Day eight....it's a good kind of pain...

What a day it has been today…I am completely worn out and should be going to sleep instead of writing this but I need to do this for my own record at least.  It’s about 1:30am as I start writing this and I usually am writing these blog things after midnight so I apologize for all my spelling errors…proofreading at 1am or later, when you’re exhausted is just not going to work.

The designers had our first movement class this morning.  It’s a totally optional activity for us but I at least wanted to try some of it that I could possibly use next year in classes or for rehearsals.  I think it’s a good thing that I’ve spent the last week walking around 10 miles a day because I think I would have collapsed after the first ten minutes of class.  I’ve surmised that the class is really about learning to control you body and making every movement purposeful, with a conscious intention.  There were plenty of moves that I couldn’t do but I was really surprised at some of the positions I was able to do.  I did describe them but, as I stated earlier, I really tired so I just move on to the next class.

That class just happened to be “The Material World in Chekhov’s Time.”  It was great!  We talked about the style of furniture and what not that would be appropriate to use if we were to try for authentic realism for Chekhov play.  She (Katya, our instructor) even gave us a digital folder with all the images she used for the class…Score!

After class I walked back to the dorm to get a shower and eat dinner before tonight’s show.  I really needed a shower after that movement class so if felt great to cleanup.  Plus, I made dinner and saved a few rubles.  Nothing like a nice heart meal of open face ham, cheese, and tomato sandwiches wash down with a little Coke-Cola.

They managed to get us tickets to the final showing of The Three Penny Opera here at the MXAT.  It’s pretty cool to see a show on its final performance after running for a couple of years.  They did some really cool stuff… The set was pretty much just a massive wall upstage that covered the whole back area.  It was brick that was painted grey except for a huge, white rectangle in the center.  The used handheld cameras that project live onto this rectangle at various times during the show.  What was really cool was that the images were kind of in the extreme black and white negative kind of thing so it had a really surreal kind of effect.  There was a big garage door in the wall on the stage left side what would open of different scenes.  For the second scene they had this big ‘balloon’ (it was about 4’-6’ wide) that had an intense lighting instrument in it that created this glowing orb that was pretty amazing.

They used these grungy looking futon couches that slide around on stage for most of the seating but they did “destroy” a piano on stage to create a table (they actually used some type of saw to cut the off…or at least it looked like they did, you know, the whole ‘magic’ of the theater).  They also used a couple of dumpsters and a rolling cage for a few things like when Mack is thrown in prison, they put him in the little cage.  Although, they did have this cool plexi-glass thing for the second prison he gets put in before his sentence is carried out.

Two other really bid things happened at the end of the play.  First (spoiler alert…kind of because they did change the ending a little), there was a 25-30’ skeleton that lowered out of the fly system and the arms even moved to point to the characters.  The second thing was when the main dude (the one that got put in jail twice) walked up the back wall…kind of an awesome why to end a musical.  It’s a good thing that they ended it with this really big bang because the whole show just a little shy of FOUR HOURS LONG!!!

Well, time for bed…it’s a little after 2am and my alarm will be going off sooner than I’d like…

 PS  Just thought I'd throw this panoramic shot I took while at Gorky Park.