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!

Sept. 14, 2010: 5 days before I leave home and 7 days before I leave for Russia

Just a quick introductory post before I fly halfway around the world.  I'll be in Russia from Sept. 22 - Dec. 19, and the work I do there will fulfill the final set of requirements for my MFA program.  I plan to update this blog once a week with stories and pictures documenting my experience.  Studying with a group of 30 other students from around the world, I'll be in Moscow for the majority of the time, staying in the dorms at the Moscow Art Theater School (the theater was founded in 1898 by Konstantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, and the school was founded 45 years later).  I'll also travel to St. Petersburg for 4 days.  At the theater school, we'll study Acting, Voice, Movement (including ballet and biomechanics), language, and more.  We'll also see Russian theater, opera, and museums as a group.

Here are a few useful links:

The National Theater Institute / Eugene O'Neill Theater Center at Connecticut College: the program with which I'm traveling:  http://nti.conncoll.edu/mats0101.htm

Moscow Art Theater School page:  http://mhatschool.theatre.ru/en/about/history/

Time and Weather in Moscow:  http://www.wunderground.com/global/stations/27612.html

A Moscow Newspaper:  http://www.themoscowtimes.com/index.php