So last night, about 1:30 in the morning, just before I went to bed, the lights went out. I looked out my window and saw lights there. I heard some of the other people in my wing come out of their rooms, and we discovered that the lights were still on in the common room off of which our rooms branch… just the lights in our rooms had gone out. So when they still weren’t working in the morning, I figured we had to tell someone. This is not as easy as one might think, since the women who are in charge of the dorm do not speak English. So, I typed a couple of simple sentences into my internet translator, wrote them down on a piece of paper, and walked down to see the babushka on duty (we call them the babushkas – but they don’t know that. Apparently “babushka” means very old woman… so it’s something that the MXAT students say behind their backs). I apologized for my bad Russian and handed her the note. I’m sure that the grammar was atrocious. It probably translated to something like “Electricity badness dark room 310-315 night please. But she seemed to understand, I cheered, she smiled, and I headed off to school. My ankle was giving me a lot of trouble this morning, so there were a lot of stops along the way. When I stopped inside the underpass at Pushkin square, a man walked up to me and started speaking. I responded with my well-practiced phrase: “I don’t speak Russian.” So he started speaking English – asking if he could take a picture of my beautiful smile, assuring me he’s not from a newspaper. I told him no and hobbled away. Apparently several other members of our group did have their pictures taken, but the fact is, I’ve seenTaken… and the whole thing started with a friendly stranger taking a picture, so hell no! The morning started with our movement class, and though I had to take it a little easy on my foot, I was able to do most things. And in general, things were a little easier this time. I actually successfully balanced all my weight on my shoulder. Next time, I’m planning on trying to straighten my legs into a full shoulder stand! Ah yeah! Vladimir is a task master, but he’s also a big ball of Russian sunshine. Next the people who hadn’t already worked with our singing teacher got a chance to work with her, so I had a little extra time off before lunch and acting class, which gave me time to catch up on my journal. We started off the acting class with two etudes. One group was a forest that caught fire because of a careless smoker. My group was a bunch of people hanging out on the slots in a casino, and mine hit the mega jackpot. Both ended up being fairly successful – but I think Sergei liked ours better. We win! We then worked our way through another set of complex but silly but brilliant exercises that I can’t explain, but can assure you have great meaning in the course of our training. We then finished up with our animal etudes – one of which was a particularly brilliant gorilla performed by the skinniest girl in the world – and finished off with a discussion about panda porn. Of course the only thing better than your Russian acting teacher talking about Panda porn is the fact that his interpreter has to then say “Panda porn” over and over. There were no shows scheduled for tonight, so we headed back to the dorms and just kicked back a bit. Then Aaron, JT and I went to the park for a little PhD discussion time (aka an excuse for JT to smoke a Cuban cigar while having deep conversations about Russian theatre). PS - the electricity was back on when I returned to the dorm after classes. Hooray for communication!
Monday, June 13, 2011
Panda Porn
So last night, about 1:30 in the morning, just before I went to bed, the lights went out. I looked out my window and saw lights there. I heard some of the other people in my wing come out of their rooms, and we discovered that the lights were still on in the common room off of which our rooms branch… just the lights in our rooms had gone out. So when they still weren’t working in the morning, I figured we had to tell someone. This is not as easy as one might think, since the women who are in charge of the dorm do not speak English. So, I typed a couple of simple sentences into my internet translator, wrote them down on a piece of paper, and walked down to see the babushka on duty (we call them the babushkas – but they don’t know that. Apparently “babushka” means very old woman… so it’s something that the MXAT students say behind their backs). I apologized for my bad Russian and handed her the note. I’m sure that the grammar was atrocious. It probably translated to something like “Electricity badness dark room 310-315 night please. But she seemed to understand, I cheered, she smiled, and I headed off to school. My ankle was giving me a lot of trouble this morning, so there were a lot of stops along the way. When I stopped inside the underpass at Pushkin square, a man walked up to me and started speaking. I responded with my well-practiced phrase: “I don’t speak Russian.” So he started speaking English – asking if he could take a picture of my beautiful smile, assuring me he’s not from a newspaper. I told him no and hobbled away. Apparently several other members of our group did have their pictures taken, but the fact is, I’ve seenTaken… and the whole thing started with a friendly stranger taking a picture, so hell no! The morning started with our movement class, and though I had to take it a little easy on my foot, I was able to do most things. And in general, things were a little easier this time. I actually successfully balanced all my weight on my shoulder. Next time, I’m planning on trying to straighten my legs into a full shoulder stand! Ah yeah! Vladimir is a task master, but he’s also a big ball of Russian sunshine. Next the people who hadn’t already worked with our singing teacher got a chance to work with her, so I had a little extra time off before lunch and acting class, which gave me time to catch up on my journal. We started off the acting class with two etudes. One group was a forest that caught fire because of a careless smoker. My group was a bunch of people hanging out on the slots in a casino, and mine hit the mega jackpot. Both ended up being fairly successful – but I think Sergei liked ours better. We win! We then worked our way through another set of complex but silly but brilliant exercises that I can’t explain, but can assure you have great meaning in the course of our training. We then finished up with our animal etudes – one of which was a particularly brilliant gorilla performed by the skinniest girl in the world – and finished off with a discussion about panda porn. Of course the only thing better than your Russian acting teacher talking about Panda porn is the fact that his interpreter has to then say “Panda porn” over and over. There were no shows scheduled for tonight, so we headed back to the dorms and just kicked back a bit. Then Aaron, JT and I went to the park for a little PhD discussion time (aka an excuse for JT to smoke a Cuban cigar while having deep conversations about Russian theatre). PS - the electricity was back on when I returned to the dorm after classes. Hooray for communication!
Russia Day
June 12 – according to our tour guide last weekend and all the posters all over the streets of Moscow – is День России (Russia Day). It’s like the 4th of July in the States. It commemorates their first democratic elections… in 1991. Yes, today is the 20thanniversary. It’s a pretty big deal. Apparently tonight in Red Square there will be fireworks and we think a Linkin Park concert… because nothing says Russia Civic Pride like Linkin Park. Since Russia day falls on a Sunday, most of the city will be off work tomorrow, out in their little country villas (they’re called something else here… I think it’s дачас (dachas)… but I’m really not sure). I hope that doesn’t mean our teachers will be grouchy about having to spend their Russia Day (observed) with all the dumb Americanskis.
But I guess we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it. Today, we didn’t have any classes, so we hopped on the metro down to the Moscow River and took a boat ride for about an hour and a half. I had a beer (which I had been craving like crazy since the night before) and just sat on the top deck in the sun and breeze, watching the sights of Moscow pass by. On the other end of the ride we got off at one of the big parks, but JT was on a mission, so we didn’t stop to look around for long. We stopped at a fountain, took a group picture, and hopped back on the metro headed for the dorm. This gave us a few hours before the show that Aaron, JT and I were on our way to see, so I went to the grocery store, where I accidentally bought some $15 ice cream (it had better be DAMN good!) and headed back to the dorm.
Then I did a very American thing and headed over to Starbucks for a little while to use their internet. We do have internet in the dorms, but we have a limited amount of bandwidth (or something else technical) allotted to each of us, so I decided I wanted to do a lot of surfing and uploading and such, so Starbucks seemed the place. I ordered my drink and the friendly Canadian fellow next to me struck up a conversation. I just love Canadians. Then, it was an hour of web time before heading back to the dorm for a little more relaxation. Russia Day has been pretty good for my weary soul!
After our afternoon of lounging like the lazy Americans we truly are, Aaron, JT and I met downstairs to head out to another Dmitri Krimov joint. This one is called Катя, Соня, Поля, Галя, Вера, Оля, Таня (Katia, Sonya, Polya, Galya, Vera, Olya, Tanya). It’s based on a collection of famous short stories by the Russian author Ivan Bunin. Of course, I haven’t read these short stories, and they’re not available online in English, so I was, once again, going in fairly blind. The theatre was a large but pretty conventional black box space, but as we entered, there were 6-7 men and 6-7 costume/make-up crew people – one per actor – on stage. Each team was at a chair, and we watched as the men changed from their street clothes into their tuxedos, and then they were frozen in their new characters until a stagehand came and placed a different hat on each head and then lit each man’s cigarette. From there… it was one helluva wild ride! There were three human-sized boxes on stage, but until they opened the first one, it didn’t occur to me that they were human sized, just that they were part of what was around. The first one was opened downstage… and the stagehands promptly sawed the woman inside it in half, leaving some entrails in between. One of the men started talking for a while – I assume about this woman – and then they all left. The stage was empty until another box upstage started to move. It began to hop toward the audience, and then it fell on its side. First a leg popped out, then an arm, and finally a head. This woman began her energetic piece from this bizarre half-in-half-out position, and eventually climbed out. She talked a mile a minute, until words projected on the upstage screen began interacting with her – then she had to slow down to allow their part of the conversation. I really wish I had been able to read them! Chairs moved without any human or string assistance, even her shoes floated away from her once she removed them. Finally, as her piece ended, the men came and placed her back into her box, leg propped up at an impossible angle. Then another man started speaking his story entirely in French (a language I understand only slightly better than Russian). The woman he was speaking about seemed to be played by the tiny ragdoll he strangled in the midst of his story. After he started brandishing one of the legs of the sawn woman as a weapon, the men all began to inspect the lower half of her body. At this point, the upper half crawled out of the box and came over to see what they were looking at. She began a long piece about a series of postcards. Then, suddenly she had legs again, and she began this fantastic tango with one of the men. She completely changed her dress and character two separate times in the course of the dance, and she ended up back in the box – and we didn’t even see it happen! The third box was opened by this time, and a tiny little woman appeared and called to one of the men on the opposite side of the stage. She then climbed across the other men – their shoulders, backs, knees – to get to her man. They giggled and kissed and made love, but eventually there was blood on her head and blood on his hand, and she was placed neatly back in her box too. The men rushed out and another woman walked in and started to give a lecture on the writer whose stories these were based on. The men returned (in what must have been an impossibly fast quick change) dressed in baggy jeans and bright football team coats – the way I guess Russians assume American teenagers dress. They watched her lecture, and then they all left, leaving a small hooded robot toy walking around the stage… and that was the end. I can’t possibly begin to explain how cool this production really was… but even without having any idea what was going on, I was captivated. I think I might be going back on the 20th to lead a group of other students who are interested in seeing it. So friggin’ cool.
We finished off the evening with our Sunday night potluck, a group meeting that really had no excuse for lasting an hour and a half, and then I tried to skype my parents, and though I could hear them, they couldn’t hear me. That was the first time I felt homesick since I’ve been here – listening to my parents’ voices and not being able to talk to them. It was very frustrating and made me feel very lonely. But we’re hoping for more success on the next try.
So that’s Russia Day. Apparently a few people in our group ventured down to Red Square to take a peek at the Russia Day festivities, but they found after going through several security checkpoints, that there were tickets involved – tickets that they didn’t have. Then they found that getting out of Red Square was even more difficult and full of military checkpoints than getting in. Wowsers.
Doppleganger Update – I’m pretty sure Russian Jerry Witty was in the play I just described.
Then I did a very American thing and headed over to Starbucks for a little while to use their internet. We do have internet in the dorms, but we have a limited amount of bandwidth (or something else technical) allotted to each of us, so I decided I wanted to do a lot of surfing and uploading and such, so Starbucks seemed the place. I ordered my drink and the friendly Canadian fellow next to me struck up a conversation. I just love Canadians. Then, it was an hour of web time before heading back to the dorm for a little more relaxation. Russia Day has been pretty good for my weary soul!
After our afternoon of lounging like the lazy Americans we truly are, Aaron, JT and I met downstairs to head out to another Dmitri Krimov joint. This one is called Катя, Соня, Поля, Галя, Вера, Оля, Таня (Katia, Sonya, Polya, Galya, Vera, Olya, Tanya). It’s based on a collection of famous short stories by the Russian author Ivan Bunin. Of course, I haven’t read these short stories, and they’re not available online in English, so I was, once again, going in fairly blind. The theatre was a large but pretty conventional black box space, but as we entered, there were 6-7 men and 6-7 costume/make-up crew people – one per actor – on stage. Each team was at a chair, and we watched as the men changed from their street clothes into their tuxedos, and then they were frozen in their new characters until a stagehand came and placed a different hat on each head and then lit each man’s cigarette. From there… it was one helluva wild ride! There were three human-sized boxes on stage, but until they opened the first one, it didn’t occur to me that they were human sized, just that they were part of what was around. The first one was opened downstage… and the stagehands promptly sawed the woman inside it in half, leaving some entrails in between. One of the men started talking for a while – I assume about this woman – and then they all left. The stage was empty until another box upstage started to move. It began to hop toward the audience, and then it fell on its side. First a leg popped out, then an arm, and finally a head. This woman began her energetic piece from this bizarre half-in-half-out position, and eventually climbed out. She talked a mile a minute, until words projected on the upstage screen began interacting with her – then she had to slow down to allow their part of the conversation. I really wish I had been able to read them! Chairs moved without any human or string assistance, even her shoes floated away from her once she removed them. Finally, as her piece ended, the men came and placed her back into her box, leg propped up at an impossible angle. Then another man started speaking his story entirely in French (a language I understand only slightly better than Russian). The woman he was speaking about seemed to be played by the tiny ragdoll he strangled in the midst of his story. After he started brandishing one of the legs of the sawn woman as a weapon, the men all began to inspect the lower half of her body. At this point, the upper half crawled out of the box and came over to see what they were looking at. She began a long piece about a series of postcards. Then, suddenly she had legs again, and she began this fantastic tango with one of the men. She completely changed her dress and character two separate times in the course of the dance, and she ended up back in the box – and we didn’t even see it happen! The third box was opened by this time, and a tiny little woman appeared and called to one of the men on the opposite side of the stage. She then climbed across the other men – their shoulders, backs, knees – to get to her man. They giggled and kissed and made love, but eventually there was blood on her head and blood on his hand, and she was placed neatly back in her box too. The men rushed out and another woman walked in and started to give a lecture on the writer whose stories these were based on. The men returned (in what must have been an impossibly fast quick change) dressed in baggy jeans and bright football team coats – the way I guess Russians assume American teenagers dress. They watched her lecture, and then they all left, leaving a small hooded robot toy walking around the stage… and that was the end. I can’t possibly begin to explain how cool this production really was… but even without having any idea what was going on, I was captivated. I think I might be going back on the 20th to lead a group of other students who are interested in seeing it. So friggin’ cool.
We finished off the evening with our Sunday night potluck, a group meeting that really had no excuse for lasting an hour and a half, and then I tried to skype my parents, and though I could hear them, they couldn’t hear me. That was the first time I felt homesick since I’ve been here – listening to my parents’ voices and not being able to talk to them. It was very frustrating and made me feel very lonely. But we’re hoping for more success on the next try.
So that’s Russia Day. Apparently a few people in our group ventured down to Red Square to take a peek at the Russia Day festivities, but they found after going through several security checkpoints, that there were tickets involved – tickets that they didn’t have. Then they found that getting out of Red Square was even more difficult and full of military checkpoints than getting in. Wowsers.
Doppleganger Update – I’m pretty sure Russian Jerry Witty was in the play I just described.
Sunday, June 12, 2011
The Cow Says...
This morning we started out with dance class… and we continue to be convinced that this guy hates us for not being better dancers. I know he was crazy pissed when some of our group members were late this morning. Granted, they shouldn’t have been late, but it was understandable, since the class started half an hour earlier than we’re used to. Anyway, ballet with my gimpy ankle was frustrating, since I can’t point as well, and I can’t do any of the jumps or anything. And I had to sit out some of the Russian folk dance too (lots of stomping and something that resembles the Watoosie). The afternoon had us back with everyone’s favorite Russian imp, Misha! As part of our warm-up today we played a game I had played in Girl Scouts, but let me tell you, you have not lived until you hear this white-haired, bright-eyed Russian chant, “I said a boom-a-chick-a-rock-a-chick-a-rock-a-chick-a-boom!” Possibly the highlight of the trip so far. Then we started to more in depth about Michael Chekhov’s process and he got to about 2/3 of us talking about our monologues from Three Sisters. I was a little disappointed that he didn’t get to me today… it doesn’t involve my stupid ankle, and I was really prepared! <sigh> Oh well. I can be even more prepared the next time we see him, which I think is not until Thursday! BOOHOO!
Tonight’s theatrical offering was just for me, the other PhD student (Aaron) and our professor (JT). We went back to the theatre where we had seen the mind-blowing, life-changing production ofDemon to see another piece by the same director called Cow. It’s based on a well-known Russian children’s story or folk tale or something, but of course we knew nothing about it. Instead of the round space we were in last time, we were ushered into a long rectangular space that was completely white. As we entered we had to walk along a trail of newspapers. At the far end were the seats which were covered by a giant image of grass and sky. Approaching the seats, we were met with a giant pile of rubber galoshes – not the big ones, just overshoes. And we were all instructed to put them on before taking our seats on the grassy hillside. The play started… and I really can’t tell you what the hell happened. There was a boy who loved a cow and the cow was hit by a train while he was away at college… I think. But there was a father on stilts, and there was a projection of a giraffe with a severed head, and there was a shadow play strip tease performed by the woman playing the cow, and there was “Old Man River,” and there was a hammer and sickle and I think possibly a nuclear explosion. A lot of the visuals of the performance were fascinating and very clever, but we were totally stymied by what we saw. This was not the universally applicable uber-work of Demon. But it was interesting. And we’ll be heading out for another piece by the same director tomorrow… so there ya go.
Doppleganger Update – The woman who played the cow tonight really looked a lot like a Russian Sara Kosmer.
Saturday, June 11, 2011
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.
Friday, June 10, 2011
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!
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
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!
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