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!
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