Russian Doppelgangers

I have got to go to sleep soon, so here’s just a quick blurb for this evening: Every time I go somewhere new, I feel like I see a lot of the same faces.  So far I have seen black-haired Russian Traysie Amick coming out of the Metro, and I saw Russian Jason Underwood as Yasha in The Cherry Orchard tonight at the Moscow Art Theatre (wearing awesome purple pants).  And I saw 30 years in the future Jayce Tromsness.  I’ll be keeping my eye out for more Russian counterparts of your fabulous Американцы (Americans). 

Saturday

Well… damn!  Today was quite a day.  The morning started off with our first dance class.  I don’t even want to think about how long it’s been since my last dance class, so to say I was a nervous is something of an understatement.  In past years the teacher has been a woman named Larissa who is a former prima ballerina from the Bolshoi, but unfortunately her husband has fallen ill, so we have a new teacher with whom our professor is entirely unfamiliar, so it was a big question mark going in.  It turns out we have this fascinating man named (I think) Рэнард (Renard – yeah, it sounds like the French word for “Fox”… and of course he’s a ballet dancer, so he kinda is a fox.  A little skinny, but hey).  He took us through some exercises at the bar, and these went surprisingly well in my opinion.  I felt a lot more confident than I expected to, and I think overall he was pleased with the whole group.  Then he decided to teach us some rudimentary Russian folk dance steps, which did not go as well.  The steps were simple, but I have to say, I felt like we were moving in a completely different way than I’m used to.  There’s something about Russian dance that comes from their souls, and it’s just not in mine… yet.  Perhaps after tonight’s metro excursion, I’m a few steps closer.  But more on that later.  We finished out the class with some contact improv, which is not really my cup of tea, but I suppose that’s a good thing – pushing myself to do new things or re-approach old things. Lunch was another day, another plate of buckwheat and vegetables at the MXAT cafeteria.  Today my fellow PhD student and I sat with our professor to get the low-down on the shows that we would be seeing over the next week.  My head is spinning thinking about all the amazing theatre we’re going to see!  And I am now on the hunt for this monthly publication which lists every show at every theatre in Moscow for the entire month of June.  It’s in Russian… but it’s super awesome.  The box office was sold out today, but I’m hoping they’ll get more. After lunch we met with our Chekhov teacher again.  I just love that man more and more every time I see him.  He’s got this marvelously impish glint in his eye at all times.  We started out playing more of the same simple games to get us to expand our circles of attention and think like a group.  We even ended up playing Kitty Wants a Corner, which is an improve game I hate because it has a tendency to get kinda violent, but it is great fun to watch.  During this class I had a moment that made me very proud of myself – I made a joke in Russian!  Our teacher was giving us a quick Russian lesson, asking each of us to speak the phrase, “Please give me the chicken.”  I was one of the last to go, and when he got to me, I looked him square in the eye and said, “Я не ем мясо” – “I don’t eat meat.”  He laughed, and asked me to say “Please give me the wheat” instead.  Joking in another language… I’m super awesome.  After our break, we sat down and talked a little about The Three Sisters, choosing which character jumped out at us as someone we could relate to.  I chose Olga – the oldest sister who’s a little more pragmatic, a little more cynical, and a little more able to use humor to cope than her sisters.  Oh yeah. While part of the group went to dinner at McDonald’s (ick), I headed back to the MXAT cafeteria for a dinner of more buckwheat before meeting half of the group to head over to the Сатирикон (Satiricon) theatre to see a play called “The Blue Monster.”  We had a theatre management student escorting us through the metro – our first time riding it.  Due to some miscommunications from the theatre, we were running a little late, and Polina ended up getting us off at the wrong stop and we missed the very beginning of the show, but we did manage to get in and settled just in the nick of time… not that this was very helpful in understanding the show.  This play is apparently based off a children’s book and adapted for adults… and it is wacky.  There is this blue monster… and then there are these two couples… and he does something weird to both of them… and then there are all these clowns… and then there’s this weird trapeze artist/dominatrix character… and a giant robot… and a turntable on the stage, and a pool that was filled about an inch during intermission and emptied in the course of a few minutes during the middle of the act… it was nuts.  The clown characters were fantastic, and really made me want to do some commedia.  There were some truly awesome bits.  The story was some sort of fantasy, and wasn’t terribly easy to follow, but I found that, as we approached the denouement, I was able to accurately predict what the outcome was going to be… though I couldn’t really explain why.  The show was this huge, amazing spectacle that completely captivated all of us, regardless of whether or not we had any clue what was going on.  And these people took what I can only call two and a half curtain calls, since the first one was soooooooo long and involved so many pieces. Now comes the really exciting part… the metro.  Since the theatre managers have an exam tomorrow morning, none of them could come meet us after the show to help us find our way back to the dorm… so I became the leader.  Polina had given me directions on where to change stations and such, but the stations are not very well marked, so it turned out to be quite the exercise, involving reading signage in Russian, and even stopping to ask directions from a guard in Russian military garb.  I think I spoke more Russian than he did English, so that was a challenge, but it got us where we were going.  I felt oddly comfortable as we took three different trains through five different stations.  I really love metros.  They’re so logical.  And we managed to make it back to the dorm… so I’m calling it a big fat win!  Woohoo!

Ya Chaika

The title of this blog post should be written: "Я чайка."  And that just means, "I’m the seagull."  But we’ll get to that. Today was another day of hitting the ground running.  Got up fairly early so I had plenty of time to laze about before class at 11:00.  This morning we had our first singing class with Марина Смырнова (Marina Smirnova).  This woman is a powerhouse!  She had each person come up and sing a few bars of a song – any song we could come up with – and she started messing with us.  She tested our range, tapped our noses, mimed punching us in the stomach, tugged on our shirts, snarled at us… all with the help of her trusty interpreter.  I’ve been a singer for years, but it has also been a number of years since I’ve sung in front of anyone, and even longer since I’ve had a voice lesson, so I found myself oddly nervous when I sang.  But as she got me higher in my range, I sank into my comfort zone and had a lot of fun with her.  And sure, it was really fun listening to the people in the group with fantastic voices, but I learned a lot more from watching the people who didn’t consider themselves singers – even the people who seemed pretty tone deaf.  She really stuck with them in a way that said, “I’m going to prove to you that you can do this, so stop pussy-footing around and sing, damnit!”  It was really amazing to see the steps that each of them took in just the few minutes she spent with them.  When next we meet with Marina, she’ll be assigning us each songs that we’ll be working on for the rest of the month.  I love this woman. Lunch was, as lunches often are, fairly uneventful.  It was our second day eating at the MXAT cafeteria, and though my order may become repetitive, it sure is delicious.  And I do know that it’s vegetarian, so that’s two checks in my book!  (One of the other vegetarians got a little adventurous today, and we’re pretty sure she ate some chicken… but I’m doing my best to avoid such shenanigans.) After lunch came our first Stanislavsky acting class taught by Сэргэй Зэмтсов (Sergei Zemtsov).  He isn’t quite as effusive as the other two teachers have been – there’s a little more of a “get down to business” feel about him, but this does not make him any less fascinating.  He took us through a series of exercises that focused on attention and creating a sort of group mind.  Some I had done before, some were totally new.  And, as he told us repeatedly with a glint in his eye, any time we were successful at an exercise, we would just have to add something to make it more difficult.  These are definitely exercises that my acting students are going to get a piece of this fall!  Over and over he repeated the Stanislavsky credo, which comes out to something along the lines of "easier, lighter, simpler, merrier."  If there’s one thing we keep hearing from these teachers it’s how tense we are.  They are doing their best to loosen us up!  For the second half of class he went around the circle of the 20 of us students asking our names and our first impressions of Moscow – both positive and negative.  This proved to be a difficult task, as we played the polite Americans who didn’t want to say anything to offend.  But in the course of the hour we spent doing this, we learned a lot about Moscow and its history, so while I found it a little nerve wracking, I think it was time well spent. After class we had a couple of different sets of instructions.  Some people went back to the dorms where they claimed their new rooms on the 3^rd floor, where apparently the collapsed ceiling from the night of our arrival had been fixed.  Since I was one of the people seeing the production of The Seagull this evening, I didn’t go back, which turned out to be a big pain in the ass.  But more on that later.  I hung around Kamergersky street for a while, had a delicious блин (Russian Crepe) for dinner, and headed to the theatre.  Despite the Soviet insistence on simple décor, the theatre really is pretty spectacular.  And is made even more so by knowing the kind of people who have performed on this stage.  The production itself was fairly interesting.  It’s a slightly experimental version of The Seagull, and it’s been pretty clear from the careful comments of the MXAT faculty that they don’t like it very much, but I have to say that I enjoyed it.  Certainly there were things that worked better than others for me, but overall I felt like it was an energetic production that made some compelling choices about the characters.  It was pretty surreal watching the whole thing in Russian.  I know the story, of course, but it was a lot of work to keep up with what was happening.  The curtain call at the end of the show was one of the first moments I’ve had here of real cultural difference.  The clapping began as the curtain closed, then it fell into a rhythm with the music playing as the curtain reopened.  The cast strode confidently downstage – but in no sort of hurry.  At the front of the stage they were met by people lined up in the middle aisle with large bouquets of flowers for their favorite actors.  Once the flowers were distributed, the actors exited upstage.  By this time the whole house was standing and had fallen into a rhythm together again with the claps – this time in rhythm with each other rather than any music, since the music had long since stopped.  But after the actors left, the clapping continued.  They came back on, stood at the front of the stage, brought three people on from the wings, clapped for them, bowed almost individually and haphazardly, and exited again.  The clapping continued through a third curtain call – it was interesting to see who tried to hang around to be the last person to walk away from the applause.  Apparently the third time was a charm, and the clapping died out as the cast disappeared for the third time.  It was really quite something.  We keep being told that we need to see the production of the Seagull happening at the Satiricon theater, so perhaps I will have more seagull-related goodness at a later date.  I also plan on keeping a count of how many curtain calls each show receives throughout the course of this month. Once the show was over we booked it back to the dorms where I discovered that there were no more rooms available on the third floor… so what the heck was I supposed to do?  This led to about 20 minutes of angst until one of the Canadian students told me that he had collected the key to what they thought was a spare room, and would I like it.  You bet I would!  It was the final single available, which was extremely necessary, as the other four people who weren’t quite sure about rooming at that point were all boys.  There ended up being enough doubles to take care of them (one extremely begrudgingly, but tough tacos, I’m the PhD student and the chick.  I win.), so we all managed to be housed.  Once that madness was put to rest, I finally sat down, took a breath, and got ready for bed.  Whew.

Looks Like We Made It

Monday I woke up in Greenville, Tuesday I woke up in Detroit, Wednesday I woke up on an airplane somewhere over Ireland, and this morning I woke up in Moscow.  We landed around 10:00 last night, when the sun was just beginning to set.  We waited in a massive line at passport control where the immigration officer stared at me wordlessly… seriously… this man didn’t even ask me a question.  He just bored holes in my skull.  By some strange miracle we all got our luggage and then we headed out to meet our liaison, a theatre management studio at the MXAT (Moscow Art Theatre) named Настия (Nastia – and I think I have the Cyrillic right).  She led us to a bus where she quickly made herself into our very favorite person in the world by supplying water and sandwiches.  She even had four vegetarian sandwiches for the four vegetarians – the first time that has happened.  The airline apparently never got the information that the study abroad asked us for in regards to vegetarians, so I’ve been eating a lot of bread.  Bonus: I can now say “bread” in Russian (хлеб [klyeb])
We got to the dorm where we learned that though we were supposed to be on the third floor, a bathroom ceiling had collapsed mere hours before, forcing us to move to the fifth floor.  And you guessed it – there’s no elevator.  So we dragged our suitcases up to the 5^th floor where we discovered the move also meant that there were not as many single rooms as we had expected either.  I did manage to snag one for myself, which is a VERY good thing, what with my general disdain for other humans (sorry, fellow travelers!).  We met in the hallway to get schedules for the next day and then went about our business.  Some people went on a quick preliminary grocery run, but I stuck around, got a tour of the kitchen with the other person who stayed behind, and then took a much needed shower.
Sleeping was not as difficult as I expected.  It is really pretty hot, but if you open the window you end up with a decent draft, some street sounds and a few bugs (no screen… yeehah).   Plus, I was exhausted enough from travel that I managed a good night’s sleep and was fairly ready to face the day.   

This morning we didn’t have to be anywhere until 10:00, so I was able to take my time in the morning.  I accompanied two of the boys to the Starbucks across the street where we discovered the difficulty of dealing with currency, and that Starbucks does not take American Express.  But I did prove my usefulness in my ability to read the menu.  We made the trek to the Moscow Art Theatre (MXAT) as a group – it’s about a 30 minute walk – and then walked up the five flights to the American Studio.  The guys who went last year said it, and I can now confirm: Moscow is made out of stairs.  We got a little chit chat about the rules and decorum of classes, went to exchange our money, and headed off to lunch at the MXAT cafeteria, which was delicious, affordable and a bit of a leap of faith.  All good things.  After lunch we began our training in earnest with an hour lecture on the history of the MXAT with the dean of the MXAT school, Анатоли Смэлиански (Anatoly Smeliansky).  The lecture took place in the foyer of the main theatre which is basically a museum to the greats of MXAT past.  Each person has his/her photo, name, and four photos of different roles s/he played.  It was awe-inspiring and humbling to be sitting there in that room with those faces staring down at us – Stanislavksy, Nemirovich-Danchenko, Dostoyevsky, Meyerhold, Chekhov – gulp.  The lobby was a little warm, and jet lag has by no means become a thing of the past, so staying awake was a bit of a struggle, but I wanted to hear every word he had to say, so the struggle was well worth it!  After his lecture, we were led back up to the studio where we met Миша Лобанов (Mischa Lobanov), for a two hour class on Michael Chekhov technique.  This man is a human beam of sunshine.  The pure joy in his eyes and the sheer excitement in every detail of class was enthralling!  He taught through an interpreter, which is definitely going to take some getting used to – learning how to listen to two people at once.  We did a series of exercises that dealt with tempo/rhythm and imagination.  The exercises are extremely simple, and won’t be terribly exciting if I detail them here, and I can only scrape the surface of Mischa’s warmth and impish delight.  Suffice it to say – I couldn’t stop leaning forward.  It was amazing!

After class, we split up.  Oooh.  Half of the group is attending a production of The Seagull performed by a company run by one of the MXAT members who also happens to be one of the most famous actors in Russia – Олег Табаков (Oleg Tabakov), while my half will be going to see the same show tomorrow night.  So, a handful of us non-Seagull-types decided to hoof it the two blocks from our studio to Red Square.  Yup, two blocks and we’re at the Kremlin, St. Basil’s… it’s breathtaking.  As sparse as so many things in Russia can be, the absolute splendor of Red Square is really something.
Now, on one side of Red Square is the entrance, on one side is St. Basil’s and on one side is the Kremlin.  I know, I can hear you geometry minded folks all the way from the US chanting angrily: “But a square has FOUR sides, red or no!”  And you would be right.  The fourth side of the square is the Гум (goom) – the largest Mall in Moscow.  It runs the whole length of Red Square, so we decided we would go ahead and walk the massive mall on the way back.  ­­­­­­The ice cream we bought in the middle was a big hit.  And then we hoofed it all the way back to the dorms.  Now, it is unseasonably hot here in Moscow, and the 7:00 sun feels an awful lot like high noon anywhere else.  So that uphill walk back to the dorms sure felt like it took a while.  And though I haven’t even considered what to do for dinner yet, I will say that I’m considering the day fairly over… and it’s been a little bit on the full side.   

Starting to Begin

Today is really sort of a pre-travel day where Russia is concerned.  Today is the day when I am travelling back from Greenville to Detroit in order to give myself plenty of time before our Tuesday night departure for the mother country.  Because I do not trust airlines as far as I can check my bags for free, I decided against flying back the day of the departure.  I felt like, even if I left myself 12 hours between landing in Detroit and leaving for Paris, I was asking for trouble.  So I booked my flight today… for 6:25am.  I don’t remember booking such an early flight, but they let me get on it, so I’m assuming I did.  And I didn’t really put it together that I would be travelling on Memorial Day.  So poor Rick had to get up at 4:30 on his day off to drive me to the airport.  Oops. So here I am in the Charlotte airport, listening to some guy in a baseball cap play the guitar while his be-mulletted pal looks on with great admiration.  The man sitting over by the window snores softly into his neck pillow.  One of the women in the unfortunate yellow polo shirts takes a break from hocking US Airways credit cards to sing some soulful blues tune.  Oh my… now a woman has stopped to chat with them.  She doesn’t seem to have any interest in a credit card; rather she seems to want an excuse to hear her own voice.  Today is her birthday, and was her grandparents’ anniversary as well.  I think she’s talking about her highlights and possibly having her eyebrows done as well.  The yellow-shirted women think that she looks like Liza Minelli.  And she kinda does.  But she swears that Liza is older than she is.  And now we’re lamenting Judy Garland’s hard life.  AH!  And now we’ve found our way into the credit card pitch. Oh wait… now we’re getting Looks-like-Liza’s full travel history.  Her brother lives in California, her daughter goes to school in Michigan, and she can’t believe they have See’s candies here in the airport.  They’re great!  She won’t buy them because she can’t eat candy, but still. I must say, I feel sort of bad for the ladies in the unfortunate yellow.  They really put a lot of time into that one, and all they got for their trouble was a referral to a candy store.  I’ll have to enjoy eavesdropping while I can, since I have a feeling I will find it a more difficult past time in Russia. 

Packing

So today began the packing extravaganza in preparation for spending a month in Moscow.  I’m going to be gone for a month and I feel this need to pack for every possible scenario.  I’ll be in acting classes and dance classes, walking 30 minutes back and forth between the dorm, going to the theatre almost every night.  I need normal clothes, workout clothes, theatre-going clothes.  I need walking shoes, dance shoes and dressy shoes.  I need to bring cold and headache meds that I can’t necessarily get hold of in Russia.  I need my computer and my camera.  I’m bringing breakfast bars for those times when there just isn’t a vegetarian option.  I’ve got all the plug adapters.  Shampoo, toothpaste, etc., etc., etc… it feels like there’s always something else to stick into the suitcase.  I don’t want to over pack, I don’t want to have too much to carry, but I don’t want to be missing something important.  It’s going to make my head explode.  Of course, the most helpful part of this process is when my cat, freaking out about the presence of a suitcase, sits on top of it, in it and around it at every possible opportunity.  And she won’t just jump off when I go to open the lid.  She sits there until it is physically impossible for her to do so anymore.  I explain to her that she won’t be going anywhere, but (since she’s a cat) this doesn’t seem to provide any solace.  This was the most boring blog post ever.  Oh yeah. 

Learning Russian

It turns out that learning a whole new language - complete with funky alphabet - isn’t such an easy undertaking.  Off and on since I decided I would be spending a month in Moscow with Wayne State University, I have been attempting to shoehorn some knowledge of Russian into my already extremely crowded brain.  So far, I have pretty well figured out the Russian alphabet, which allows me to pronounce Russian words very very slowly.  I can ask a couple of rudimentary questions, I can say "I don’t speak Russian" and "I don’t eat meat" (I think… I put that sentence together on my own).  I can count to five and respond to being asked "How are you?"  I continue to slowly plow through my Russian book, learning bits of grammar that I am absolutely not retaining, and teeny pieces of vocabulary that end up being all but inapplicable if I remember them at all.  I know I won’t have much spare time, I won’t be wandering around the streets of Russia on my own all that much, but I like to have some degree of understanding of the language.  Of course, the little pieces of German that I picked up over the years are directly interfering with my teeny weeny acquisition of Russian.  I’m going to be speaking word salad to people and understanding even less.  So here’s hoping I don’t have to bail any of the undergrads out of jail… because I’m pretty sure that scenario is not in my phrase books.