Day 25 & Day 26...Double time....

Friday, June 26…

I’m pulling double duty today because I was busy drawing renderings last night and didn’t write anything.  So, I’ll start with Friday and then hit Saturday.  Hopefully this won’t be to long because the days weren’t that eventful…yeah, right!

So, Friday started with a noon class with Victor.  We are each designing a different Chekhov play for the class and we had rough sketch due today with color samples.  He really liked my idea for the last act of my play, The Three Sisters, but he wasn’t too keen on my idea for the third act and he said my first act needs to look more “cozy.”  I think I can do that.  Our final class with Victor is on Monday and we have complete rendering for all four acts due plus he is going to look through our portfolios.  Looking forward to the class…now I just have to create my four renderings!

Next, we headed over the Meyerhold Museum to learn about one of the most tragic theatre stories from the Soviet times.  Meyerhold was an actor in the early years of the MXT but left to begin directing and finding his own method which essentially is the exact opposite of Stanislavsky’s method.  He traveled all over Russia directing and experimenting with his new idea of theater.  This wasn’t part of the tour, but if I remember correctly, Stanislavsky wasn’t too happy about this when it happened but later came to terms with it and even is said to have named Meyerhold his “sole heir in the theatre—here or anywhere else.”  Now, remember that Stanislavsky died in 1938 because this is important later.

In the 1930’s, Meyerhold was an Avant-garde and experimental director trying to work in the time of Stalin’s social realism (we covered this extensively in our History of Russian Cinema class).  Let’s just say that these two things don’t go together.  Meyerhold was a great director and had created some very powerful works but there were some that didn’t like it because it wasn’t this social realism.  In January of 1938, Stalin finally closed down Meyerhold’s theatre and the ailing Stanislavsky asked Meyerhold to become the director of the Opera Theater that he was working on (it now the Stanislavsky Music Theatre…we got a tour back stage that I talked about several blogs ago).  It is said that this, helped prolong Meyerhold’s life of even for just little longer.  He was arrested on June 20, 1939 in Leningrad.  His wife was found dead in their Moscow apartment on July 15, 1939.  Actual, she was found alive after being stabbed 17 times (none near the heart or lungs so she slowly bleed to death) by to plain clothed men to snuck into the apartment, stabbed her, and fled in a plain black vehicle (if you haven’t guessed, she was assassinated).  He was tortured to the point of giving a false confession to being a spy (he later recanted but it was too late) and was executed sometime around early Feb., 1940.  Stalin essentially tried to wipe his name from Russian History.  So, less than a year and half after Stanislavsky died, his heir to theatre had been wiped out because he didn’t play nice with Stalin…

OK, enough sad stuff and onto better things…

So, after the Meyerhold Museum, the designers went and checked out the costume design students’ exam exhibits.  Of…all…the…days…to…forget… my…camera…  These exhibits were freaking amazing!  The costume renderings themselves were on par, if not better, than most professionals I’ve seen in the States (and these are basically college kids).  Then there was their drawing and painting works…I wish I was that good.  And finally, they also make paper versions of a few of their costumes to show how things are put together.  If you didn’t know they were paper, you’d think they were the real thing at first glance.  Like I said, I didn’t have my camera but I do happen to have a couple of pictures from the Stanislavsky House Museum where they have some on display so I’ve put one of those up here.

The rest of the night was pretty boring…I just came back to my room and finish up my renderings for The Wizard of Oz…

Saturday, June 27…

OK, so I really didn’t finish the Oz renderings until about 5am this morning so I got a couple of hours of sleep and just didn’t my costume rendering for class after I got up around 11am.   It was nice to get a little sleep but I’m a little bummed that I missed a chance to catch another museum…

While we only talked about our costume rendering for a couple of minutes, our teacher asked if she could keep them so I guess, that’s a good thing.  We spent the rest of glass talking about what women wore from 1890-1900.  The interesting thing is that is all really come down to underwear…no, really, it does! This was kind of the last decade for the corset but the dresses were being made for the corset because it was still in style.  It was interesting to learn that the theory to corseting was only to reduce the waste by 10 inches.  So, if you were already 30” then you get a 20” corset.  Alli got to be the guinea pig today and she put on an authentic 19^th Century corset.  This picture just goes to show how weird it looks to our eyes but back then, it was the norm…  Another highlight was getting to see and touch a couple of costume pieces from the first production of The Three Sisters from 109 years ago…Yippe!  This is the top to the costume for Olga, the school teacher.

After that, we got to go talk with the chief designer at a theatre not far from the MXT called the Russian Academic Youth Theatre (RAYT) which was build back in the 1820’s.  The designer, Stanislov Benediktov, has been at this theatre for something like 30 years.  He and the artistic director have worked together for so long they have started to stage play in unconventional ways.  For instance, they’ve done a play on the grand staircase leading from the lower lobby to the upper lobby.  They’ve even put the audience on stage and performed the play out in the house!  This is a picture from their last production of The Cherry Orchard where the audience watched the show from the wings.  He said this is one of the advantages of kind of owning the space because you can do unconventional things that you couldn’t do in other theaters because you are just a guest designer.  To top the whole thing off, he even gave us autographed copies of a book of his design work…