A Leisurely Beginning

This morning we woke up in Moscow – most of us for the first time.  I didn’t find my pillow until this morning so I used my comforter as a pillow, which means I woke up with a crazy case of the shivers in the middle of the night.  But I managed to take care of that pretty quickly, and I actually did sleep for about six hours, which I count as a point for me… take that jet lag!  Of course, I’m typing this at 8:30am, so ask me again in a few hours when my body thinks it’s 4:00am.  It’s sounding like they’re going to keep us fairly busy this weekend, which will be good for getting us on this schedule.  I feel like I want to have so much to talk about right now, but I just don’t have it yet.  Of course, that will cease being a problem almost immediately, but at the moment I’m feeling a little like I’m floating. 

Things I know for sure so far: this haircut is not conducive to the “get-up-and-go” lifestyle of Russia.  Translation: my hair is going to look like a street urchin for most of the month (and yes, I recognize the ambiguity of the syntax here, so if you prefer to imagine my hair itself as a street urchin living on top of my head, that’s your prerogative – and probably not entirely inaccurate either)

Things I suspect so far:  Part of my disembodied feeling probably stems from my lack of internet access…which will, of course, be remedied by the time I’m posting this.  I resent how much we rely on the interweb tubes… but boy howdy, I miss it when it’s gone!

At any rate, we spent the morning on a little walking tour of the supermarkets in the area, and it was a good time watching everyone wander through the grocery store with that “where the hell am I” look.  Having done this before, I am only slightly less deer-in-the-headlights-ish. I led the group down to the school for a brief orientation, which was a hoot.  I walked that path like I had never left.  It was a little surreal.  This evening we'll be having a little mini orientation in which we'll work on ballet positions and classroom procedure.  Sunday is a bus tour, and Monday is go time!  It's actually kind of nice that we arrived on a Friday and have this weekend to get our feet on the ground.  It's weird - I actually don't feel remotely jet-lagged today.  We'll see if that continues, but so far, I'm feeling pretty good!

Another thing I forgot: gifts for the professors.  Looks like they’re getting Russian candy again this year!

And something I forgot to do today: to wear my pedometer.  I really want to include my steps walked in each blog post... so here's hoping that little goal is met starting tomorrow!

Off we go...

So – days one and two are finally at a close.  We left Detroit a little later than our scheduled 9:40pm departure time, but with our four hour layover in Paris, a little delay doesn’t really hurt anyone.  The whole travel experience was made up mostly of sleeping, but my little triumph for the day was that they did have vegetarian meals for me and the other two veggies.  So… hooray!  Arriving back here in Moscow was a really strange experience.  The name of the game for me today has been “cognitive dissonance.”  How can I be having a once in a lifetime experience twice?  Coming through passport control, claiming our bags, being met by our fabulous liaison Настя – it was all so foreign, but all so familiar.  In particular, it’s nuts to come halfway around the world to have someone you know hug you and say how nice it is to see you again.  Weird.

So we bussed out to the dorm – it was right where I left it.  I have a bigger room this year, since I’m the RA/Den mother/house frau, which is nice.  And there are a bunch of other American students around this summer as well, so that should be an interesting little cultural exchange within a cultural exchange.

Mostly, once we got to the dorm, we met to plan out tomorrow, there were plenty of complaints that we don’t have web access yet, and plenty of disbelieving stares when I broke the news that we don’t flush toilet paper here.  I already have my guesses as to who’s going to be high maintenance, who’s going to be late all the time, who’s going to be easily distracted… so we’ll see whether I turn out to be right.  But overall, I have a good feeling about this group.

Things I’ve forgotten: scotch tape, the correct extra bag (the one I brought is my tiny red one, not my medium red one) and my copy of Chekhov’s plays.

Things I should have forgotten: I packed way too many clothes.  This is extremely unlike me. 

I get the feeling that homesickness is going to be a bit stronger for me this year…but once we get started, I don’t think I’ll have too much time to notice.

Moscow Standard Time

Here, folks, is what time it is in Moscow.  8 hours ahead of Eastern, 10 hours ahead of Mountain, 11 hours ahead of Pacific, 6.5 hours ahead of Newfoundland.

Sadness on the Interweb

So... it seems that my old standby blogging platform blogsome.com is going away.  I have received no notice of this, but the blog for The Distracted Globe has disappeared some time in the last couple of weeks, and I fear that my personal blog is not far behind.  So... here I am on blogger, trying to figure it out.  It's much less customizable at first blush, but I'm playing around, seeing what there is to see, and I figure google's not going to be folding any time soon, so it's probably a pretty safe place to house my summer meanderings.  Of course, someone else already had my old blog title (Self Indulgent Ramblings), so I came up with this one... which I don't really like... but we'll see if it grows on me.  But now that I'm done whining about my new blog, I should probably go pack for my unfortunate weekend trip to Toronto (for my grandfather's funeral - he was a dear, dear, adorable man with the cutest Newfoundland accent you have ever heard, and he will be sorely missed), do some reading, and get my act together for Russia.  This next week is a doozy.

Back to the...

"Back to the Commonwealth, Back to the Commonwealth, Back to the Commonwealth of Independent States!" - Wayne and Garth

In less than two weeks I'm headed back to Russia for another June of intense training and intense theatre... and I feel kind of unprepared.  Last year there was so much build up and anticipation, but this year there has been very little prep work.  I haven't been working on my Russian (yikes), we didn't have a pre-Moscow training session, we didn't have many meetings... so the fact that I'm jumping on an airplane in eleven days to begin the most intense month of my life - AGAIN - has been escaping my conscious understanding for the moment.  This weekend I bought a pair of comfy walking sandles.  I did go over some numbers and colors in Russian yesterday, hoping that might help jump start things.  In the next day or two I'll be putting together a shopping list for the trip - maybe buying all the blister band-aids, ibuprofen and cold meds, and sunscreen will knock me into gear.  Or maybe it just won't land until I do.  The fact is - everything about my life this summer is very different from where I was at this same time last summer, so maybe it's just all the change that seems to be defining me right now that makes the idea of going to Russia so unfamiliar.  I don't know what it is... but whatever it is, it's definitely time to start getting my ишак (ass) in gear.

Hey... maybe FEAR will get me motivated! 

Things that scare me about going to Russia this year:

1. I have not been working out this year like I was last year (plus, I'm a year older)... so the physical work is probably going to be even tougher 
2. I'm the group coordinator this year, which means I'll have some weird, undefined set of extra responsibilities on this year's trip
3. I've been on this trip before... so I'm supposed to know stuff or something
4. I came back from a five day trip to Denver and my kitten had grown.  I can't believe how different she's going to be after a month!
5. I am currently studying for my qualifying exams, which will take place in September.  This means reading everything that has ever been written ever... and I'm all kinds of nervous about it.  Russia will not help me with the studying.
6. I'm sure there are plenty of other reasons to be scared... I'll go try to read and instead obsess about the things to be scared about.

Social Works

“What if performance challenges strict divisions about where the art ends and the rest of the world begins?” (15)

I always feel like something of a heel using a quote from so early in the book, but I felt like this idea merited some discussion.  According to the manifesto I’m writing for Blair’s class, art is inherently liminal, in that it is always negotiating that space between real and representational.  And, on the scale of liminality, theatre is the one that spends the most space in this in-between.  And, in the terms of this book, when theatre begins to interact not only with a real audience, but with the really real social world outside the theatre doors, this line becomes ever more delicate, ever more blurry.  Brecht wanted his theatre to remain distinctly unreal so that it could inspire real action in its audience.  Augusto Boal took his theatre to society, rather than expecting society to come to his theatre.  The Tectonic Theatre Project’s use of documentary techniques in building their theatre has real people’s words coming out of the mouths of actors, hoping to challenge the audience’s perceptions of real events and issues.  Paul Chan felt the pull of New Orleans from the comfort of his New York apartment and felt that the only way he could answer that pull was to put a 60-year-old piece of European art into direct conversation with the all too real landscape of devastation in the ninth ward.  What is the responsibility art takes on when it edges its way closer and closer to reality?  And not just any reality, but the sensitive realities that surround social issues.  Art can never be really real, or it simply becomes life instead of art, so where does this kind of “experimental” theatre practice fall on the continuum?  Certainly, as Jackson points out, this is a delicate distinction as well: “Experimental art performances use visual, embodied, collective, durational, and spatial systems, but a critical sense of their innovation will differ depending upon what medium they understand themselves to be disrupting, i.e. which medium is on the other end of whose ‘post.’” (2)  So while navigating theatre that participates in social discourse, we have to take not of its interaction with reality, its interaction with issues, and its interaction with the history of the art form itself in order to be aware of all the levels of codes present in any given performance.  And all of that may well prove to be the easy part.

Everyone's a Little Bit Anachronistic

“all bodily practice is, like language itself, always already composed in repetition and repetition is, paradoxically, both the vehicle for sameness and the vehicle for difference or change.”[1]

“Of course, when playing in the crossfire of time letting anachronism do its creative work, things can feel a little uncanny, or dislocated, or unsettling, or queer.  They can also feel like downright bad art…The first time was true.  The second time is false, etiolated, hollow, or infelicitous.  The second time, the third time, the nth times are not actual.  Thus: the second time is lesser.  But…the minor, forgotten, overlooked, disavowed, unsung second, double, and ‘lesser’ gain a kind of agency in the re-do.”[2]

A couple of years ago, I interviewed a Civil War reenactor for a documentary theatre piece I was working on for a class.  I was talking to her about being a Southern woman, but we couldn’t help, of course, discussing her passion for reenacting.  As the descendant of a confederate soldier, she took the whole thing very seriously.  She led me to the air conditioned shed out back where she built and stored all of her costumes – at least two racks worth.  She spoke with pride about the authenticity of the garments, the way a dress petticoat would become an everyday petticoat once it had been worn too many times.  When I performed as her in our documentary performance, the knowledge that I was performing a performer kept tickling the back of my mind. 

Judith Butler’s discussion of identity as “a stylized repetition of acts”[3] seems to be in conversation with a lot of what I observed in my own little anecdote, and what Schneider is talking about in navigating the murky waters of reenactment.  There is something dismissive about the way most of us would talk about the second time around.  It’s an interesting contradiction of our postmodern sensibilities, in that we are so comfortable with simulacrum in our daily, mass-produced life, but there seem to be places where we draw the line and say at those things that aren’t really real, that aren’t authentic or original.  But in Butler’s sense, nothing we ever do is truly original – our very identities are a sedimentation of simulacra built up through decades and centuries of repetition.  And then, when we in the theatre rehearse and rehearse and rehearse, all in an attempt to produce the illusion of the first time, we add a layer of sediment to our behavior.  Think about revivals.  Think about tours.  Think about cast members being replaced midway through a run.  Iterations of the “original” are almost infinite in a theatrical sense.  And then, these reenactors, have their own layers to add – whether they acknowledge their touristy allure, or dedicate themselves to serious authenticity.  Historical events happen for the first and only time, but then, as the truism goes, we are doomed to repeat them – either on a historical scale or in unending recounting and reenacting.  And even historical events make reference to past events, past speeches, past people.  One would be hard pressed to point to any event that could truly stand on its own. 

But does this constant referentiality devalue the reenactment?  Is it merely a precondition of existing in a world built out of performances?  Is there ever really an original?  How far back must historiography reach to find the roots of any given historical or theatrical impulse?  Is consciousness of our relationship to the “original” necessary to give the reenactment validity?  I found myself particularly interested in the protests Schneider discusses in her Afterword for this very reason.  The acknowledgement of their deliberate anachronism is a powerful tool in demonstrating the way in which we as a people have been reenacting our own flawed history, since the same fights from the past have so much to say to contemporary issues, so by foregrounding the out-of-time-ness of the argument, we can draw attention to the repetition that believes itself to be originality. "The ‘performance’ of history can create a rupture in the safe contemporary evaluations of the past and conceptions of the future"[4]  There is something important in the conscious reenacting impulse that forces the now into a dialogue with the what was and the could be.  So perhaps it is the level of consciousness on the part of both performer and observer, rather than the reenactment itself that becomes the most compelling and useful element in terms of the effect of reenactment on history itself.  This extends queering of identity into queering of place in history and place in time, which allows us to look at ourselves in non-linear terms, feeding on anachronism as a tool for understanding rather than as a mistake or an affront against the rigid forward motion of time.

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[1] Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, (New York and London: Routledge, 2011) 10.

[2] Schneider 180.

[3] Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal(40:1988, 519-531) 519,

[4] Paige Sarlin quoted in Schneider 185.