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!