Day 10b...What I was to tired to say yesterday...

So, yesterday was a really huge day… First, we spent a couple hours just roaming around, oh, you know, the KREMLIN!!! You can only walk around about a quarter of the grounds and the only buildings you can go into are the churches but it was just a beautiful way to spend the morning.  Oh, and the churches…there’s only six different churches inside the Kremlin, no big deal, right?  And the insides…WOW!  I only wish that pictures were allowed inside the churches but it is strictly forbidden (even cell phones).  I did buy a book that has pictures of the insides just so I can use them as a talking point.  The Tsar’s Cannon and the Tsar’s Bell were also pretty interesting.  The Bell was cast in 1600’s and only weight a shade of 200 tons…yes, 200 TONS.  That’s a 400,000 lb of cast iron bell…and it’s broken!  The chuck you see next to me only weighs a measly 11 tons… I have so many pictures that I’m not sure what I’ll be able to do with them.

Then, in the afternoon, after our Theater History class is Anatoli, we got a special treat…an all access, backstage tour of the Stanislavsky Music Theatre complex.  In simple terms, it was another jaw dropper.  Most of their sets are steel based and they have a rather large area that I am extremely jealous of to not only cut and weld everything, but also to assemble it before it even goes on stage.  There’s not as much space for wood stuff but wood isn’t always the best for repertory theatre.  The prop shop was pretty cool as well.  We got to see a few of the props they were working on for some mermaid show that’s coming up.  We then got to see the costume storage area where everything is organized by show on these cool rolling carts so every costume is easily accessible.  Then onto the costume shops…apparently, for the past 300 years, costumes for men and women are made by separate shops, didn’t know that.  So, there is one shop that only makes women’s costumes and one that only makes costumes for the men.  This theater even has its own group of cobblers that makes shoes for every person, for every character, and for every show…costume made for each individual.  It’s just two guys sitting up in a room making shoes all day.  Then, an extra special treat…the paint deck where they paint all the drops for the theatre.  They had two down on the floor that they were working on, one that was mostly painted and one that was still in the layout stage, but both were cool to look at from the catwalk above the deck.  It was just a totally amazing tour.

Then, to top the night off, the head of the design program at the theatre school got the designers tickets to Шут Балакирев (in English-Jester Balakirev).  This was a stunningly beautiful show.  There were over 150 chairs on the stage.  Most were fixed in place (you read why soon) but it was an interesting look.   They did some cool things with big planks that they used to span over the chairs kind of like a bridges and ramps.  Then all the planks went away and things started to slowly change.  The chairs started to rise into the air!  The last four rows of chairs were connected to fly lines so they just went straight up, but the first three rows were attached to the front rank, and the whole stage started to get stepper and stepper and stepper as the first act progressed.  For the final scene of the act, a multitude of paints had be set on the chairs so as the rows began to rise, you could see more and more of the paintings.  Then at the end of the act, the king is dying and so the stage floor, now at about a 15-20˚ angle from the floor, broke apart into individual plank boards and some tilted even more which caused all the art work on them to shift into crazy positions.

 
Act two had all the floor planks at different angles and the actors wove their way in and around them throughout the first 2/3rds of the act.  Then some of them tilted even more (several were actually leaning out over the audience by this point) that gave the stage a bit of a frightening look.  Then, for the last scene, all the planks returned to their home position lying parallel to the floor.  It was just a visually mind blowing performance.  I stole some images off the web so you can see little what I am talking about.