Well, it was a rainy day here in Moscow…not any heavy rain, just an on and off lazy kind of rain. If nothing else, at least it helps keep the dust and pollen down.
We started the day with a three hour and 15 minute drawing class…I am not a drawing artist. The way my brain works is not conducive to drawing, Russian style. In my limited (and mostly self taught) drawing experience, I’ve generally been in the shading camp where you don’t draw lines but use light and dark shading to create depth and perspective. Here, they tend to start out very line oriented where you created shading with line instead of blending. I think I’ve done some pretty good drawing but they take me a long time because I tend to be very detail oriented. When something’s not right, it just drives me crazy because I think it should be perfect. This mentality is a little messed up considering that the only formal art training I’ve ever had were in elementary and middle school along with a one semester drawing and painting class in grad school (interestingly enough, taught by a Russian) that was much less intense than this class. I’m learning to push myself to try being less detailed oriented but it’s really hard to break both physical and psychological habits and ways of thinking at the same time. The other challenge is that we are working on just one still life for all four of our three hour classes…at least we’re half way through!
Our second class today was in History of Stage Design. We talked mostly about Chekhov’s play Three Sisters which I really liked because that is the show I’m working on over here. What was even cooler was that our teacher mentioned that they did certain things in the play that are the exact same idea that I had! Overall, in our two classes, we’ve pretty much just covered the early designs for Chekhov’s plays but our last two classes will be spent looking at design in the Soviet era and the later 20th Century in Russia. I’m really looking forward to that!
We went and saw the play Poplars in the Wind at the Satirikon Theatre tonight. If you want to hear a long rant about the crazy tram busses here in Moscow, just let me know… The play was kind of interesting. This was the first small cast show (only three characters) we’ve seen here. What’s interesting is that the theatre stage is huge but there was only three actors using the space. When we saw Richard III at the same theatre, they used the whole width of the stage (a good 150ft. wide) but for this one, they added a false proscenium and cut the stage down to a more manageable 60-80ft. It was hard to watch in a certain respect because they were speaking in Russia, which I don’t, and there wasn’t a lot of action because its three old guys who all have movement problems. The set was a relatively simple gazebo like structure with a large bronze statue of a Great Dane plus three other female statues to the sides. From what I gathered, I think that the characters either thought the statues moved from time to time or they were trying to get them to move. Either way, at the end of the play they manage to get the dogs head to turn to the audience and the three statues came to life and turned to the audience and started to slow flap their arms. I wish I could say that the female statues were women who stood still on stage for over two hours without moving (because there was not intermission, third show so far) but during the last scene change black out, the three statues where replaced by women dressed to look like the statues. I might not have noticed the change before they moved if one of our guys hadn’t pointed it out to me.
Well, I think it’s time to do a little drafting for The Magic Flute before heading off to bed.
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