty hard, and woke up around 6:00am just outside of St. Petersburg.  I got some tea in one of the nifty glass and sterling silver (or something) mugs that hearken back to the tsars, and we trundled off the train and onto a van which took us straight to a hotel (not ours) for a bitchin’ breakfast buffet.  After the buffet, we met our guide Olga to begin a bus tour.  At this point, I was feeling a bit on the delirious side.  What city are we in?  Why does my back hurt so much?  What the hell is going on!?!  Still, she led us around, showing us all kinds of sights.  We saw the fourth largest dome in the world (St. Isaac’s), we saw the burial place of the Tsars (Cathedral of Peter and Paul), we saw sphinxes along the river and a creepy statue of Peter the Great.  Unfortunately, she kept us driving for a bit too long near the end of the tour, so several of us fell asleep.  I felt bad about it later, but it was just physically impossible for me to keep my eyes open at that point.  After the tour we were dropped off at the hostel, which turned out to be a pretty good setup – I might venture to say it was the best hostel I’ve stayed in.  Of course, my last hostel experience was a little over 10 years ago… but still.  At this point, a small group of us headed out to explore.  We grabbed lunch at an Irish pub on our street called O’Hooligans and then we walked over to the Cathedral of Christ the Savior on the Spilled Blood.  A decommissioned Eastern Orthodox church, it was built on the site of the fatal attack on Alexander II.  On the outside, it is definitely a relative of St. Basil’s in Moscow.  On the inside, EVERY SINGLE INCH of wall and ceiling is covered in mosaic – embellishments, Bible stories, saints, icons… it was unreal.  We strolled down to the Kazan Cathedral after that which is still a fully operational Orthodox church complete with some really special icon at which there was a giant line of people waiting to pray.  We also tried to go to the Russian National Library, but they didn’t seem to allow people to enter without a library card, so we settled for taking pictures of the statue of Catherine the Great outside before heading back to the hostel for a nap.  After the nap we grabbed dinner at Café Romanov (so Russian… even though I ate vegetarian sushi) and then met up with the rest of the group at “A Traditional English Pub.”  For realsies.  A little before midnight (when it was still fairly bright outside, by the way – maybe it looked like about 5:30-6:00pm) we strolled down to the dock on one of the canals to buy tickets for an English language boat tour.  This ended up being one of the highlights of the city – everything was lit up so beautifully, we got to watch the bridges open for the night, and some guy flashed us from a bridge.  We weren’t allowed to stand up on the boat because some of the bridges under which we passed were so low that I could reach up and touch them from my seat.  That was a trip.  At 2:30 – when it still wasn’t completely night-like outside – we hit the pillow at the hostel… one full day.

Tuesday morning we were up and at ‘em (and by “‘em” I mean the breakfast buffet at the hotel down the street again) before walking over to the Hermitage Museum.  The Hermitage was a little like Versailles and the Louvre all in the same place.  It was breathtaking.  And at the end of all the fancy rooms we were left to our own devices to wander around the rooms full of Renoirs, Monets, Picassos, etc.  At this point, Andrew, Greg and I went to lunch at an Italian restaurant with the intention of heading to a theatre museum afterwards, but upon consulting our guidebooks again, we realized that the theatre museum was closed on Tuesdays, so we started looking for something else to do.  I must admit, I considered not posting the decision we made, since my parents are reading the blog, but the fact is, it is an hilarious story for which I paid 100 rubles, so I’m going to tell it!  So, Andrew tentatively suggested that we attend an Erotica museum that he had found in his book.  Greg and I shrugged and agreed, so we walked for a while and ended up finding the address, but we couldn’t find the museum.  Then a toothless guy smoking on the corner said something about a museum and directed us around the corner and down a flight of stairs.  Now – the guidebook had said something about the museum being in the same building as a VD clinic, but we assumed that it had to be in an old one, or perhaps on a different floor.  This assumption turned out to be erroneous.  The museum and the VD clinic were one and the same.  When we walked in and inquired with the nurse behind the desk, she plopped a paper down on the counter welcoming us to Russia’s first erotica museum, giving us the price, and directing us to put on some protective booties over our shoes.  After we complied, she directed us down the hall… the “museum” turned out to be about two hallways worth of glass cases full of dirty little tchotchkes – lots of sexual positions and erections and stuff.  I was kinda hoping for some historical pieces a la In the Next Room, but there was none of that.  It was just someone’s dirty little collection.  The centerpiece of the collection, however, was a freestanding glass case with a jar inside.  This jar, they claimed, contained Rasputin’s penis.  Yup.  So, we looked at that for a little while, read the google translate English explaining their theories on how Rasputin might have been castrated (though not on how the result of that castration might have ended up in this creepy little VD clinic).  Oh, and PS – the clinic was fully operational.  We were not the only people in there, but we were definitely the only people not waiting to find out if we had Gonorrhea or something.  There were about 3-4 dudes sitting in there waiting for appointments or test results, and doctors and nurses came and went and interacted with them from time to time.  It was all kinds of surreal.  Then we went to a park across the street so that we could scrub that “museum” out of our brain.  That night the whole group grabbed dinner at a Georgian restaurant and then drinks back at the Irish pub for Greg’s birthday, and we turned in for the evening after another crazy day in Petersburg.

The third and final day began much the same way as the others – with a breakfast buffet.  Then we checked out of the hostel and loaded ourselves into a van that took us about an hour outside the city to Царское Село – the summer home of some of the tsars.  It turned out to be a little like a mini Versailles – in fact the rumor is that Elizabeth (a daughter of one of the tsars) was supposed to marry one of the Louises of France, but the marriage fell through so she decided to build a palace that would make Versailles look lame in comparison.  It was lovely, though ridiculously crowded.  That’s one thing we discovered about St. Petersburg – it’s much more of a touristy city than Moscow, so everywhere we went there were these enormous crowds.  And let me tell you, you learn a lot about people when they’re in a tour group.  French people will cut you if you get in the way of their seeing antique ceramics.  Once we wound our way through the house, we walked through the grounds and met back up with our bus, which took us to a mall in St. Petersburg where we grabbed lunch before hopping back on the train – this time it was a bullet train, so the trip that took eight hours on the way there took four hours on the way back.  On the train, there was some crazy Russian movie playing.  I tried to follow it with no sound, and I think I actually may have figured out some important elements about it, but overall, it seemed like a very strange movie.  When we got back to the dorms, some people were at a play, so I just ate and tried to get re-settled.  It ended up being a very drunk night for a lot of people, but I just had a beer with some of the grad students and had a perfectly lovely evening.

So… that’s the nutshell version of my adventures in St. Petersburg.  My two main regrets from the trip are as follows: 1) I never managed to stop moving long enough to buy anything with “St. Petersburg” on it – even a keychain.  2) I didn’t get a chance to go to this vegetarian restaurant I read about called “Idiot.”  But hey… I guess that gives me a reason to come back?  Whatever the case, it was a fantastic trip that I wish could have been about a day longer.  Now, we’re really in the home stretch: Thursday, Friday, Saturday… then Sunday we fly home.  Yikes! 

Well, yesterday was our final day of singing and acting with Sergei.  Singing was basically a recital… which was mostly a lot of fun.  The most fun for me were the people who didn’t consider themselves singers and seeing how far they’ve come in the last few weeks.  There are a lot more people in this group who sing than they think!  I personally didn’t rock my songs the way I had the week before in class, so I was a little disappointed in my own performance, but I still have the good work I did over the last few weeks as a benchmark to set for myself on the way to getting my voice back in shape.  And Marina had a lot of kind words for us all, so we all left with a pretty warm, fuzzy feeling.

For Sergei we did one final set of etudes (one involving a dead guy on a subway, my group’s involving an awkward elevator ride) and then we had individual evaluations with him.  Now, Sergei admitted that he hasn’t had the time to get to know us that he has with his Russian students, and it was quite obvious that he wasn’t setting out to point out our faults, but rather to give us all something positive to walk away with – and that was a-okay with me.  I’m not going to catalog everything he said about me… because it’ll just sound like me patting myself on the back, but I did appreciate that he commended me for not being afraid to be funny, not being afraid to look silly and being willing to sacrifice appearance for the scene – and as a comedian, that sure was nice to hear!

There was no show for me to see Friday night either, so I headed back to the dorm for a little dinner, spent a couple of hours doing interweb stuff at Starbucks, and then camped out for a scholarly beer with some of my fellow grad students.  It was a pretty chill evening all around.

Then Saturday we headed up to school for our last day of movement class with Vlad.  He had us watch a video of his first year students after they’d been working with him for seven months.  We could see the foundations at work that we had been learning… but the stuff these kids were able to do… YIKES!  You see, we were in elementary acrobatics training, and by the end of seven months, they were throwing each other all over the place!  It was unreal!  See, according to Stanislavsky, it’s good for actors to learn acrobatics, not only so that they have better control over their bodies, but so that they can overcome their fears.  And boy howdy… watching that video, things made a lot of sense.

Finally, we had our last class with the glimmering ball of joy – Misha.  He was both our first and our last acting class, and it ended up being a really emotional class.  We all presented our final monologues from Three Sisters.  I actually felt very good about mine – far better than I had felt about my song the day before.  Go figure.  And then we sat in a semi-circle and talked about what we would be taking back with us from Moscow.  I found that I was unable to participate in the conversation because every time I thought about opening my mouth I would get choked up.  One of the other grad students put it very well though when he said that we had all been so nervous when we got here – what was it going to be like?  And then we met Misha who was so generous and disarming and welcoming and alive, and that he wanted to bring back a little bit of Misha with him from Moscow.  I’m pretty sure we all agree on that front!

Class got out early, so we had some time to kill before the show that Aaron and JT and I were scheduled to see Saturday night, so I sat in the square journaling (and being approached by every beggar on Kamergersky street – one who seemed prepared to adapt his panhandling into loud slow Russian so that I could better understand.  Listen guy: as an American tourist I can tell you: louder and slower does not mean more understandable.)  Then Aaron, JT and I went to dinner, spent about an hour sitting on the boulevard at Pushkinskaya killing time and talking about the month before heading to the theatre.  It was at the same tiny little theatre where we had seen Death of Giraffe, and the place was PACKED.  The little wooden café chairs where we were seated in the front row were smooshed together and our knees were a little over a foot from the edge of the stage – then they put people on pillows on the floor in front of us and continued to set up extra chairs on the side of the seating… and this is a show that has been running since 2006!  I mean, holy moly!  I had a successful Russian interaction with the woman sitting next to me as I helped her and her husband locate their seats, so she assumed I spoke Russian – which was not a correct assumption on her part.  But she did speak English, and we had a very pleasant chat about the show and about theatre in Moscow in general.

The show we saw was the last Kremov production of the trip, this one was called Торги (Auction).  It was inspired by the issues that surrounded the building they were performing in, which had been a space that was taken away from a famous director during Soviet times.  The actors seemed to be sort of saying their goodbyes to the space, and then they began to dig up pieces of the theatre’s past – literally.  You see, when we entered, the entire stage was covered in plastic sheeting, and there was a huge mound of sand in the middle where there were sand sculptures of the building as well as different places around Moscow.  During the course of the show, they dug up oversized dolls of the three sisters, money, candles, a seagull (which really did seem alive in their hands) and a whole bunch of other things that had some tangential relation to Chekhov and/or Vasiliev (the director who had had the space taken from him).  They sang and even rapped sections of Chekhov’s text, and at one point they constructed a see-saw with the model of the building in question as the fulcrum.  They played on it up and down in amazing different ways, before they began to allow it to spin, with the actors flying through the space, supported by the weight of each other and help up by the theatre space.  It was another one of those plays that made me long for the text so I could fully understand everything they had done.  I caught a few of the jokes, and felt very savvy for doing so, but I really do hope I can come back here some day with a better understanding of the language.  That would take this experience to a whole new level.  Plus, as a special treat, we actually got to meet Dmitri Kremov at the end of the production!  It was just a quick handshake and introduction by our professor, but it sure was cool.  Aaron and I geeked out big time over it.

When we got back to the dorm we discovered that there was a giant round of the drinking game “Waterfall” being played on one end of the dorm, and there were some very drunk people involved in this whole process.  I’m not so much with the drinking games, so I just stopped in here and there before heading to bed.  A little after 1:00 I did have to let the world know that I was planning on going to sleep, so the noise level on our side of the floor would have to simmer down a little bit – I’m such a killjoy.  But I did manage to sleep pretty hard, if not very long, since I got up in the morning to head over to Starbucks for a little skyping.  I managed to skype with my parents and then with Rick, and then the pleasant surprise of getting to skype with my brother, sister-in-law and niece too!  And Anya has officially figured out my name, which made me want to weep right there in Starbucks!  That little girl is just the best thing ever.

So… tonight I hop the midnight train to St. Petersburg (well… it’s actually at 11:00, but still) and I’ll be there until Wednesday.  I’ll be offline during that time, but I’m sure I’ll have many exciting adventures to chronicle when I return!

Well let’s see.  Looking at my last post, I was right about one thing – I did start off Wednesday morning with my feet behind my head… only I did it on my own this time without the assistance of a large Russian man.  So that’s pretty special.  I didn’t quite make it this morning, but give me a break… this was the first time we’d had two days of movement in a row!  I’m lucky I’m able to sit upright.  Then instead of having acting class, we watched a Russian movie from the 1970s called Unfinished Piece for a Player Piano.  We watched it because it’s a great example of a Chekhovian style, and I totally get that, but it was our penultimate day of class with Sergei… so we were all a little bummed that we just got shrugged off to sit in front of a VCR instead of working. 

After classes last night I went to my fourth show at the Сатирикон (Satirikon): Король Лир (King Lear).  This production was directed by the same guy who directed Richard III, Seagull and Hamlet, and featured the same guy who played Richard III as King Lear, and it also included almost the entire cast of last night’s Seagull.  One thing I have to say about the Russian repertory system – these people have to keep so many shows in their heads for so long.  And it’s not as if a person with a big role in one show plays a smaller role in another show.  The stars tend to be the stars… and that translates to sooooooooooo many scripts running through these people’s brains!  It’s really impressive when you stop to think about it. 

At any rate, I think this may have been the most straightforward of the productions I’ve seen by this director.  I thought it was good, the acting was excellent, but the staging wasn’t as creative as I had come to expect from this director.  Although the final image of the play was beautiful and devastating enough that even if the rest of the play had been abysmal, I probably would have walked away praising it.  See, they just cut all the stuff at the end about Albany and Kent and Edgar being really good people, and maybe Edgar should be in charge or whatever.  The set featured three upright pianos upstage, and after Goneril and Regan died, they sat on the piano stools and slumped over their respective pianos.  So when Cordelia died, she went to take her place at her piano, but Lear kept trying to sit her up straight – to bring her back.  Then he started going to the other sisters, but as he left to start working on another, the last one would crash back into the keys or onto the floor.  This went on for a while until the lights just faded out.  It was really gorgeous.  That’s one thing I’ve found very interesting about the way they approach Shakespeare here: they have no problem cutting things that do not suit the concept.  He wanted Richard to be about karmic retribution, so he cut Richmond and let the people he killed destroy him.  He wanted Hamlet to be about Hamlet’s lone descent so he cut Horatio.  He wanted Lear to be about this man who destroyed his family, so they cut the stuff about someone else taking the throne.  And I have a feeling that, if I could understand the language, I would discover even more cuts and more pointed sculpting of the text to the director’s purposes.

This morning, as I said, we had movement again.  I achieved a full shoulder stand, and even though no one saw me, I felt pretty spiffy.  Then we had our last theatre history lecture which turned out to be a Q&A… for which we didn’t prepare.  So our questions were kinda lame.  Then we had our Chekhov acting class during which we worked through our monologues with Misha.  Now, over the next two days we are going to have a bunch of lasts.  Tomorrow is our last day of singing and our last day of acting with Sergei.  Saturday is our last day of movement and our last day of acting with Misha.  Then Sunday ten of us will head to St. Petersburg for a few days.  Then Thursday we’ll have our little “graduation” ceremony from the MXAT school, Saturday we have a little outing that I will blog about when it happens (and I’m not going to tell you what it is yet.  This will probably just cause undue interest, because it won’t end up being nearly as interesting as anything any of my 5 1/2 readers could imagine on their own, but whatever), then Sunday the 3^rd at 5:00am we will pile on the bus and head to the airport.  I knew the end of this month was going to sneak up on me, but DAMN!  This is madness!  I do feel like I’m ready to go home, but I also feel like I could stay here for another few months and just really go to all these classes again and again and again.  There is so much to learn here.  And I’m so lucky to have gotten this little taste of it.  And I kinda want more!

Well, it’s the Summer Solstice today… which I suppose means tomorrow we might have about 4 hours and 10 minutes of darkness.  But anyway… this morning we had our final film history class which was, as usual, crazy interesting.  This woman is just bubbling over with knowledge and enthusiasm… I would have listened just to her for the whole month and been very happy.  After a quick lunch we had acting.  We were all gratified to hear that our group etudes were closer to the Chekhovian idea that Sergei had set for us.  Our training was overall more in-tune.  And my individual etude went over very well.  So I was feeling pretty good going into the evening.  Most of the group was scheduled to see a ballet version of The Little Mermaid (not the Disney version), but I was scheduled to see something else…

SO, the first show I saw when I got to Moscow three weeks ago was a production of Чайка (The Seagull).  The folks at the MXAT didn’t seem to like that production much – despite the fact that many of their own actors were involved with it.  Most of our teachers at one time or another advised us to see the new production of Чайка running at the Сатирикон (Satirikon).  It was directed by the same guy who directed the Richard III and the Hamlet that we’ve already seen, as well as the King Lear that I’ll be seeing tomorrow.  But back to my story: JT and one of the undergrad students and I trundled off for our 7:00 curtain, took our really great seats, and had our minds absolutely blown for the next four and a half hours.  I would attempt to describe this production, but there’s just no way that I possibly could.  And even if I could transcribe the five pages of notes I took during the show, or even if I could accurately describe every moment, it still wouldn’t make sense.  It really has to be seen.  But I really truly had a life changing experience at the theatre tonight.  Everything we’ve seen here has been exceptional in its own way, but this was different.  The images and the physicality and the variations… obviously there was a language barrier, and I so wish that I could have understood everything better… but I was still able to follow them on almost all of their twists and turns, and I just want to go see that show every night until I leave.  Of course, that’s not how Russian theatre works.  So 10 of our group are going to get to see the show on Sunday night while the rest of us are on our way to St. Petersburg… and then it’s not playing again until after we leave.  So there are eight people in our group who will never get to see this production… and I am so so sorry for them.  Because I really cannot explain the experience I had tonight.  I actually enjoyed the first production we saw.  But this production had a soul and a life all its own.  I cried because the play was over.  It was earth shattering.

So… with all of those images and memories and emotions and questions dancing through my head, I’m going to try to get myself to sleep.  We’ve got movement in the morning… which probably means that in about 10 hours I’ll have my feet behind my head. 

Russia is weird.