December 23, 2010: Home.

Three months of Moscow cold, of 6- and 7-day work weeks, of doing what I'm passionate about 24 hours a day, of forging and strengthening a network of incredible friendships, of challenging myself beyond any limits, of exploring a city that was closed for years, of finding myself, of missing Steve.  I'm home, and I'm found and I'm lost and ready or not, I'm taking another step forward in this thing we call life.

In Moscow, I learned:

That anything is possible.  My acting teachers often started notes or suggestions with "it is possible..." and that applies everywhere.  It is possible to make a different acting choice -- to be joyful even when my words are sad, to be large with my gestures even if that feels foreign at first, to create a dialog out of a monologue.  It is possible to learn to dance ballet at 30 years old having never taken a dance class before.  It is possible to learn to stand on my shoulder.  It is possible to communicate in Russian even though my vocabulary is under 100 words.  It is possible to be simultaneously lonely and fulfilled, frustrated and proud of myself, found and lost and found again.

These last 3 months in Russia have been some of the hardest of my life, and some of the most artistically and personally fulfilling.  I learned that there is a deep well of strength within me that grows even stronger when I ask for help.  I learned that I am never alone, and that when I surround myself with good people, I become more confident and I have more to give.  I learned that when I am a part of a healthy ensemble, I share in each person's successes as if they are my own.

I'm terrified and excited to figure out how to take what I've been learning and apply it to the beginning of my professional career as an artist, while I continue my process as a student of the arts.  Now it's time for me to create a career for myself as an actor and a teacher and a continuing student.  I have a lot to share, and as I figure out how to do that, it will be challenging and rewarding and worthwhile and POSSIBLE.  If I don't find immediate success or gratification, that doesn't mean I have to give up on my dream in any way.  It is possible to find different paths toward my goals.  It is possible to be a working actor.  It is possible to live my dreams.  It is possible.

I've enjoyed blogging so much, I don't think it's going to end here.  If you're interested, keep an eye on this site.  I think I'll create another blog connected to this one: Jenny's Adventures as a Working Actor :)

~~ April 16, 2011: here it is: http://jennysadventuresasaworkingactor.blogspot.com/ ~~

December 12, 2010: The Pleasure of Communication

Lydia is making cake balls (chocolate cake rolled with cream cheese and dipped in melted chocolate) and singing along to 90s music in the kitchen.  Darren and Greg and Donovan and Rachelle and Katie are having a design project party across the hall.  Kelley and Rebecca are practicing ballet in the hall.  It snowed 4 inches today so the nighttime world is glistening quietly, as yet undisturbed by the daytime traffic.  I’m safe and warm in my little Moscow dorm room, here for one more week, and I think I’m going to miss this place.

I was supposed to go to the zoo today with Ilya, but we ended up having a final rehearsal for our scenes at school instead.  So yesterday I called her to let her know I couldn’t meet her and ask for her address so I can write her postcards when I get home.  I wrote out a script for myself, then went downstairs to ask the lady at the front desk to let me use the phone.  There are 3 main women who work at the desk buzzing people in and out.  We call them the Babushkas (grandmothers), although they’re not actually that old.  One of them has dark hair and a round face and always smiles and greets me as I pass.  Another wears short gray hair and a grimace, and sits a little like an ogre protecting a drawbridge, although I’m sure she’s actually much nicer than that.  The one who was there yesterday has orange-ish brown hair with mousey brown roots.  Her lipstick matches her hair, and the plastic frames of her thick glasses match the roots.  She rarely smiles but nods solemnly in greeting, as though I’m entering a church (it makes me want to curtsy to her, but so far I’ve resisted the urge).  When I got to the lobby I asked to use the phone:

Me: “Ya dumayu telefon v maya komnata ni rabotayet.  Mojna esposavat eta telefon?” (I think the phone in my room doesn’t work.  May I use this phone?”)

Babushka: “Yes.  I help.” 

And she got up and let me sit at her desk and dialed the number for me.  Ilya didn’t answer, and it sounded like a child’s voice on the other end of the line.  In the first part of my script, I asked to speak to Ilya, and the child said she wasn’t home.  In the next part of the script I explained why I couldn’t meet “you” at the zoo, so I quickly changed “you” to “Ilya” and forged ahead, then said “ponimaeyete?” (do you understand?).  The child mumbled something and then moved the phone to call for someone else to come and talk to me, and then hung up on me.

Slightly ruffled but determined to relay my message and get Ilya’s address, I dialed the number again.  But I couldn’t figure out how to dial out of the building, so I called for the babushka to come and help me again.  She dialed it for me again, probably wondering vaguely if I was harassing somebody, then handed me the phone.  This time a man answered.  I read him my whole script and he said “yes” and started giving me the address, at which point I realized I was never going to be able to figure out how to spell the street name in Russian.  So I called for the babushka again, waved the receiver at her and said “izvenitye, pajalusta, ya haichu adres?” (excuse me please, I want address?) and pointed at my script.  She took the phone and copied down the address for me, and even got Ilya’s last name for me, somehow knowing I needed that too.  When she hung up the phone, she read the address to me and I read it back to her to make sure I knew all the letters.  I said “spaciba balshoi” (thank you very much) about 5 times and smiled hugely at her, and she nodded and smiled back – the first time I’ve ever seen her smile.

It is immensely satisfying to communicate with people here – I am pleased with myself every time I understand when the checkout lady asks if I want a bag or when the lunch lady tells me that my meal costs 151 rubles or when the speaker voice says that we’re at the Mayakovskaya metro stop and the next stop is Beloruskaya.  The amount of focus and determination it takes to understand and make myself understood forces me to be more aware of myself and the world around me.  It’s harder to fall into habit here, and although this can be exhausting, it’s also rewarding.  So although I’m looking forward to seeing my first play in the States and being able to follow the story from the words being said, I will miss the pleasure of simple communication.

December 5, 2010: Russian movement to keep the cold away

Two weeks to go, and it's a little hard to fathom all I have learned and all I have left to do.  Like a marathon runner in her last miles, I'm running on fumes, exhaustion, and a burning need to cross the finish line.  On December 3rd, Steve and I celebrated our 5th wedding anniversary half a world apart.  There are a million things to be grateful for here in Russia, and also a million reasons I'm ready to go home.  My heart strings are pulling me back to Steve.

Moscow is covered in snow and filled with snow-removal teams of all kinds: snow-shovelers, men dragging bags of snow off the sidewalk and into the gutter, snow plows, sweepers with brooms, men throwing sand, and even cranes lifting the snow out of monument areas.  There was a cold snap last week that slapped us all in the face with how tough Russians have to be.  For 3 days the warmest I saw the thermometer was -16 and the coldest was -21.  That's Celsius, but that's COLD.  Walking to school, I had to cover my face with my scarf in order to breathe, and my breath caused my hair to freeze to my face.  I wear 4 shirts every day, and I stay relatively warm.  I've noticed that Russians don't smile as much as Americans do, and I think it's because of the Russian winters.  When your face is frozen, you can't smile.  Cold is a way of life.


I'm going to take more pictures of my movement accomplishments, but here are a few teasers.  The hardest for me was the shoulder stand: it took me all semester to learn this, and when these pictures were taken I held it for probably 2 minutes, a personal record by far.

 me and Todd, balanced figures

shoulder stand!

me and Greg doing seagull, with Darren in the back

evidence of the cold, cold weather

November 30, 2010: A Picture Update

me and Ilya at her produce stand

Jacquie, me, Todd, and Kelley at the ice museum

ice sculptures

me and Todd by the Moscow river -- University of Moscow behind us

me and Oleg and Sasha, my acting teachers.  Sasha is making fun of the Russian "serious face."

Christmas tree in front of school

Christmas tree in Red Square

Sunset looking through the sculpture garden at the New Tretyakov gallery toward Gorky Park

Building near school.  Note the temperature at bottom.  That's Celsius, but it's still really cold!!

November 26, 2010: A Russian Thanksgiving

We went all out for Thanksgiving.  Everyone signed up weeks in advance to make different dishes, and then Marissa made up a schedule of kitchen use and time for each person in the 3 kitchens available to us.  We cooked all day.  There was a debate about the appropriateness of playing Christmas music – some people thought it helped to get in the holiday mood, and others insisted you have to wait until after Thanksgiving to play Christmas music.  So we switched it up every hour or so, and there was also a really different vibe in each of the 3 kitchens, depending on who was cooking and whose music was playing.  We laughed and joked and helped each other chop vegetables and told childhood stories and banded together to keep the fire alarm from going off when the fried chicken caused clouds of smoke.

There was SO MUCH food!  For many of us, it was our first time making family recipes without the help of our parents, and we also had to improvise with some ingredients that aren’t readily available here.  But everything turned out beautifully.  We had a turkey and a chicken and macaroni and cheese and meatloaf and a giant pot of Russian cabbage soup called shee.  There was creamed spinach and tomato salad and green bean casserole and fried eggplant and frosted cauliflower (my specialty) and mashed potatoes and stuffing and cranberry sauce.  For dessert we had pumpkin pie made from fresh pumpkin, apple pie, cinnamon apples, cookies, brownies, and pecan pie.  And there was plenty of vodka, sangria, and champagne to go around.

There were between 60 and 70 of us packed into the rehearsal space in the basement of the dorm that’s about 15 feet by 40 feet.  The food was laid out on tables, but there were only about 8 chairs lining the walls – we stood to eat and talk.  It was a real treat to share this holiday with our closest Russian friends who are students at MXAT and our teachers: in attendance were both of my acting teachers, my Russian language teacher, my stage combat teacher, my movement teacher, and the head of the Moscow Art Theatre School, Anatoly Smeliansky.  Dr. Smeliansky gave a toast saying that because of Russia’s rough history, they don’t have any holidays that really mean anything to the people, and he is honored to be a part of this holiday that has a real meaning for us.  He also said that we are a very special group of American students, and more than just students he sees us as colleagues.  Our Russian language teacher Elena also gave a short toast, saying that this is the 8th Thanksgiving she has shared with the American students, and although she has never been to the United States, it is now a treasured tradition for her.

At home, I tend to take Thanksgiving for granted.  It’s just a day to eat a lot of food and see a few friends or relatives.  This year, I was reminded what the holiday is really for – it is a chance to share what you can: your time, your food, your company – and appreciate all your blessings.  It warmed my heart to be a part of such a large team effort that turned out so well and that was truly appreciated by the Russian people we’ve grown to love here.  We’re all still glowing from the success, and I’ve heard more than one of my friends say it was the best Thanksgiving they’ve ever had.

November 21, 2010: First Snow, Holiday Season, Hamlet, and Culture

Christmas decorations are going up everywhere.  There is a giant Christmas tree at the entrance to the park just outside the dorm, and another one in the street outside school.  The fast food restaurant called Teremok by school is decked out with 2 trees, lights, and garlands.  The grocery store I went shopping at today has a decorated tree and a sign that I think says “Happy New Year.”  It snowed a little today, enough to stick to the ground.  Ilya says it’s supposed to snow for real on Friday (she put her hand up to her waist to demonstrate the amount).  I’m happy to experience the universality of Christmas celebration, realizing again that despite the language barrier, people everywhere are still people, sharing joy in similar ways.  I smiled to see a family having a snowball fight with the small amount of snow they could scrape off of a car parked on the street.  But I miss my family and my own traditions, and although I am welcome here, it’s tough to be away from home this time of year.

I developed and framed a picture of me and Ilya at her fruit stand, and I wrote a little note on the back and gave it to her.  I think it made her really happy.  She will only be working there for a few more days, and then she closes for the winter because it gets too cold and her fruits and vegetables would freeze.

Last weekend 5 of us went to an ice sculpture museum.  It was magical and I have pictures, but I’ll have to post them later.  The museum was only one small room, maybe 15 by 25 feet.  Before we went in, they gave us special cloaks that made me feel like Snow White.  It was very cold inside (we were walking around in a freezer!) and the room was filled with ice sculptures.  There were warriors on horses and three-headed dragons and birds in houses and squirrels running through the meadow and a giant dragonfly and a chest of treasures and a big Faberge egg and a log cabin with fruit frozen into ice blocks inside and a photo opportunity where you could put your face into the hole so that you had a different person’s body – but it was made of ice!  We stayed inside for maybe 30 minutes, until we couldn’t feel our fingers or toes.

Last night I saw Hamlet performed by a company traveling from St. Petersburg.  It was less than 2 hours long with no intermission.  Onstage was a giant set of bleachers oriented so that when the actors were sitting on the bleachers, their backs were to the audience.  Center stage was a long set of stairs leading up into the bleachers, and at the very front of the stage was a pit with a wooden plank across it.  As we walked into the theatre, the actors were already onstage, all dressed in black and sitting in the bleachers waiting for an event to take place.  The play opened with 2 officers leading drug dogs through the bleachers, across the stage, and back out.  Then Hamlet’s friends carried him through the audience onstage and under the bleachers.  He was passed out from drinking too much, and his friends revived him and dressed him in a suit and carried him to the event, which turned out to be his father’s funeral (which took place upstage, through the bleachers, so we really couldn’t see much except the actors’ backs).  Hamlet was drunk through the funeral, making a bit of a scene (grabbing Ophelia’s butt, trying to leave to go to the bathroom, and clapping at inappropriate times).  After the funeral, Hamlet’s friends poured him more shots, and he drank until he passed out again.  Then they staged a hallucination of a ghost – the lights dimmed to blue, they used a microphone passed between them, and there were thunder sheets and a spotlight.  Hamlet seemed to me to be legitimately crazy for the rest of the show, with no “pretending to be crazy” as is usually accepted.  During the scene when Hamlet stabs Ophelia’s father behind the curtain, her father was under the bleachers and he stabbed him there, and the lights dimmed to almost blackout.  Hamlet dragged Ophelia’s father out onto the stage and only when he started stabbing him repeatedly did I realize that it must be a doll, not the actor playing Ophelia’s father.  A crowd gathered to watch Hamlet stabbing this body, and in the crowd was an actor in a donkey suit who had appeared earlier in the play within a play.  Hamlet dragged the body all the way across stage and adopted a vulgar position with the body, stabbing it even more, when Ophelia appeared.  She was already going crazy, singing her song, and when she saw Hamlet, he left and she cradled her father, then dumped him into the pit and threw herself into the pit as though drowning herself.

Much of the action of the play took place behind the bleachers, so we couldn’t really see it.  There were 2 extended party scenes like that.  The play within a play was entirely behind the bleachers, and King Claudius comes running, screaming out and down the stairs and through the audience when he is struck with guilt at having killed Hamlet’s father.  The duel at the end begins behind the bleachers and finishes in view of the audience.  The play ended as it began, with 2 officers leading their drug dogs through the bleachers, across the stage, and back out through the bleachers.

The play left me with a multitude of impressions: They cut it and completely changed it.  It’s a story of one long, drunken hallucination.  It’s a practical joke with tragic consequences.  It’s the immense frustration of seeing everything from Hamlet’s point of view – he never has the whole story, and he can never see anything clearly: thus the bleachers in the way, obscuring our view.  This impression was intensified even more for me because I was in the very last seat in the second balcony, and when I was sitting down I couldn’t see the front of the stage, and when I was standing up I couldn’t see the platform at the top of the bleachers.  The people in front of me spent about half the show standing, so I did too.  But rather than annoying me, it turned the show into an interactive experience for me, where I was struggling to get the full picture, just as Hamlet is doing.  For me, it was a dark and thought-provoking way to twist a (perhaps) over-told story, to highlight completely different ideas.

Today I went to 2 art galleries and a cathedral.  There was a church service going on inside the cathedral with a choir singing, and the acoustics were beautiful.  The cathedral was large and impressive with vaulted ceilings and colorful decorations depicting Bible stories, much like the cathedral I saw in St. Petersburg.  I visited the Pushkin Museum of Fine Art and the New Collection added on in 2006.  The Pushkin contained art and artifacts starting with Ancient Egypt and going through the 19th century.  It wasn’t terribly large, but there was a lot of really interesting stuff.  I loved the New Collection.  It was almost exclusively French Impressionist work, with full rooms of Monet, Manet, Renoir, Gauguin, Matisse, Van Gogh, and Picasso.  There were 3 floors that displayed pieces systematically and progressively through time, starting with about 1850 and ending at about 1980.  The museum was not at all crowded, so I lingered and soaked it all in.  Art museums (especially good ones) are a refreshing break from TV!

November 11, 2010: Hot Weather and Hard Work

The last 2 days have been unseasonably warm:  it was 15 degrees Celsius as I was walking home last night.  Although it's nice to peel off my coat and linger outside, I somehow feel like something is wrong - like we should be bundling up and shivering and drinking tea and huddling together for warmth.  I've been away from home for 54 days, and I'm experiencing a paradoxical undercurrent of knowing I fit in and feeling loved and supported, while still feeling isolated within a crowd.  My friends have become my family.  Moscow has become my home.  I visit Ilya every other day to buy fruit, talk about the weather, name the classes I took that day, and answer her questions with smiles and "I don't understand"s, or sometimes broken attempted responses.  I saw a rat on the street and a man talking to himself, and I'm starting to recognize the old women with wrinkled faces bundled in rags who shiver and hold out dirty cups for kopecks.  I gave a man directions to Tverskaya street last night in Russian, even though he switched to English as soon as I started to speak:
Man:  "(Unintelligable Russian question.)"
Me:  "Izvenitye?" ("Excuse me?")
Man:  "Where is Tverskaya street?"
Me:  (Pointing) "Tam."  ("There.")
Man:  "Thank you."
Impressive, yes?  I'm practically fluent!

In Acting, we do etudes and etudes and etudes: in groups, in pairs, and solo.  We're starting to focus on etudes relating to our scene work, and I'm playing Liuba from The Cherry Orchard.  This week I did a solo etude in which Liuba tries to poison herself (which happened shortly before the play begins) and an etude in which my scene partner tells me my son has just drowned in the river (which happened 6 years before the play begins).  Perhaps this is contributing to my general feeling of discontent.

I struggle in ballet.  Larissa told us through a translator about her career in ballet at the Bolshoi Theatre and how her dad always said that art is equally about technique and radiance.  I'm inspired and continually awed by the fact that I'm studying with such a beautiful and accomplished ballerina, and frustrated that I'm not better at the dances.  I suppose I should be easier on myself since I've only been dancing for 8 weeks, but it's difficult to be radiant when I'm tripping over my own feet.  I stayed after class yesterday to practice a dance step again that we've been working on since the beginning of the semester.  I was sweating and crying and getting it wrong repeatedly, and Larissa was clapping the rhythm and adjusting my body and shouting "again!" and saying "maladiets!" ("good job!") even though it wasn't.  Finally she told me to stop, and I said "ya haichu dyelat" (I want to do it).  She smiled and kissed me on the cheek and told me it was OK and said we would work together again after class on Monday.  I don't know if I'll ever learn all the steps, but I hold within me a feeling of hard work, struggle, and immense care from a lovely artist who wants me to succeed.

11-04-10: My Birthday, St. Petersburg, and Another Busy Week

Last Thursday was my 30th birthday.  I tend to be overly dramatic about these things, and I've been dreading this day for months.  But it's a little hard to be unhappy about getting older when I realize everything I'm doing with my life, and when I'm surrounded by an incredible ensemble of people who care about me.  For my birthday, Darren and Lydia made me gluten free cookie bars that were some of the most delicious sweets I've ever tasted.  I'm not sure I'll be able to duplicate them at home because they included a couple of Russian ingredients (chocolate butter and some sort of peanut buttery legume confection).  I had no idea they had made me these treats (they did it in the kitchen across the hall rather than the one right by my room) and they brought them to acting class and everyone sang happy birthday to me.  I cried, but it was more from happiness than from overdramatic despair at the tragedy of getting older.  I'm a million miles away from home, but I'm surrounded by an amazing group of friends who went out of their way to make sure I felt loved on my birthday.

And on my birthday evening we saw a play called Opus 7 that was a performance art piece that blew my mind.  It had 2 acts, and between acts one and two they moved all the chairs into a different configuration and totally changed the space.  Act 1 was wide and narrow with a long white cardboard backdrop.  The ensemble entered with instruments and sang a haunting, strange song while the main girl appeared through the middle of the cardboard backdrop.  She cut slits in the cardboard for her hands, feet, and eyes.  Then she wriggled backwards through the eye slit and rolled onto the stage.  The play was a performance art piece in tribute to the victims of the Holocaust.  Perhaps the most moving moment for me happened near the beginning of act 1: all the members of the ensemble spread out across the stage and created a person on the wall.  First they each threw a bucket of black paint onto the white cardboard.  Next they stapled black paper shoes and hat onto the person, and then a curl of hair on each side.  They cut a big arch around each person with a knife, and there was bright white light shining through from behind.  Suddenly, the ovens turned on as there was an overpowering blast of smoke and shredded newspaper that knocked each cardboard person down.  The shredded newspaper filled the space and fell onto the audience.  It was shocking and sobering and beautiful.  There were multiple projections of people standing and waiting in an empty room, and as a moving projection of a Nazi guard moved across the whole backdrop with his echoing footsteps on the hardwood floor, each person disappeared and left the room empty.  At another point, a whole pile of shoes was dumped through a hole in the cardboard.  The ensemble members painted a crowd of children holding hands and then arranged the shoes in front of them.  There was one pair of bright red shoes, and one of the actors walked those shoes across the stage to join the crowd of children.  Then the actor joined the painted children by attaching his coat to the wall, and one of the other actors painted a child's arm up so that the adult was holding hands with the group of children.  Suddenly, the man was killed, and the actor wriggled out of the coat, so we were left with the image of the crowd of children holding hands with an empty coat jacket.  The second act included a 20-foot puppet woman who transformed into a Nazi general and started shooting at everyone, including the girl who had been her child.  The piece was inspiring and moving and different from anything I've seen before.

It's difficult to form concrete impressions of St. Petersburg because we were only there for 2 days.  We took a 10pm train Friday night and arrived in the city before 7am Monday morning.  Saturday morning we had a bus tour of the city that was more about bonding over our mutual confusion and exhaustion than actually learning about the city.  St. Petersburg is so far north that it didn't get light until about 10am, so after traveling for so long and not sleeping well and then riding around in a bus, it was an almost out-of-body experience for me.  The highlight of Saturday was an afternoon tour of the Hermitage, perhaps the best art museum in the world.  It's a palace with beautiful giant rooms filled with art.  Partly from the sleep deprivation, but also because the overwhelming nature of the experience, I was moved to tears to realize how lucky I was to be there, in this huge famous palace, looking at paintings by Monet and Renoir and Van Gogh and so many others.  That night, 8 of us went to a Georgian restaurant.  The food was good and the company was great, and it was fun to have a night to relax.

Sunday we took a trip to Pushkin, about 45 minutes outside of St. Petersburg, to visit another famous palace.  It was huge and beautiful.  My favorite room was decorate all in amber -- pieces of amber that covered the walls and columns completely, and also formed picture frames into the wall that held colorful mosaic art.  The grounds were beautiful as well, and we walked through the gardens.  It was nice to be out of the city and enjoying the fresh air, and although we were all bundled up, it really wasn't too cold.

This week I saw King Lear, and although it wasn't my favorite play as a whole, the ending was the single most moving moment of theatre I've ever experienced.  Lear's 3 daughters die in the play, and the older 2 have already died.  There are 3 pianos at the back of the stage, and the 2 dead daughters walk onstage and sit at the pianos facing out, and collapse like rag dolls against the keys.  Lear is in the field with his third daughter as she is dying, and he lifts her into his arms and carries her over to the last piano and sets her down on the bench.  At first she is sitting up straight, but then she collapses like a rag doll against the keys like the other 2 sisters.  Lear sees and lifts her up straight again, but the falls back again.  Then he notices the second daughter and lifts her up straight.  As he does, the third daughter collapses, so he lifts her up again.  He notices the third daughter as well, and the four of them do perhaps a 2-minute dance in which the 3 daughters are collapsing and Lear is lifting them up again.  Most of the time, the daughters collapse back against they keys, but sometimes they roll all the way to the floor or over the benches.  The dance is accented by discordant crashes against the piano keys as the bodies hit them.  The dance was underscored by loud violin music with a heavy bass beat.  It made me catch my breath and sit forward and cry, and it is an artistic moment that will stay with me.

Here are a few pictures:

Above: at the Kremlin

The puppet woman from Opus 7

Friends on the train: from top, Lydia, Grady, Tess, Rebecca, Katie, and Marissa

Church of Spilled Blood in St. Petersburg

In a trench from WWII outside of St. Petersburg

10-29-10: A Busy, Busy Week!

Hello Everyone!  I composed the following entry on Sunday, October 24th, and I've been having internet issues all week.  So much more has happened since I wrote this, but time is limited so I'll have to write more later.  THANK YOU ALL for the birthday wishes!

This week I visited the Moscow Museum of Modern Art.  It included an interactive display that looked like a phone booth made of pink silk parachute material.  As I stepped inside and sat down on a pink pouf, a woman started speaking welcomingly in Russian and the parachute material inflated all around me.  I was inside a birth canal, ready to be born!  In the entrance to the next room was a video camera shooting the door frame and projecting the image of me onto a screen directly in front of me.  On either side of me were shots of people who had been there earlier in the day.  On my left were a woman and a child, and the woman was pointing at the screen, showing the child where to look.  On my right was a guy dancing to the music that was playing for part of an exhibit farther ahead in the room.  It was funny but also somehow profound to be sharing space and time with these images, these people.  Upstairs was an exhibit that consisted of 6 photographs of the same young man.  He was a soldier in the French army who was just about to begin his service in the first picture and had just completed his 3 years of service in the last picture.  He had the same expression on his face in each photograph, but I felt as though I could see through his eyes into his soul as his innocence was stripped away.  It was frightening and moving and intensely personal.

This week I saw 3 plays: Othello in Lithuanian with Russian subtitles, directed by the same person who directed Uncle Vanya that I saw last week; White Guard; and Masquerade.  Othello took place largely in or around a ship, and three actors provided a soundscape with containers of water in the back.  On the ship, there were 3 hammocks strung across the stage, and the actors swung on them and into them in really interesting ways.  In Desdemona's first scene, she carried a door on her back all around the stage and hid behind it and peeked around it.  There were many fascinating and creative elements about the show, but it was really hard for me to either understand, ignore, or accept the fact that Othello was played by a white man.  White Guard was one of the most naturalistic shows I've seen here.  The set was my favorite part of this show -- there was a steep ramp made out of metal grating that slanted up from stage right to stage left.  The Russian Army could hide under the ramp while the family interacted with each other inside.  In the house were crooked lamps that flickered on and off, crooked piles of furniture, and deep black emptiness all around.  Masquerade was a show that was developed by Meyerhold and shut down during Stalin's era.  It was a comedy that was highly stylized with lots of really interesting movement.  It took place on a frozen lake covered with snow against a black background.  Many times during the show, it snowed, and the heavy snow falling was beautiful against the black background.  Both Act 1 and Act 2 began with a childlike man making faces and noises at a hole in the lake.  In Act 1, his antics caused a large fish to pop its head out of the water.  In Act 2, these same antics caused a man in swimming trunks and a snorkel to pop out of a different hole in the lake.  The childlike man made a small snowball near the beginning of the play, and throughout the action, he rolled it on and offstage and it got bigger and bigger and bigger.  By the end, it was taller than him.  There was a group of townspeople dressed in colorful costumes who always moved across the stage as a group with small, quick steps so that it looked like they were floating across the ice.  I couldn't tell you exactly what the plot was, but the interesting movement choices kept me entertained.

This week Ilya my fruit and vegetable stand friend wrote me a letter in Russian that included a really touching poem.  She told me that she always looks forward to seeing me, and she wants to know more about me.  She has 3 children, and they live in a district nearby.  I want to learn to speak Russian so that I can ask her about her family and her life and tell her that it makes my day when she helps me learn the names of fruits and vegetables, and when she smiles when she sees me coming.  I will learn to say "I'm happy we're friends."

This week I went to the Diamond Fund at the Kremlin.  It is said that only 2 other world collections are equal in status: the crown treasure in Great Britain and the treasure of the previous Shah of Iran.  This collection was far more impressive than what I remember of the crown jewels in London.  There were two large rooms -- one contained a collection of 20 platinum nuggets (the largest weighing 7,860 kg) and about 100 gold nuggets, all from different Russian deposits.  In this first room also were a large collection of cut and uncut diamonds, the largest at 342.57 carats (I don't even really know what that means, but they were big and impressive!).  This room contained a total of 14 showcases with diamonds, sapphires, amethysts, emeralds, aquamarines, rubies, pearls, and other precious gems.  Many of the stones were piled into containers or arranged into shapes (including a map of Russia) and others were elaborate pieces of jewelry.  I never really knew what the phrase "dripping with diamonds" meant until today.  All of the earrings were fashioned so that they hooked all the way over the body of the ear rather than through the earlobe, because they would have been too heavy to hang in the normal way.  As we were looking through this hall, I felt like my eyesight was on sensory overload: you know when you go into a candle store and you smell like 20 different candles, and then you feel like you've almost lost your sense of smell because you've smelled so many scents all in a row?  I felt like that was happening to my eyes.  It was amazing and impressive and overwhelming.  The second hall contained historic jewelry from the 18th and 19th centuries.  Highlights of this hall were the Grand Imperial Crown made in 1762 and containing (yes) 5000 diamonds, the world famous Orlov diamond at the end of the State Sceptre, and the Imperial Orb containing a sapphire of 200 carats.  All of these were used during the coronations from Empress Catherine II in 1762 through the last Emperor Nicholas II in 1896.

We will be spending next weekend in St. Petersburg, so I may not post another update until the following week.  Love to all of you!

October 19th -- A few pictures

Me and Donovan in front of the Moscow River, across from the Kremlin

Me and Todd at the Kremlin

Friends!  Todd, Jordan, Greg, Rachelle, and Darren at the Moscow Modern Art Museum

View from a window at school

Street in front of the Moscow Art Theatre

The internet always kicks me off when I try to add pictures, so that's all for now!

October 15, 2010: 3 plays, Lenin's Tomb, and a New Friend

This week I saw 3 plays and Lenin’s tomb, and I jumped the language barrier to make a friend.  I could write a whole entry on each of these, but I’ll try to be concise.

We saw a dress rehearsal of The Marriage of Figaro on Sunday night that was in French with Russian subtitles at the top.  Although it was really different from Hamlet, the second act took on a dark and twisted tone that was reminiscent of Hamlet for me.  The set was really simple with cloths hanging down for the doors that were pulled up or down quickly when people went in and out.  The play was presentational in style, and the actors told the story more with stage pictures than physical gestures.  The second act seemed to be from an entirely different play – the set changed to a sort of anti-realistic hunting lodge setting.  There were groups of stuffed animals on the floor and hanging upside down from the ceiling, 2 carousel horses that moved up and down, and a smoke machine.  For me, the highlight of the show was an extended party scene that included an old man in a skeleton costume and a guy in a bear costume doing a ridiculous hopping dance.  If bad luck at a final dress rehearsal foretells a good show run, this show should be great: the lead actress twisted her ankle in the first scene and limped for the rest of the play, and had it wrapped for the second act.  And during curtain call, one of the cast members fainted.

On Monday after class, I saw a play called Understudies at the Satirikon Theatre.  My acting teacher Sasha is in it.  I think it’s my favorite play that I’ve seen so far, which is surprising because going into it I had no idea what it was about (and it was in Russian).  It was SO FUNNY!  The first act was backstage of a period play, so people kept taking off their wigs and half-undressing from their hoop skirts and pants.  Sasha was so interesting to watch!  He was totally organic and real, but he made all these little tiny creative choices.  He stirred tea really loudly, he played with a towel in about 20 different ways, he made faces and gestures in order to flirt and make his stage partners laugh.  At one point he pulled his pants down to his red speedo shorts and scooted under the other woman’s hoop skirt to try to have sex with her!  The second act was onstage of the play, and there were 2 actors who had to be replaced at the last minute, so Sasha and the leading woman spent a lot of time in the wings prompting them.  Again, Sasha had all these really interesting, funny gestures.  At one point when he was trying to get the actor onstage to turn around and look at the actor behind him, Sasha took his own face and pushed it from one side to the other.  At another part, he took a quill pen out of the fountain to write a letter, but it was a prop so it was actually 3 quill pens stuck together, and he noticed and reacted to that and then proceeded to write the letter with 3 pens!  I didn’t think I could laugh so hard at a play in a language I don’t speak, but I really understood a lot of it from their physicality, and they did so many funny things!    I really, really enjoyed it.

We saw Uncle Vanya last night and it had a really dark, twisted, haunting, and wholly unsettling feeling.  The stage was very deep (much like the Hamlet set) and there was smoke and darkness and overt symbolism.  People posed and moved chairs in interesting ways and were unabashedly drunk.  A large jug of strong wine that had to be sucked from a hose was used onstage for several scenes.  When Sonya and Yelena played the piano at the end of the first act, they did it very jarringly with large gestures followed by jerky head-turns and huge smiles on their faces.  They were accompanied by strange ball-game instruments.  I think I would have liked the show (because it was the kind of show that stretches theatrical boundaries, explores theatre in new and interesting ways, and raises a lot of questions), but about 20 minutes before the end, a lady 3 rows in front of me had a seizure.  It took what seemed like a very long time for anyone to do anything, and then finally a guy behind her carried her out. My friend  Marissa (who is epileptic) had been sitting next to me in the middle of the balcony during the first act, but at intermission she just randomly decided to sit on the end of the row instead.  Consequently, she was in position to go out and help.  But the whole event really caused very little reaction from anyone, and nobody seemed to be very deeply affected.  But I couldn’t concentrate on the play after that.  I was really upset by the fact that nobody really seemed to care about this woman.  I suppose there was nothing that I or anyone in the theatre really could have done, but it just seemed to me that no one cared.  That, added to this twisted world view that was being created, was just too much for me. The strong, dark images onstage seemed too close to the reality I was experiencing in the moment, and because of that, I didn’t want to contemplate the big life questions that are usually philosophically interesting to me.  I wanted the world to be a bit brighter and people to be a bit more compassionate and everything not to seem quite so dark.

Lenin’s tomb was strange and interesting.  They have preserved his body using some kind of new technology, and 5 days a week between 10 and 1, people can walk into the tomb and view his body behind glass.  It doesn’t look quite real to me, but my guidebook says that rumors that all or part of his body have been replaced with wax have been vigorously denied.  To me, the most interesting part of this experience were the guards guiding people through.  The path is laid out in a straight-edge, geometrical fashion with lots of corners to turn.  You walk along an outside path with memorials to Russian leaders (including Stalin), and then down into the tomb.  At every corner, there is a guard who doesn’t say anything but holds his arm out to show you the way.  This is especially chilling inside the tomb, because it’s so dark that it’s difficult to see the stairs or the path to walk, so it’s sort of like a black hole where the only truly visible things are these guards.  Also, you can’t linger at Lenin’s body.  I stopped for maybe 20 or 30 seconds to look, and a guard appeared at my side and pulled my arm to make me keep moving.  It was all a little bit surreal.

For the last two days, I’ve been really excited because I made friends with the lady who sells me fruits and vegetables.  I’ve been wanting to make friends with her because every time I go there to buy produce, she helps me with the words I don’t know and repeats them with me until I get it right.  She always smiles when I show up, and when we practice words, she says “Maladiets!” which means “good job!” when I say the words right.  So, on Thursday I took a Russian dictionary with me and tried to have a conversation with her.  Her name is Ilya and she’s from the Ukraine and she doesn’t speak any English, but I think I managed to communicate with her that I will be here for 3 months (when we got to that part, she said the 12 months with me), that I’m from Florida, and that I want to come back and talk with her to practice my Russian.  She gave me presents – a tangerine and a plum and some chocolate cookies that she got out of her supply van.  Today I brought her a chocolate bar, and she put 3 plums in my bag. It was so special and moving and exciting and such a big deal to make contact with this person.  She is there every day, standing in the cold selling her fruits and vegetables.  I can’t imagine what kind of life she has led, but we share this childlike excitement at meeting a person so different from ourselves, and sharing the few words we can.

October 10, 2010: The Armoury Museum at the Kremlin is a Fairytale Land

Six of us went to the Armoury Museum at the Kremlin today.  They don't allow pictures, so words will have to suffice.  It was the most amazing display of opulence I remember ever seeing.

The first room had a lot of large cases to hold the Bible - made of gold and silver and decorated with engravings, precious stones, and enamel.  Each item was decorated with hundreds of precious stones ranging in size from the head of a pin to a ping pong ball.  Famous in the collection are a number of faberge eggs that were often given as gifts among Royalty.  They are colorful and intricately patterned on the outside, and each has a surprise inside.  One is a music box, another contains a tiny working train, and another holds a ship that is an exact replica of one that was used to sail around the world.  I was fascinated by a collection of intricately carved gold and silver castles that were actually incense burners, and the smoke would rise through the windows in the castles.  There were samovars and tea sets and plates, all shiny and colorful and intricately designed.  There was a room of weapons and armor including swords and rifles, decorated not only on their handles but all along the blade or barrel.  Some were inlaid with stones or enamel; others were engraved.  I learned that the average coat of armor weighed 30 kilograms!  There was a room of dressings for horses - bridles and saddles decorated with silver and gold and precious stones.  One of the saddles had tassles all the way around it made of silver thread (not silver-colored; made of silver).  Downstairs, there was a large room of clothing and tapestries and crowns.  Most of the clothing was decorated with pearls as well as gold and silver thread and precious stones.  The pearls and precious stones were not sparsely distributed but rather arranged like kernels on corn on the cob: right next to each other and all over each garment.  Sometimes they were arranged into desings, but when this was the case, the garment was decorated in the open spaces with gold and silver thread or small plates painted with cherubs.  The clothing was very colorful.  There was a throne room; one throne was decorated entirely with carved ivory; another was made for czars who were brothers: a 10-year-old and a 14-year old (history buffs?  I don't remember their names...).  The frame was ornately carved wood and the seat was plush red velvet, and into the back of each chair was a window where a tutor could peek through and instruct the boys how to receive guests.

I think the highlight of the museum was the carriage room.  It was full of carriages that were more spectacular than I imagine Cinderella's carriage would be.  One was a sled that was pulled by 23 horses.  There were 3 small ones used for children that were pulled by ponies and attended by dwarves!  The rest were chariots whose wheels were as tall as me and whose bodies made the room look small.  Like everything else in the museum, they were intricately carved and adorned with silver and gold and elaborate paintings.  It was like being in a fairy tale for the day.

October 8, 2010: Hamlet at the Moscow Art Theatre

I saw Hamlet at the Moscow Art Theatre last night.  It was unlike any show I've ever seen.  Shakespeare purists would not like this show -- but then again, I'm not sure why a Shakespeare purist would choose to see Hamlet in Russian.  It seems impossible to translate iambic pentameter into Russian: Russian words have more syllables, and I just don't think it would work.  I don't speak Russian so I don't know how they handled the language, but my impression was that they realized this shortcoming and made up for it in every other aspect of the production.  Here's what I saw:

The setting seemed to be Siberia, with perhaps 20 metallic cords upstage stretched all the way across the stage, from ankle level to just above head level.  Strung on the cords were sharp looking metallic objects that looked like tin cans and gave the impression of barbed wire.  The actors could fall into the cords, pull them together, or step between them.  In the second act, they were lowered to the floor so the actors could run across them.

Scene changes were incredibly smooth, circular, and flowing in nature and were covered by a combination of the actors moving their own furniture, and a sort of underground army of people dressed in black overcoats and black bowler hats rolling the set pieces on and off.  In the opening scene when the guards are watching for the ghost, this army was sitting in silhouette along the back of the stage, each holding a red apple. 

Movement and music in the play reminded me of Commedia del Arte, at times almost to the large, garish extreme of Cirque de Soleil.  Actors walked on tables, flipped over chairs (made of twisted metal) to create other set pieces, and flipped tables end over end to move them around.  There was a giant industrial-looking fan onstage to blow smoke around and also to create a strobe light effect with a light in front of it.  During the play within a play, Rosencrantz held up a metallic tabletop as a mirror to show the audience a different perspective of the actors.

There was a sense of dark comedy about the piece.  When Hamlet is faking madness, there is a giant sheet of plastic hanging like a curtain across the middle of the stage.  Hamlet takes a bucket and goes back and forth underneath the curtain and seems to be urinating in the bucket, but then he comes out with a bottle of water and sprays Horatio, the stage, and himself.  Then he grabs the curtain and spins around several times, wrapping himself up like a mummy and yelling as if trying to scare Horatio.

During the scene where King Claudius goes to a church and tries to pray, he struggles to flip a table over twice.  This physical struggle makes it really clear what his lines are about.  As he stands the table up after the second flip, there is a white cross painted on the underside of it to make it clear that he is in a church.

Toward the second act, the symbolism of the play seemed to get stronger.  When Ophelia goes crazy, she comes onstage in a nightgown, sopping wet, and instead of handing out flowers, she tears off strips of her dress and throws them on the floor.  There is a giant plank down the middle of the stage, and her father (who has died earlier) walks down and carries her away in his arms.  It was one of the most poignant moments I have ever seen in the theatre.

For the first part of Ophelia's funeral, the coffin and all the characters except Hamlet were posed along the back of the stage and back lit with blue light so that all we could see were their silhouettes.  I have never seen a scene played for so long in silhouette, and it added a really creepy, otherworldly feeling to the scene.  At the end of the scene, the coffin dropped through the table, so it looked like it dropped into the ground.
Throughout the play, scraps of paper and sawdust were used in scenes and left onstage.  For me, this gave an increasing feeling that everything was falling apart.

Before the end of the play, they added a dream sequence showing the fight at the end of the play.  Then for the last scene, all the characters (including Ophelia and Polonius who are dead) enter the stage twirling black bowler hats on the ends of sticks.  Then everyone sits down around a rectangular wooden table and a bunch of silverware is thrown dramatically onto the table.  There is no swordfight but just the lines, and every time a "hit" is made, everyone at the table takes a breath in and raises their chest and face toward the sky, then slams their hands onto the table at the same time.

The play left me with an immense feeling of unease, foreboding, and darkness.  I thought I had seen dark plays before, but this one gave me a whole new idea of black humor.  Hamlet is not a comedy, it is a tragedy, but somehow this play was both funnier and more tragic than I thought the story was.  Was this a traditional production of Hamlet?  Absolutely not.  Was it what Shakespeare had in mind when he wrote the play?  I seriously doubt it.  But I loved it because it highlighted themes that exist in the play in shocking, thought-provoking, highly creative ways.

And I got to see my master acting teacher play Rosencrantz.

10-02-10: Russian Movement Nearly Killed Me!

Our Russian Movement teacher calls pain "special pleasure," and mine was very, very special yesterday.  Russian movement is very different from any other movement class I've had.  I'm certain the goals are the same, and clearly they work because there are so many incredibly talented theatre artists here, but WOW!  I've never been quite so acutely aware of my body before!  There is a lot of jumping and crawling across the floor, which although difficult, is tolerable for me.  I can handle breaking a sweat and breathing hard and walking like a seal, jumping like a frog, or wheelbarrowing myself across the floor again and again.  What I'm struggling with is the extreme stretching.  We did a sort of back-hip-quad-butt stretch yesterday that I couldn't even come close to actually doing, and I thought my hips were going to break.  Immediately afterward, we did a "scorpion stretch" which involves a sort of runner's stretch but with your head and shoulder burrowing under one knee while your other hand grabs your open foot and pulls it up to your butt.  I really couldn't do this either, but the teacher came over and "helped" me grab my foot... and apparently I could!  I did the rest of the class with tears in my eyes, as much from physical pain as from psychological fear that my body can't do this, and doing it anyway.  I guess there's a balance between being gentle with myself to protect from injury, and diving into new territory because there is growth to be had.  I think about the ballerinas I saw in Swan Lake and the amazing feats they are able to accomplish with such ease, and I'm sure they didn't get to that place through caution and hesitancy, but through hard work and courage.  This is only one of the different mind sets here.

It's not too cold here yet.  I make a 30-minute walk to school every morning, and I'm often carrying my coat by the end.  There is a thermometer in the square near school, and the coldest I've seen it read is 6 degrees Celsius.  There's been some rain and some sun, but mostly it's just really nice to be outside.

Our singing teacher is a short, squat, coloratura soprano who is probably in her 50's or early 60's.  She doesn't speak English, but her gestures are expressive enough so that most of the time we don't really need the translator who is there.  When she sings with us, she snorts and growls and meows like a cat, makes claws, pokes us in the diaphragm, twists our faces, and says "whiskey, vodka, gin!" with a fake shot glass to get us to lift our soft palettes as if we were taking shots.  This is an effective metaphor for college students.  She is as blunt with her "NO!" as she is enthusiastic with her "YES!"  She is a firecracker of a woman.

There is a fish in a fishbowl in the lobby of the building where we have a lot of our classes.  Next to the fishbowl is a hand mirror.  One morning before class, our singing teacher was playing with the fish by holding the hand mirror in front of it.  She was squealing and jabbering and singing in Russian to the fish, putting the mirror up and taking it away.  As I observed, I saw that the fish truly was aware of the mirror, puffing itself up as if to show off for the mirror and my teacher.  I have rarely seen such enthusiasm and joy as she had for that fish, and I couldn't stop laughing.

In acting class, we have been working on many, many etudes, or created scenes.  These etudes are solo, partnered, and with the whole group.  We did two rounds of object etudes, where we each chose an object to be.  I was a book, there was a piece of gum, a ceiling fan, an umbrella, a door knob, a basketball, and many more.  Both of our acting teachers speak English, but Sasha's is not quite as fluent as Oleg's.  Sasha speaks the language of objects, though.  Whenever he gives feedback, he instantly transforms himself into the object that has just presented, and adds interesting, hilarious details that we didn't figure out during our whole day of rehearsing and planning.  We also did a round of animal etudes, and I was a pigeon because it was the only animal that I could observe in real life here.  It's also really interesting to me that I only really see single pigeons here -- they're never in groups.  There are fewer pigeons here than in any other city I've been to.  When he gave me feedback on my pigeon, he told me that it was useful to take the most interesting qualities of the pigeon and transfer them into human characteristics.  And he demonstrated, becoming a pigeon-man who was this inquisitive, suspicious, dense, quirky character -- just with a few specific movements that arose from what I was exploring with my pigeon imitation.  He talks about learning to share the deepest parts of yourself in your acting, about making creative discoveries that come from your soul, that are uniquely yours to share through your art.  We learn about the importance of observation: specific, detailed, instantaneous observation.  My acting teachers have better memories than anyone I've ever met.  With one look, they remember the clothes everyone is wearing, they remember the order of words we've said, objects we've passed, events that have taken place.  This is important to acting because actors must be more acutely aware of their surroundings than everyday people.  Life onstage is a heightened reality, and more than being naturalistic, the actors can choose to highlight details, and in order to work together in the most effective and fluid way, actors must be in the practice of evaluating and knowing the whole picture along with all the details.  I'm so lucky to be learning from these master teachers.

I've never taken ballet before, and my first EVER ballet class last week was taught by a ballerina named Larissa Barisovna (sp?) who was a star ballerina with the Bolshoi ballet for many years.  She also does not speak English, but says that she "speaks language ballet."  And she does.  She walks around talking to us in Russian and French, adjusting our bodies and yelling "NO!" or "YES!" much like our movement teacher.  Even though she is probably in her 70's now, her form is still stunningly graceful, and I am struck repeatedly by how lucky I am to be learning from such a master.  What an immense privilege.

Red Square, as I think I said before, is about a 7-minute walk from school.  Whenever I have time on lunch, I walk over just to look at St. Basil's again.  I can't believe I'm here.

Sept. 28, 2010: The Kindness of Strangers

09/28/2010
The stores in this area are very cash-based.  There are places that accept credit cards, but usually those places are more expensive.  In particular, the cafeteria at school only takes cash, they don't have a lot of change, and they really don't like to break large bills.

I went to the ATM yesterday and got 2 1000-Ruble notes (worth a little more than $30 each), so I decided to try to break them before I needed to use them for food.  So, in Russian language class this morning, I asked the teacher how to ask for smaller bills, and she gave me the phrase.

On our lunch break, I went to the bank next to school and said, in Russian, to the man at the desk: "Good afternoon.  I would like, please, to break these bills."  He shook his head and spoke a lot of Russian, so I asked, in Russian, "do you know where?" and held up the bills I was trying to change.  He pointed down the street, so I said thank you and headed that way.

I went into the first bank in that direction (in Moscow there are lots and lots of banks everywhere) and asked the woman at the desk the same question, with the same result.  She pointed across the street and said the name of a bank I thought I understood.

Heading across the street and struggling to read the signs in Cyrillic, I didn't see the name she had said, but I saw a long word that started with the sounds "bank," so I went inside.  The room I found myself in looked more like a hotel lobby than a bank, and the man at the desk was an older, portly gentleman with a gray mustache and a bald head.  I asked him my question, and he laughed and said "dyevuchka, nyet," which means approximately "young girl, no."  And he continuted smiling and laughing and spoke a lot of Russian that I didn't understand, but he gestured to the right, and I thought I understood him to say "go straight" and "turn right" and then the name of a bank.  I repeated his words with him and kept making him say it again, and the more I repeated, the more he smiled.  When I was pretty sure I knew where he wanted me to go, I said thank you and headed out again.

I walked the way he directed me until the street ended, and I didn't see any sign of a bank.  Looking right and left, I saw a Citibank sign about 2 blocks to the right, so I headed that way thinking I might find the bank I was looking for.  I didn't see anything sooner, so in I went to the Citibank.  I asked my question again to the woman at the desk, and she responded with a definite "no."  When I asked her if she knew where I could get them changed, she said in English "maybe in shops."

About to give up on the whole idea and just do as she suggested and try to spend the money in shops, I saw a "Bank Moskva" (Bank of Moscow) nextdoor to the Citibank.  Since it was right there, I decided to go inside and try once more.

When I asked my question, the girl at the desk didn't look hopeful.  She spoke apologetically in Russian, but then she held up a finger like "one moment" and made a phone call.  She shook her head again, and then asked the teller next to her.  He looked at me and looked at her and they had a conversation in Russian.  Then he took his own bag from underneath his chair, pulled out his wallet, and found change for one of my notes.  He used his own money to help me out!

I don't know how Russians normally break their large bills.  Probably they use them for groceries or other large purchases, and use the change for everyday expenses like metro tickets (which cost less than a dollar and cannot be purchased with bills larger than about $4).  Maybe they just never withdraw more than a few hundred Rubles at a time.  I wonder if the man who helped me will now have a hard time using the money I gave him.  I wonder if our meeting made as much of an impression on him as it did on me.  I don't think I've ever really depended on the kindness of strangers, but his help today, for me, was a really big deal.

Sept. 26, 2010: jet lagged and homesick, but loving Moscow!

Greetings from Russia!  It's Sunday, September 26th, and I've found a cafe down the street from my dorm with free wifi and figured out how to upload pictures more quickly, so here we go!  This entry is a combination of entries I've been working on over the past week.

09/23/2010
Teaser: this entry ends with a visit to Red Square!  But my journey didn’t start there, it started with a plane (I love cloud pictures)

(clouds out the window on the plane from Newark to Providence)

and a train ride to Waterford, Connecticut to spend 3 days on the campus of the National Theatre Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Center.

The weather was perfect: brisk in the mornings and sunny during the days.  You can see the ocean from campus, and it’s a 5 minute walk down to the beach.  There are 31 of us here in Russia, and on campus with us at the O’Neill Center were a group of other students studying at NTI for the semester.  They are spending 2 weeks in London as part of their course work, and the night we arrived in Connecticut, they performed a series of location-specific scenes based on the elements of Viewpoints.  Their work was very strong, and their collaborative creativity in the varied locations available on campus made for a really enjoyable evening.

 Other highlights of our Connecticut stay: meeting and exchanging life stories with the other 30 people I’ll be living with for the next 3 months (many of them have done an incredible amount of traveling – from East Timor to Vietnam to Africa and beyond), master classes in Tai Chi and Russian Movement, and brisk morning jogs during which I saw a deer and a woodchuck.

During our preparatory orientation sessions, our group leader warned us that:
1)       In Russia, women are not allowed to lift heavy things or sit on cold or dirty surfaces.  This is in order to protect their reproductive health.
2)      In the theatre, when crossing in front of someone to get to your seat, you must face them as you pass.  Backing in front of them as you pass is equivalent to giving them the finger.
3)      You should only greet someone with the word for "hello" once a day.  If you greet them once and say “hello” again to them later, it is rude because you should have remembered that you already saw them once.
4)      No one speaks when they ride the subway.  If you speak, everyone will stare at you.
5)      The subway doors will not wait until you have boarded to close.  During rush hour, people will push and shove to get in.  If you are partway in the door when it closes, you will get bruised.
6)      The police can ask you for your documents (passport, visa, letter from MXAT) any time you are in public.  If you don’t have these papers, you will need to pay the police.  If you don’t have money, you will be arrested.
On Tuesday night, we left JFK for Moscow, with a layover in Frankfurt.

 (outside the Moscow Airport on the evening we arrived)

We left the airport around 8:30pm, and a drive that takes about 45 minutes without traffic took us more than 3 hours.  Our tour guide says that in the past few years, more and more people have cars and love to drive them, so traffic is terrible.  Much of the time, it was bumper-to-bumper, stopped with 4 or 5 or 6 lanes across, at 11pm on a weeknight.
Our dorm at the Moscow Art Theatre School (MXAT) is beautiful.  I requested a single,

 
but many of the double rooms are much larger, with lots of living space.  We have a kitchen, bathrooms, showers, and washers/dryers available.  It’s a 25 minute walk to the school, where we went today.

 (the sign says School Studio MXAT Theatre)
 
In order to determine the 2 groups we’ll be in for our acting, dance, combat, voice, and movement classes, we all did monologues for the 2 acting teachers.  They only speak Russian and teach with a translator.  We’ve been told that our ballet teacher doesn’t speak English and doesn’t use a translator; she just slaps your body into position while speaking emphatically in Russian… I’m sure I’ll have stories.
In the afternoon we went to Red Square!  Here are pictures of the sights in Red Square.

 (Lenin's Tomb)

(St. Basil's Cathedral!)

I’m composing this from my dorm room, and my plan is to visit a cafe down the street with free wifi to post this sometime soon.  Love to all of you!  I’ll post again when I can – we have classes 6 or 7 days a week, and we are seeing Swan Lake this Saturday!  (With our MXAT ID cards, we are allowed to see plays for free, and as a group we will be seeing 30 or 40 plays in the next 3 months.)









09/26/2010

It's Sunday, and we've had 3 days of classes.  I keep meaning to write down the list of our teachers' names posted on the wall, but I don't have them yet.  They're difficult to understand and even more impossible to spell, so that will have to come later.



Our Theater History teacher, Anatoly Smeliansky (the one name I do know because he's the head of the theatre school), speaks very good English and tells really compelling stories about Russian history.  Our first class was held in a central room with portraits of all the famous participants of MXAT throughout the years.

This is a portrait of Anton Chekhov.  Dr. Smeliansky told an interesting story about the third photo on the bottom (which I know you can't really see, but it doesn't matter too much).  There's a woman in the picture holding an umbrella that is closed, and Meyerhold (a very important theatre figure, inventor of biomechanics, who was arrested, tortured, and killed during Stalin's era) is sitting at her feet.  When the picture was released to newspapers, because Meyerhold was a "traitor," they used early photoshopping techniques to remove Meyerhold from the picture and replace him with an open umbrella held by the woman.

I ended up in the acting group with 15 people (the other group has 16), and our teachers both speak English (the other acting teacher does not).  It's a wonderful class that has met 3 times already -- we have acting class every afternoon for 3 hours, 6 days a week.  We play a lot of games similar to the Michael Chekhov warm-up games my FAU class played when Lenard Petit was teaching.  We also do group improvisations called etudes, and personal assignments.  So far, it's a different approach to ensemble building, and the Stanislavsky acting technique straight from the source!

In Russia, you don't become a teacher until you are a master of your art, and teachers are highly respected, often to the status of celebrity.  Theatre in Russia is viewed as Hollywood in America -- all the theatre actors are well known and admired as celebrities.  Our acting teachers are actors and directors as well as teachers, which is part of the reason we have two in our group of 15 -- when one has an acting engagement, the other can take over.  They are passionate about what they do -- almost every class runs late because they want to be sure to get their points across.  It's an energetic, hardworking, serious but fun environment.

Our Theatre Design teacher doesn't speak English, and it's interesting listening to a translator -- there are delays in the jokes, etc.  She is a passionate, friendly, knowledgeable woman, and it's amazing how engaging her lectures are.  Our Russian Cinema teacher does speak English, and she is wonderful too.  We've watched several early Russian short films made with puppets that look a lot like the Tim Burton animations.  Fascinating stuff.

Last night we saw Swan Lake, and I didn't write down the name of the theatre.  It's the main ballet company here that is not the Bolshoi.  Here is a picture of the chandelier inside.

The curtain call lasted about 10 minutes, which I've heard is typical.  The audience started clapping in synch, and then the artists just took bow after bow after bow.  Even after the curtain closed, the 2 main artists came out about 5 more times to take bows again.  I think it's wonderful how much the theatre here is respected and loved!


That's all for now.  Thanks for following, and I hope to write again soon!