Day nine...the problem was that you started...

Today was a long yet not long day…  We didn’t have any big trips or anything and I didn’t go off to see any museums or anything so that was the not long part.  But it was long just because of the amount of stuff our group did.

Our first class of the day was a three hour drawing class.  I am not a drawer…or at least I’m not a fast drawer.   I’ve somehow managed to do some good stuff but it takes me forever because it has to be right or I can’t go on.  I hate it when I’m trying to draw a still life and I look at what I’m working on and there’s a part of it that’s not accurate to what I’m drawing.  I think it also takes me a while because I’m not a trained artist in terms of drawing and painting so I have to think a lot about how to do something before I can actually do it.  Then you through in a Russian professor and a translator who has a hard time translating because she’s not an artist (she’s a producing student at the theatre school) and it makes it even more difficult.  I did learn a little about using dark and light (via gradients) to help produce depth so that was pretty cool.  Plus, I learn a new way to use a kneaded eraser (translated as ‘liquid eraser’).

I think the best thing about that class was a translation that I overheard out teaching telling another student.  Now, it is possible that it was either translated wrong or that he paused at an odd interval to wait for the translator but his is what I hear, “The problem with this was that you started to draw.” That just made me smile…

Second class was our first History of Stage Design class, which is really a history of design for Chekhov’s play and hopefully we’ll also get to some later 20^th century designer.  We learned a lot about the original floor plans for the Chekhov plays at the MXAT and it was really awesome to see how they started doing design differently for his shows.  They broke a number of old traditions and started to revolutionize theater design at the turn of the century.  Of course, I think some of these ideas were already being implemented in other parts of Europe (I’m thinking of Ibsen’s plays from a decade or two earlier) but it was all new to the Moscow theatre seen.  Some of it was really simple stuff that we take for granted now, like currents splitting from the center and traveling offstage.  Pre-MXAT versions of Chekhov (Stanislavsky directed the first production of The Seagull at the MXAT in 1898…I think) the currents always just went up, into the fly system.  The critics all talked about the current, that’s how new it was back then…

We saw Chekhov’s play Ivanov tonight at the MXAT.  It was a very different production…they did it backwards.  Now, they didn’t walk around backwards or anything crazy like that, in fact, I think the physical aspect of the play had a great forward moving motion…it was just the plot that was backwards.  Actually, I think it might be more appropriate to say that it was mostly backwards, I think… Since I don’t actually understand what they are saying, I’m just basing this off of what I saw and what I know of the play.  The set a pretty cool too but it wasn’t until the end of the show that it really made sense.  The floor was littered with logs, stumps, and branch that the actors had to navigate in order to get across the stage.  Plus there was a large gate like thing on one side of the stage and a large pile of sticks and branches on the other that looked like it was ready for a massive bonfire.

I also really liked the lighting for the show.  The European (or at least Russian) sense of lighting is very different from a more American style.  We like to use a lot of color whereas they like to use a lot of white or very lightly tinted colored gels and only once in a while through stab of color into the mix. I kind of like it and I think it might work well at Bryan in the fall.

Well, tomorrow starts with a tour of the Kremlin so time to go to sleep…