Die Dreigroschenoper

Yeah… that’s German.  But Friday night we saw a production in Russian of this play by a German set in London.  Yeah… it hurt our brains too.  But the day started out as all our days do – with classes.  Half of us had individual coaching with Marina – our whirlwind of a voice teacher.  She got way behind so we ended up having to stay late, but the time she spent with me was really fun.  We hardly even needed the interpreter.  We just kind of screeched at each other in Soprano-ese until we got the sounds we wanted.  After we worked through “Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again” she added “Misty” to my work load, which should be fun.  The afternoon brought us another acting class, and a grouchy group of us for some reason.  Our training for the day relied on us all having memorized a portion of “To be or not to be,” but it became rapidly apparent that not everyone had.  So we failed at that exercise.  We don’t like to fail, but apparently we don’t always like to rehearse either.  So there you go.  Anyway, we had to start doing our animal etudes today, and I was trying to hang back so that mine would be put off to next week since my ankle is giving me so much trouble, but after the first few etudes, no one else was willing to go!  So I got up to be a squirrel (and to prevent us from looking like a bunch of slackers).  Unfortunately, squirrels have stronger ankles than I do, and I definitely made the whole ankle situation worse with what I did.  Sergei was very kind, however, applauding me for taking one for the team.  He also commented on the stupidity of my squirrel – which we both agreed was a realistic characteristic. So after grouchiness and not-so-great etudes and not-so-great exercises and not-so-great motivation, half of us met up to go see Трехрошовая Опера (Threepenny Opera) at the MXAT.  I have to say, I really enjoyed the hell out of this show.  It was three acts, almost four hours… but somehow it didn’t feel as long as some of the two hour shows we have seen thus far.  The men who played Trigorin and Sorin in the Seagull that we saw played Mack and Peacham in this production… and man were they good.  This Trigorin/Mack fellow is all kinds of sexy.  And the production was extremely well constructed.  The end was a giant piece of spectacle that didn’t end up making a whole lot of sense, but it was pretty darn impressive.  It’s not every day you see a ginormous human/horse/dragon skeleton puppet in hell, now is it? Doppleganger Update – Russian Craig(e) Holcombe was in front of me in line at the cafeteria this evening, and Russian Sonya Thompson was in the audience at Threepenny.  And I’m pretty sure the  main chorus for Threepenny was the Russian equivalent of 1957 Diva Heaven – probably Cheryl, Debra (two hot blondes in evening gowns) and Rick and Will (two smooth dudes in tuxes).  Though I will say… aside from opening with “Mack the Knife,” I would say the doppelganger ends there.

Read Your Tickets Well

Today we had our movement class with Vlad again… and boy howdy… that man is sadistic!  First of all, I woke up extremely sore today after our evil dance class and the power walking catching up with me, so by the time he got his hands on us, I was already feeling like I might fall apart.  Then he had us hopping across the room like frogs and jumping for our lives, all the while gleefully growling “SMILE” in his terrifying and hilarious Russian way.  Theoretically I should be able to stand only on my shoulder by the end of this class… I’m a little afraid of that, but we’ll see.  After lunch we had a theatre history lecture from the head of the MXAT school, but unfortunately it turned into less of a history lecture and more of him complaining about the version of The Seagull that we saw last week.  He seemed very non-plussed by anything any of us said that painted the production in any sort of positive light, and basically expounded on the director’s responsibility to the playwright for an hour.  But apparently next time we’re going to talk about the first MXAT production of The Seagull, and I am very much looking forward to that lecture! The lecture was followed by our Chekhov class – the first one in several days, and we were all delighted to see Миша again.  (Although his energy and childish delight is somewhat tempered by our new – and sadly permanent – acting class interpreter.  Her tone is utterly disinterested and condescending… and she’s definitely editing in translation.  But Misha is too fantastic!  He will not be defeated by our Droopy the Dog interpreter!)  After our usual group warm-ups he took us through a mirror exercise as well as an exercise in which we had to take two different positions that he described and then try to remember a time in our lives that we had taken that position.  I’m sure this is just part of the lead up to Psychological Gesture work, but it was a little unsettling when it got a little too personal/bordering on Method with some members of the group.  After class the grad students grabbed some dinner and headed back to the same theatre we had attended last night for another show.  At about 6:40, when we noticed that no one was around the theatre yet, we started to be a little concerned.  We have been told over and over and over again that everything in Russia has a 7:00 curtain (which usually ends up being 7:15 or 7:20).  So there we were, waiting for our 7:00 curtain… all alone.  So we pulled out the tickets… at which point we discovered that this show was the notable exception with a start time of 9:30pm… about 45-30 minutes after we had expected this play to end with its 7:00 curtain time.  Fantastic.  So, we headed back to the dorm for a few hours before heading back to the theatre for the third time in two days.  But let me tell you, this show was all kinds of worth it!  The play was К. И. из “Преступления” (K.I. from “Crime”), also directed by Кама Гинкас (Kama Ginkas).  This turned out to be a one-woman-show about the character Katerina Ivanovna Marmeladova from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.  In the novel she is a fairly small character, but Ginkas lifted her out of the novel and gave her her own evening of theatre… and it has been playing forever!  We came upstairs to the same level of the theatre we had been in the night before, but instead of entering the theatre, there were seats set up in the lobby.  We sat down, and a bedraggled woman popped in and out of the doors in front of us a few times before launching into her frantic monologue.  She dealt directly with the audience – we were the guests at the memorial dinner she had thrown for her late husband – talking to us directly, touching us, sitting among us, etc.  She flew with great agility from emotional extreme to emotional extreme, bringing us with her even though we really only understood the few English sentences that she repeated from time to time (and I also understood the German and French that she threw in).  About half an hour in, she insisted that we all stand up and follow her into the next room – a tiny little theatre space that was entirely white.  Most of us sat in standard (though cramped) raked audience seats, though there were about twelve audience members who were seated at her banquet table on the stage.  Her three young children (two of whom we had met briefly in the lobby) were also in this room, and they acted as her props throughout the rest of the evening.  She sawed away on the violin, she berated the woman she had labeled as her landlady, she laughed, she wept, she screamed, she shook her children about like dolls, and eventually she died – at which point a wooden ladder attached to a rope was lowered from the ceiling, allowing her to swing freely.  Clearly shuffling off this mortal coil was a freeing experience for poor K.I.  As she and her children took their six curtain calls (each containing about six separate bows), we got to observe this remarkable actress in a whole new way – the joy that oozed out of her was simply gorgeous.  It made me think of this article I had to read for my directing seminar.  I can’t remember who wrote it, but he talked about the fact that actors – even when they are playing someone who is dying or murdering someone – must always have a sense of joy.  This woman was the purest embodiment of that idea that I have ever seen.  Even as she sat propped against the wall on the verge of death, even as she beat her children and screamed at the heavens, I could feel the joy of her creation underneath it.  This theatre was so alive… it was fantastic.  And I really want to get a copy of a translation of the script… I want to study what they did there, because it was beyond beyond! Doppleganger Update - I saw Russian Debra Capps as I was leaving the show tonight… but I have to say, Russia has more than its fair share of gorgeous leggy blondes, so I can’t say I was too surprised.     But seriously folks, it was a little uncanny.

Technical Difficulties

Well… I actually have a very nice blog post written about a wonderful show I saw last night, but wifi is down in the dorms, so I can’t get it off my computer for the moment.  It’ll be here at some point.  In the meanwhile, I’ve managed to do something icky to my ankle, and I woke up with my left shoulder in spasm this morning.  Good news: we have no movement based classes today.  So I plan on being all better and un-little-old-lady-fied by the time we have dance class on Saturday morning.  WOO!

Be the Shoelace

This morning started off with dance class again… and I think we’re getting the impression that he doesn’t like us very much.  None of us is particularly strong or flexible (and he rolled up his pants today to demonstrate something… revealing calves that could possibly destroy everyone in the classroom without a second thought), and for most people in the group it’s all we can do to turn our head the right direction, let alone do the bar exercises correctly.  He definitely took those bar exercises up a couple notches today… and boy howdy did we feel it.  I may have to check the Geneva conventions to see if what he was doing to us is actually legal.  Then, rolling his eyes only slightly, he took us through some Russian folk dance… and we were slightly better at that this time around, so hopefully we are on the way to redeeming ourselves.  After dance two of the other vegetarians and I decided to try out a restaurant a few doors down from the studio (Прайм Стар – Prime Star) that we heard had vegetarian fare.  Well, not only did it have vegetarian fare, it had a variety of vegetarian fare… and everything was labeled in Russian AND English!  We were very happy.  Hello, caprese sandwich and cheesecake mousse.  Welcome to my tummy. After lunch we began our acting class with another set of etudes.  One group set up a wedding party in which the bride ran from the altar, and my group set up a big drunk party to which the cops showed up.  We continued to work on a lot of the same group-think exercises we have been working on for the last few days – always making them harder when it seems that we might be getting the hang of them, and then we finished our inanimate object etudes.  I did my second one today – a shoelace – and I was told by Sergei that it was an “elegant” etude.  Now, this is a word that all of our professors are using a lot, and it’s something that it’s pretty clear that we Americans don’t really have readily accessible in our bodies. But today, I achieved elegance!  BOOYAH!  (Or… I suppose in Russian that would be БУЯ!)  He was all kinds of encouraging about my little etude, which made me feel all kinds of spiffy. For dinner, the grad students made another visit to Prime Star and then sauntered up to the theatre for this evening where we saw Дама С Собачкой (The Lady with the Lapdog), adapted from Chekhov’s short story by Кама Гинкас (Kama Ginkas).  I have to admit, this was the first show so far that I thought to myself: “I could have not seen that and not been sad.”  For a 15 page short story, 2 hours and 15 minutes with no intermission in a VERY hot room seemed a little long.  That said, the space was very cool.  It was a huge theatre like the Peace Center or the Buell or the Schnitz or something like that… but the stage and audience were on the top balcony.  So the whole gaping maw of the space was behind the stage.  That gaping maw wasn’t really used hardly at all except as background, but apparently two other grad students saw another show in the same space the night before, and said that they did actually use the real stage to great effect from time to time.  We’ll be back there tomorrow night for a third piece by the same director, and this one is supposed to be mind-blowing, so hopefully I’ll be a little more enthusiastic about tomorrow’s offering. Doppelganger update – Tonight I saw Russian Steve Schultz… complete with the white on red flowered shirt!

Just Another Manic Tuesday

It is Tuesday, isn’t it?  We’re never quite sure around here.  At any rate, this morning we had our first of three classes on the history of Russian cinema… and holy moly.  Our teacher – Галина Аксенова (Galina Aksenova) – is a human encyclopedia.  No lecture notes, no reading from slides.  She just projected images and dates, and then she was off and running.  First she gave us a brief history of Russia over the 20^th century – most of which, I’m proud to say, I was fairly familiar with (especially the Gorbachov coup… that made a big impression on my punning development – my Odyssey of the Mind team did a whole sketch about Gorbachef hunting the elusive coup-coup bird… pretty heady stuff).  Then she talked about silent films, which was great, since there’s none of that language confusion that comes with watching something in Russian!  Definitely the most popular film of the morning was a stop animation piece about a couple of adulterous beetles.  Yes, you read that correctly. After a stern talking to about the bad kids who have been getting wasted in the dorms (bad undergrads!), we had a hurried lunch before rushing upstairs to practice our etudes before class.  This time my group created a whole gym workout atmosphere with people checking each other out and getting all flirty.  The other group created a restaurant setting on the morning of September 11, 2001.  Two more different atmospheres you might never see, but both etudes worked very well.  We moved on into our training exercises for the day which were an awful lot of fun.  I can’t wait to teach the DG folks the new samurai game I learned.  We’ll need a fairly big group to make that game work… so lots of people will have to come play with us!  We also continued our inanimate object etudes – the big hits for me being a popcorn kernel and a bra. Class went a little long today, so I booked it back to the dorm before heading out to see a piece called The Demon devised by Russian directing/design badass Дмитрий Крымов (Dmitri Krimov).  For the first time since we’ve been here, the language barrier was almost a non-issue (aside from finding our seats).  Oh… the seats.  Before I try to explain the beautiful insanity that was this show, I have to talk about our seats.  A lot of these plays that we’re seeing, we’re getting into because theatres are exchanging favors with each other.  So we got a card that said there would be four people coming courtesy of the MXAT… but the show was sold out.  So they had to fit us in where they could.  In this case, it meant the tech gallery.  And this is not your Warehouse Theatre tech gallery.  Oh no.  This theatre was built specially for experimental director Анатоли Васылев (Anatoly Vasiliev) to be extremely free form.  It’s in the round with three seating galleries around the center, and the tech gallery is on the fourth level hovering above it all.  We were craning our necks to see around the lighting instruments, and I spent most of the show standing up and bending out over the abyss I was so totally engrossed in what was happening. To try to explain The Demon in words is not an easy task, since they used almost no words to create it.  The entire floor of the stage was covered in layers and layers of paper and plastic, and the performers painted images, tore shapes, crumpled, ripped, stomped, splashed… it was magnificent.  I wept at stick figures.  I sat there watching the entire human experience (and a good portion of human history) unfold beneath me, and the simultaneous simplicity, specificity and complexity of every single moment was simply breathtaking.  The three curtain calls this cast took were well deserved. After the show the grad students sat down with our professor to talk about other shows that might be available for us to see over the next couple of weeks.  My head might explode. Doppleganger update – Today was a day for too-tall doppelgangers.  I saw too-tall Russian Mary Freeman and too-tall Russian Amy Holtcamp. Travel abroad tip - I know there are a lot of those Americans who think that loud English is more likely to be understood than regular old English when addressing non-English speakers.  This is not the case.  It turns out, however, that speaking English in the accent that you hear Russian English-speakers using does not work either.

Our First Full Week - GO!

That’s right, we haven’t even been here a week yet, and in some ways it feels like we’ve been here for months.  Of course, all I have to do to counteract that feeling is attempt to have a conversation with a Russian person.  Then it is abundantly clear that I am a dumb American with only a couple of days under my belt. But today began our first full week of classes… so time marches on!  We kicked off the week with our movement class taught by Владимир Сажын (Vladimir Sazhin), a Russian beefcake of a man who can move his buttocks independently of one another (and does so with great relish).  He led us through an hour and a half (no breaks) of stretches and isolations and bending and jumping and jumping (so much jumping), and all sorts of other ridiculous things that your body doesn’t usually have to do.  I did manage to do this crazy double jointed thing with my arms that I can’t possibly describe, but it made me feel like I accomplished something for the day.  After class with him, we went straight to singing class where Marina kicked out the women in order to work with the men for an hour.  She then brought us in and finished handing out the songs that we would be working with for the next few classes.  I have to admit, I was a little disappointed at being assigned “Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again” from the world’s most overrated musical, Phantom of the Opera.  But still, this class is sort of like taking voice lessons from the Tazmanian Devil (the woman punched me in the stomach while I was singing today), so it seems our best bet is just to hold on for dear life and learn what we can along the way. Lunch was very quick, as we only had an hour and we all wanted to practice our etudes before acting class.  Class began with the first group’s etude about several blades of grass who grew up and then were tragically mowed in the prime of their lives by a man and his lawnmower.  It was a pretty fantastic etude.  My group created a gumball machine and a whole progression of a person trying to get the right gumball… it really wasn’t all that successful or clear, but it was a lot of fun putting it together.  From there we did a series of exercises which proved to be very frustrating.  The second was the worst because we all understood it, but then a couple group members started asking a bunch of questions which led the interpreter to give us the wrong instructions, so Sergei then chastised us for not understanding the exercise and not asking more questions when it had been the questions that had led us astray in the first place.  Then we completely failed at the third exercise – and since my half of the class was second to go we were chastised again for not being better than the first group after having watched them.  After our break, however, things got a lot more fun when we presented our first individual etudes.  We had to become an inanimate object and illustrate a story about it.  There was a tree, a cloud of hairspray, a match, a hair tie, a baseball glove, a Russian cathedral (which ended up being hilarious), a clothes drying rack, a stick of gum… and I was an egg.  I went from fridge to bowl to whisk to frying pan to plate… it was quite a journey.  And though I ended up with a bit of a floor burn on my elbow, my little egg went over pretty well. Monday nights are not dark theatre-wise in Moscow as they are in the states, but they are slightly less action packed, so we don’t have tickets to anything tonight which gives us a much needed evening off – as we have to work on new etudes and re-read The Three Sisters for tomorrow’s classes.
Doppelganger Update – Today I saw Russian April Schaffer on my way back to the dorm from the theatre, and apparently Russian Craig(e) Holcombe lives in our dorm on another floor.

Drinking Out of a Fire Hydrant

The first thing I did on Sunday was sleep until I couldn’t sleep anymore.  It felt fantastic!  And I might declare myself now officially on Moscow time.  Huzzah!  I headed to the grocery store for the first time, which was a formidable experience, since my credit card refused to work.  Luckily I had some cash, but that headshake by the cashier made me all kinds of nervous.  I knew I couldn’t get by for the whole month with the $300 worth of Rubles I had exchanged.  Eek.  Then in the afternoon we were led on a bus tour of Moscow… and then my brain exploded.  We saw so much in this three hour tour (a three hour tour…), and yet so little at the same time.  Of course, the place where we spent the most time was Red Square – a place I’ve already been.  But it was neat to be there with someone who knew all the crazy history about the cobblestones and the invasions and crazy wax-dipped Lenin.  And it makes me want to come back a third time so that I can tour around inside the Kremlin… which just sounds fantastic!  Our bus drove us slowly (and not-so-slowly) past a lot of things while our guide gave us fact after fact after fact after fact about everything on the planet.  There were places we couldn’t stop because of the difficulty of parking a bus, and there were places we couldn’t stay because we were on such a limited schedule.  We couldn’t stop at the Christ the Savior cathedral – the largest in Moscow built to commemorate the Russian victory over Napoleon, so I’m definitely going to have to swing by there on my own.  We only stopped across the river for a photo op of Novodevichy Convent (which includes Novodevichy Cemetery – the burial place of people like Stanislavsky, Chekhov and Bulgakov).  We only drove around part of the outer perimeter of the ginormous Victory Park (commemorating the end of WWII).  This city is so friggin’ huge, and there is so much history here, and we have so few days off… I am really going to need to try to budget my time in order to make it everywhere I want to go.  Our tour guide told us that we should go to Victory Park at night since they light up the fountains… and while that sounds cool in theory, that would mean wandering through a giant park in Moscow at 11:00 (when it is finally dark)… so I’m not sure it’s necessarily the best idea. After the tour, we booked it down to the MXAT.  There was little time for dinner and I stopped by an ATM where my debit card worked (Huzzah again!), and then we headed in for their production of The Cherry Orchard (Вишневый Сад).  The design was very spare and minimalistic, which gave us poor non-Russian speakers even fewer cues to hold onto in following the story, but I really liked it aesthetically.  Ranevskaya was, unfortunately, not terribly strong.  She was not – unlike every other actor on stage – a MXAT company member, MXAT trained, or even an actress at all.  She is famous throughout Russia as a personality.  I might compare casting her to casting someone like Paris Hilton – not that she’s as trashy as good ol’ Paris (PS – everyone I could think of as an example of an American celebrity personality is super trashy: Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, Snookie… are there non-actor personalities we worship who aren’t super trashy?), but she’s famous for being her, not for being particularly talented at something.  Aside from her volume issues, there was just a palpable (if not entirely easily described) difference between her and the company members in the rest of the cast.  She was absolutely gorgeous, but her performance just wasn’t on par with the rest of the cast.  She certainly wasn’t as lousy as someone like Paris Hilton would have been, but she just wasn’t a MXAT actor.  The rest of the actors were really pretty remarkable though.  I thought Lopakhin and Varya’s final scene was devastating, Anya’s evolution throughout the script was really lovely, Yasha and Dunyasha were delightful, and the stage pictures were absolutely breathtaking. Having seen two Chekhov plays now on this trip – it occurs to me that every Chekhov play has that one male character who I completely forgot about.  He’s the person who doesn’t make it into my brain when I’m thinking through the plot before the play begins, and then I spend the entire play going, “Oh!  I remember him… what the hell is his name…?”  In The Seagull it was Shamraev, and in The Cherry Orchard it was Simeon-Pishchik (and a little bit Yepikhodov). After the show, we all came back to the dorm for our Sunday night meeting/potluck.  It’s interesting to see what we all cobbled together as our potluck offerings.  I brought some watermelon (which we read in a guidebook the next day we probably shouldn’t have eaten… but it tasted good), there were cookies and candies and cheeses and breads, a makeshift Mac & Cheese, and even some nachos.  Following that meeting, we divided up into two groups to plan our etudes for the next day’s acting class.  More on this tomorrow.  After that, I tried to go to sleep, but my tummy had other plans.  So, after dealing with my grouchy tummy until almost 3:00, I finally managed to fall asleep.  Phew! PS - Allergy sufferers - summer in Moscow may not be for you.  Right now, as I look out my window, it almost looks like it is snowing… but it’s cottonwood puffs (or something equivalent) blowing EVERYWHERE.