St. Petersburg

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

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

The third and final day began much the same way as the others – with a breakfast buffet.  Then we checked out of the hostel and loaded ourselves into a van that took us about an hour outside the city to Царское Село – the summer home of some of the tsars.  It turned out to be a little like a mini Versailles – in fact the rumor is that Elizabeth (a daughter of one of the tsars) was supposed to marry one of the Louises of France, but the marriage fell through so she decided to build a palace that would make Versailles look lame in comparison.  It was lovely, though ridiculously crowded.  That’s one thing we discovered about St. Petersburg – it’s much more of a touristy city than Moscow, so everywhere we went there were these enormous crowds.  And let me tell you, you learn a lot about people when they’re in a tour group.  French people will cut you if you get in the way of their seeing antique ceramics.  Once we wound our way through the house, we walked through the grounds and met back up with our bus, which took us to a mall in St. Petersburg where we grabbed lunch before hopping back on the train – this time it was a bullet train, so the trip that took eight hours on the way there took four hours on the way back.  On the train, there was some crazy Russian movie playing.  I tried to follow it with no sound, and I think I actually may have figured out some important elements about it, but overall, it seemed like a very strange movie.  When we got back to the dorms, some people were at a play, so I just ate and tried to get re-settled.  It ended up being a very drunk night for a lot of people, but I just had a beer with some of the grad students and had a perfectly lovely evening. So… that’s the nutshell version of my adventures in St. Petersburg.  My two main regrets from the trip are as follows: 1) I never managed to stop moving long enough to buy anything with “St. Petersburg” on it – even a keychain.  2) I didn’t get a chance to go to this vegetarian restaurant I read about called “Idiot.”  But hey… I guess that gives me a reason to come back?  Whatever the case, it was a fantastic trip that I wish could have been about a day longer.  Now, we’re really in the home stretch: Thursday, Friday, Saturday… then Sunday we fly home.  Yikes! 

Beginning of the End

Well, yesterday was our final day of singing and acting with Sergei.  Singing was basically a recital… which was mostly a lot of fun.  The most fun for me were the people who didn’t consider themselves singers and seeing how far they’ve come in the last few weeks.  There are a lot more people in this group who sing than they think!  I personally didn’t rock my songs the way I had the week before in class, so I was a little disappointed in my own performance, but I still have the good work I did over the last few weeks as a benchmark to set for myself on the way to getting my voice back in shape.  And Marina had a lot of kind words for us all, so we all left with a pretty warm, fuzzy feeling. For Sergei we did one final set of etudes (one involving a dead guy on a subway, my group’s involving an awkward elevator ride) and then we had individual evaluations with him.  Now, Sergei admitted that he hasn’t had the time to get to know us that he has with his Russian students, and it was quite obvious that he wasn’t setting out to point out our faults, but rather to give us all something positive to walk away with – and that was a-okay with me.  I’m not going to catalog everything he said about me… because it’ll just sound like me patting myself on the back, but I did appreciate that he commended me for not being afraid to be funny, not being afraid to look silly and being willing to sacrifice appearance for the scene – and as a comedian, that sure was nice to hear! There was no show for me to see Friday night either, so I headed back to the dorm for a little dinner, spent a couple of hours doing interweb stuff at Starbucks, and then camped out for a scholarly beer with some of my fellow grad students.  It was a pretty chill evening all around. Then Saturday we headed up to school for our last day of movement class with Vlad.  He had us watch a video of his first year students after they’d been working with him for seven months.  We could see the foundations at work that we had been learning… but the stuff these kids were able to do… YIKES!  You see, we were in elementary acrobatics training, and by the end of seven months, they were throwing each other all over the place!  It was unreal!  See, according to Stanislavsky, it’s good for actors to learn acrobatics, not only so that they have better control over their bodies, but so that they can overcome their fears.  And boy howdy… watching that video, things made a lot of sense. Finally, we had our last class with the glimmering ball of joy – Misha.  He was both our first and our last acting class, and it ended up being a really emotional class.  We all presented our final monologues from Three Sisters.  I actually felt very good about mine – far better than I had felt about my song the day before.  Go figure.  And then we sat in a semi-circle and talked about what we would be taking back with us from Moscow.  I found that I was unable to participate in the conversation because every time I thought about opening my mouth I would get choked up.  One of the other grad students put it very well though when he said that we had all been so nervous when we got here – what was it going to be like?  And then we met Misha who was so generous and disarming and welcoming and alive, and that he wanted to bring back a little bit of Misha with him from Moscow.  I’m pretty sure we all agree on that front! Class got out early, so we had some time to kill before the show that Aaron and JT and I were scheduled to see Saturday night, so I sat in the square journaling (and being approached by every beggar on Kamergersky street – one who seemed prepared to adapt his panhandling into loud slow Russian so that I could better understand.  Listen guy: as an American tourist I can tell you: louder and slower does not mean more understandable.)  Then Aaron, JT and I went to dinner, spent about an hour sitting on the boulevard at Pushkinskaya killing time and talking about the month before heading to the theatre.  It was at the same tiny little theatre where we had seen Death of Giraffe, and the place was PACKED.  The little wooden café chairs where we were seated in the front row were smooshed together and our knees were a little over a foot from the edge of the stage – then they put people on pillows on the floor in front of us and continued to set up extra chairs on the side of the seating… and this is a show that has been running since 2006!  I mean, holy moly!  I had a successful Russian interaction with the woman sitting next to me as I helped her and her husband locate their seats, so she assumed I spoke Russian – which was not a correct assumption on her part.  But she did speak English, and we had a very pleasant chat about the show and about theatre in Moscow in general. The show we saw was the last Kremov production of the trip, this one was called Торги (Auction).  It was inspired by the issues that surrounded the building they were performing in, which had been a space that was taken away from a famous director during Soviet times.  The actors seemed to be sort of saying their goodbyes to the space, and then they began to dig up pieces of the theatre’s past – literally.  You see, when we entered, the entire stage was covered in plastic sheeting, and there was a huge mound of sand in the middle where there were sand sculptures of the building as well as different places around Moscow.  During the course of the show, they dug up oversized dolls of the three sisters, money, candles, a seagull (which really did seem alive in their hands) and a whole bunch of other things that had some tangential relation to Chekhov and/or Vasiliev (the director who had had the space taken from him).  They sang and even rapped sections of Chekhov’s text, and at one point they constructed a see-saw with the model of the building in question as the fulcrum.  They played on it up and down in amazing different ways, before they began to allow it to spin, with the actors flying through the space, supported by the weight of each other and help up by the theatre space.  It was another one of those plays that made me long for the text so I could fully understand everything they had done.  I caught a few of the jokes, and felt very savvy for doing so, but I really do hope I can come back here some day with a better understanding of the language.  That would take this experience to a whole new level.  Plus, as a special treat, we actually got to meet Dmitri Kremov at the end of the production!  It was just a quick handshake and introduction by our professor, but it sure was cool.  Aaron and I geeked out big time over it. When we got back to the dorm we discovered that there was a giant round of the drinking game “Waterfall” being played on one end of the dorm, and there were some very drunk people involved in this whole process.  I’m not so much with the drinking games, so I just stopped in here and there before heading to bed.  A little after 1:00 I did have to let the world know that I was planning on going to sleep, so the noise level on our side of the floor would have to simmer down a little bit – I’m such a killjoy.  But I did manage to sleep pretty hard, if not very long, since I got up in the morning to head over to Starbucks for a little skyping.  I managed to skype with my parents and then with Rick, and then the pleasant surprise of getting to skype with my brother, sister-in-law and niece too!  And Anya has officially figured out my name, which made me want to weep right there in Starbucks!  That little girl is just the best thing ever. So… tonight I hop the midnight train to St. Petersburg (well… it’s actually at 11:00, but still) and I’ll be there until Wednesday.  I’ll be offline during that time, but I’m sure I’ll have many exciting adventures to chronicle when I return!

Clever Blog Title Here

Well let’s see.  Looking at my last post, I was right about one thing – I did start off Wednesday morning with my feet behind my head… only I did it on my own this time without the assistance of a large Russian man.  So that’s pretty special.  I didn’t quite make it this morning, but give me a break… this was the first time we’d had two days of movement in a row!  I’m lucky I’m able to sit upright.  Then instead of having acting class, we watched a Russian movie from the 1970s called Unfinished Piece for a Player Piano.  We watched it because it’s a great example of a Chekhovian style, and I totally get that, but it was our penultimate day of class with Sergei… so we were all a little bummed that we just got shrugged off to sit in front of a VCR instead of working.  After classes last night I went to my fourth show at the Сатирикон (Satirikon): Король Лир (King Lear).  This production was directed by the same guy who directed Richard III, Seagull andHamlet, and featured the same guy who played Richard III as King Lear, and it also included almost the entire cast of last night’sSeagull.  One thing I have to say about the Russian repertory system – these people have to keep so many shows in their heads for so long.  And it’s not as if a person with a big role in one show plays a smaller role in another show.  The stars tend to be the stars… and that translates to sooooooooooo many scripts running through these people’s brains!  It’s really impressive when you stop to think about it.  At any rate, I think this may have been the most straightforward of the productions I’ve seen by this director.  I thought it was good, the acting was excellent, but the staging wasn’t as creative as I had come to expect from this director.  Although the final image of the play was beautiful and devastating enough that even if the rest of the play had been abysmal, I probably would have walked away praising it.  See, they just cut all the stuff at the end about Albany and Kent and Edgar being really good people, and maybe Edgar should be in charge or whatever.  The set featured three upright pianos upstage, and after Goneril and Regan died, they sat on the piano stools and slumped over their respective pianos.  So when Cordelia died, she went to take her place at her piano, but Lear kept trying to sit her up straight – to bring her back.  Then he started going to the other sisters, but as he left to start working on another, the last one would crash back into the keys or onto the floor.  This went on for a while until the lights just faded out.  It was really gorgeous.  That’s one thing I’ve found very interesting about the way they approach Shakespeare here: they have no problem cutting things that do not suit the concept.  He wanted Richard to be about karmic retribution, so he cut Richmond and let the people he killed destroy him.  He wantedHamlet to be about Hamlet’s lone descent so he cut Horatio.  He wanted Lear to be about this man who destroyed his family, so they cut the stuff about someone else taking the throne.  And I have a feeling that, if I could understand the language, I would discover even more cuts and more pointed sculpting of the text to the director’s purposes. This morning, as I said, we had movement again.  I achieved a full shoulder stand, and even though no one saw me, I felt pretty spiffy.  Then we had our last theatre history lecture which turned out to be a Q&A… for which we didn’t prepare.  So our questions were kinda lame.  Then we had our Chekhov acting class during which we worked through our monologues with Misha.  Now, over the next two days we are going to have a bunch of lasts.  Tomorrow is our last day of singing and our last day of acting with Sergei.  Saturday is our last day of movement and our last day of acting with Misha.  Then Sunday ten of us will head to St. Petersburg for a few days.  Then Thursday we’ll have our little “graduation” ceremony from the MXAT school, Saturday we have a little outing that I will blog about when it happens (and I’m not going to tell you what it is yet.  This will probably just cause undue interest, because it won’t end up being nearly as interesting as anything any of my 5 1/2 readers could imagine on their own, but whatever), then Sunday the 3^rd at 5:00am we will pile on the bus and head to the airport.  I knew the end of this month was going to sneak up on me, but DAMN!  This is madness!  I do feel like I’m ready to go home, but I also feel like I could stay here for another few months and just really go to all these classes again and again and again.  There is so much to learn here.  And I’m so lucky to have gotten this little taste of it.  And I kinda want more!

Ya Chaika... For Realsies

Well, it’s the Summer Solstice today… which I suppose means tomorrow we might have about 4 hours and 10 minutes of darkness.  But anyway… this morning we had our final film history class which was, as usual, crazy interesting.  This woman is just bubbling over with knowledge and enthusiasm… I would have listened just to her for the whole month and been very happy.  After a quick lunch we had acting.  We were all gratified to hear that our group etudes were closer to the Chekhovian idea that Sergei had set for us.  Our training was overall more in-tune.  And my individual etude went over very well.  So I was feeling pretty good going into the evening.  Most of the group was scheduled to see a ballet version of The Little Mermaid (not the Disney version), but I was scheduled to see something else… SO, the first show I saw when I got to Moscow three weeks ago was a production of Чайка (The Seagull).  The folks at the MXAT didn’t seem to like that production much – despite the fact that many of their own actors were involved with it.  Most of our teachers at one time or another advised us to see the new production of Чайка running at the Сатирикон (Satirikon).  It was directed by the same guy who directed the Richard III and the Hamlet that we’ve already seen, as well as the King Lear that I’ll be seeing tomorrow.  But back to my story: JT and one of the undergrad students and I trundled off for our 7:00 curtain, took our really great seats, and had our minds absolutely blown for the next four and a half hours.  I would attempt to describe this production, but there’s just no way that I possibly could.  And even if I could transcribe the five pages of notes I took during the show, or even if I could accurately describe every moment, it still wouldn’t make sense.  It really has to be seen.  But I really truly had a life changing experience at the theatre tonight.  Everything we’ve seen here has been exceptional in its own way, but this was different.  The images and the physicality and the variations… obviously there was a language barrier, and I so wish that I could have understood everything better… but I was still able to follow them on almost all of their twists and turns, and I just want to go see that show every night until I leave.  Of course, that’s not how Russian theatre works.  So 10 of our group are going to get to see the show on Sunday night while the rest of us are on our way to St. Petersburg… and then it’s not playing again until after we leave.  So there are eight people in our group who will never get to see this production… and I am so so sorry for them.  Because I really cannot explain the experience I had tonight.  I actually enjoyed the first production we saw.  But this production had a soul and a life all its own.  I cried because the play was over.  It was earth shattering. So… with all of those images and memories and emotions and questions dancing through my head, I’m going to try to get myself to sleep.  We’ve got movement in the morning… which probably means that in about 10 hours I’ll have my feet behind my head.  Russia is weird. 

Chekhov Fail

This morning was an extension of my day off yesterday, since the other half of the group had singing this morning.  So I got up and <gasp> did my damn laundry!  I now have clean clothes to wear!  It’s a very exciting feeling, I must say.  So, I stepped outside and presently sweated my way through my first clean shirt on the hot and humid walk to the theatre for acting class in the afternoon.  Because we are trying to cover in a month what MXAT students usually do over the course of about a year and a half, we often have to take giant leaps for which we are not ready.  Today was an example of that, in that we moved into working on “Chekhovian” etudes to start out the class.  We were basically told that we used too many words and ended up lying on stage the whole time.  Ouch.  I think this threw us a bit, and so our group dynamic was way off for our training exercises.  Then, when we went into our personal etudes, it just went from bad to worse.  My attempt at channeling my niece was extremely unsuccessful, but lauded for the difficulty of what I attempted… so I guess that’s something.  And when I helped out one of my classmates with his etude, we were congratulated for not being as untruthful as the one that preceded it… so I guess that’s something too.  Oh well – it’s all part of the process.  After class I walked back to the dorm and made a little dinner before leading a group of six undergrads to see Катя, Соня, Поля, Галя, Вера, Оля, Таня (Katia, Sonya, Polya, Galya, Vera, Olya, Tanya) – a play I saw a week or so ago.  I loved it, talked it up, and decided that I would go again… why the hell not, eh?  I will say that I don’t think that this performance was quite as on as the last performance, but it was still absolutely stunning and fantastic.  Plus, since I had seen it before, I knew when they were trying to hide something by directing my attention elsewhere, so I fought back and tried to observe some of the mechanism behind the magic.  I’m not sure the students enjoyed it quite as much as I did… but I think they at least appreciated it anyway.  Especially the young women – because seeing the kind of work done by the four women in that show is just plain inspiring. Then… when I got back to the dorm I drank a little vodka and did some journaling, reading and blogging (oh my!)   Not a bad way to end a day.

Long Arm Tourist Photos

We don’t have classes on Sundays, but we usually do have shows to attend in the evenings, so they end up being only partial days off.  Today half of us were supposed to go see Richard III and the other half of us were supposed to go see Much Ado About Nothing.  I was in the Much Ado half.  However, it seems that some wires got crossed, and no one ended up getting us tickets for that particular show, which gave us an honest to goodness day off.  So my plan was to be the uber-tourist.  The fact that it was raining pretty heavily when I woke up put a bit of a damper on this plan, but I was not to be deterred.  After a little Starbucks interweb time, I made myself some lunch, put on my rain coat and headed out on an adventure.  I started out at the Храм Христа Спасителя (Cathedral of Christ the Saviour) – the largest Cathedral in Moscow.  It was originally built to commemorate the Russians’ victory over Napoleon, but then Stalin tore the magnificent building down with plans to build a giant statue of Lenin in its place.  Luckily that never happened.  Instead the site was the largest swimming pool in the world for many years.  Only in 1994 did they begin to rebuild the cathedral… finishing it in 1997.  So even though this particular building is only about 15 years old, it has the feeling and grandeur of a much older and more historical place.  I walked inside and was just overcome with the sheer beauty and scale of it.  It was not unlike the feeling I had walking into St. Peter’s Basilica ten years ago.  My eyes couldn’t open wide enough to take it all in.  I walked around and around in circles just staring in every direction.  I even bought a candle so I could go light it for my family at one of the many shrines in the building (It is Fathers’ Day after all… so I figured it was a good time to do it!).  By the time I was done in there the rain had mostly stopped.  So I decided to head to the Арбат (Arbat) – a pedestrian street with lots of stores and street artists.  On my way there I got off one stop too early from the metro and wandered around a really pretty park for a while before finally heading on to my destination.  There was nothing particularly fancy about the street itself.  There are a lot of tattoo parlors on the strip, which is sort of making me want to go get one.  We’ll see how brave I get.  Oddly, I have never heard the frickin’ theme song from Titanic as many times as I did on that strip.  I mainly steered clear of the gazillion souvenir shops, but when I did walk into one I was absolutely adopted by a sales girl.  She swooped down on me and wouldn’t leave me alone.  She was very sweet, but way pushy.  I ended up buying a couple of items for some family members and headed back down the street to the metro. Back at the metro, I hopped onto another line which took me out to what is known as “Victory Park” – a ginormous park dedicated to the Russian victory at the end of WWII.  There are fountains and monuments and floral arrangements everywhere.  There is a 142m tall Обелиск (obelisk) in the middle of the park – 1 cm per day of the war.  They even have their own Триумфальные Ворота (Triumphal Arch).  Apparently St. George is either Moscow or Russia’s patron saint, so he is all over that place.  I didn’t go into the Церковь св Георгия (Church of St. George), but I did take my picture in front of it.  So there’s that.  I wandered around the park for about an hour, bought a Magnum Bar (here it’s Магнат) that was just as delightful as I remembered them from my Austria days, and headed back to the dorm.  It was such a full day!  And since I was on my own, I ended up taking a ton of long-arm photos of myself at the various sites, since I was tired of just seeing the scenery… I wanted to be in the pictures too!  I’m sure I got plenty of stares, but I really don’t care.  I made the conscious decision that I was going to be the uber tourist today… and uber tourist I was!  I even bought my first bottle of vodka since I’ve been here.  I’ve been told this brand is extremely smooth, so I’m quite looking forward to giving it a try this week!  Go Boдka! PS - thoughts to myself during my solitary outing included:

• Man, I’m good at this metro thing.
• I have Russian face.  I wonder if I look Russian enough.  Do they think I’m Russian?
• How do you pronounce that sign?
• Wait… which stop is this?
• I wonder who those people are.  Well… they’re in this picture.
• How much did that shot glass cost?
• What if I pretended I didn’t speak Russian or English?  Then what would they do?

Stanislavsky and the Bolshoi

The morning of the 18^th we took a tour of the apartment that Stanislavsky was given by the Soviet government after they collectivized all of the country’s assets.  The apartment was a pretty nice spread… until you look at a picture of his original residence, and you realize that this must have felt like pretty cramped quarters.  Still, it was pretty wild seeing the literal places that I’ve read about and heard anecdotes about.  There’s even a large door that he had brought in from one of the sets from the first season of the Moscow Art Theatre and it’s become a ritual for actors starting on new projects to come touch the door handle for good luck.  So… of course… we all did.  Ah, it’s good to be a tourist. The afternoon was taken up by our Michael Chekhov class with Misha, who just continues to amaze me every single day.  He’s working on monologues from Three Sisters with us, and it’s ridiculous how well he knows these plays.  We tell him a character and an act, and he knows what monologue it is.  And though he doesn’t understand most of the actual words we’re saying, he still gives us these crazy insightful notes based on exactly what we’re saying and doing.  He’s a master.  And he’s adorable.  I want to put him in my pocket. The evening was an excursion to the Большой (Bolshoi) for a preview performance of the Rimsky-Korsakov opera Золотой Петушок (The Golden Cockerel).  It’s a crazy little fairy tale about a foolish tsar and the magical bird he’s given to help tell his future.  Of course, there’s a beautiful Tsaritsa, a mysterious old man, and the bird ends up pecking a hold in the tsar’s jugular… so you know it’s going to be a good time.  And this production was really amazing in every possible way.  Of course the voices were stellar, and the production values were out of this world!  THAT is what it looks like when you put money on stage.  The building itself is an absolute monument.  And we were in the alternate space that they built to house the Bolshoi shows while they’re renovating the original Bolshoi.  But even so, it was magnificent.  The lights were alive, the sets were amazing, there was a cast of about a gazillion (including a chorus of creepy lollipop guild dancing children).  I bought the program and discovered that there was a full libretto inside in both Russian and English, so as the show began I was prepared to try to follow along in English… when we discovered that they were projecting subtitles in English!   Huzzah!  This was the first show we’ve been to where we were able to simply sit back and follow the show the way we would in the states, so that was a nice relief.  Plus, the seats were definitely more comfortable than any of the other shows we’ve attended, so that was a double treat.  The only thing that sullied the experience in the least was that our translator was all pissy at us for not getting dressed up for the show – even though no one told us to.  And frankly, we all would have loved the opportunity to get dolled up, but we didn’t know.  There were plenty of people dressed casually, so we weren’t completely out of place, but in such a sort of fairy tale setting, it would have been pretty cool to have felt a little fancy-schmancier.  Oh well.  The show was so much damn fun, we didn’t spend too much time worrying about it.  Besides, our other liaison showed up in jeans, so we just dismissed it as part of our first translator’s constant negative demeanor.  So there!  We went to the Bolshoi, bitches! PS – the show did include a guy doing that Russian dance where he squats and does a bunch of front kicks… so that’s another Russian stereotype to cross of the list!