Today marked the end of two classes for our time here in Moscow. The first was the History of Russian Cinema class which everyone in our group absolutely loved. Our professor, Galina Aksenova, was great and I could easily take an entire semester long film class from her. It helps that she speaks pretty good English and has taught film classes in the States for several years. You could tell that she loves the cinema and loves teaching about it. She also emailed us a list of Russian films that are available in the States with subtitles for use to expand our knowledge of Russian films. And she guaranteed that all the movies would be good because she wouldn’t put anything trivial on the list…and after this class, I believe her.
The second class was Material World in Chekhov’s Time taught by Ekaterina Kuznetsova. She’s worked at the MXT and the school for well over 20 years and the class was all about things like furniture, wall paper, curtains, and lamps. This might be boring for most folks but for us designers…we’re like kids in candy shop. The cool thing was that we were able to actually touch authentic period stuff, that’s things over 100 years old (we get to do the same thing in our costume class, actually touching costumes and historic articles of clothing that were worn over a century ago). Today we got to see (and touch) some fabric samples of things that the theater did in the past for fabric material to use for drapes. They did (and still do) some pretty inventive things to make fabric look period; stuff like using rice, glue, and gold paint to create decorative dimensioned embroidery; using stencils to add patterns to cheaper fabric; and actually painting floral patterns on cheap, one color fabric to make it look expensive. It’s all so cool. We even got to finger through a sketch book that had been bequeathed to her by the head of the theatre’s fabric design department from the middle of the last century. It was his personal sketch book that contained some of his personal designs for curtain drapery. I took numerous photos…I liked this particular page because it looks like he just painted a quick little still life over part of it...
Tonight we went and saw movement theater piece. Movement theatre is theatre with no words but it’s not exactly dance either. Movement theatre is similar to ballet with respect of telling a story but it’s different because in ballet, the dance moves themselves have a meaning and technique that go along with the story, but in movement theatre it’s more about pure physical expression of emotions and meaning. Now, that could mean using various dance moves and styles but it’s not limited to them. This piece in particular told an old Russian tales set in contemporary times. It’s the story of a nobleman who seduces a lower class woman who falls madly in love him. He, however, gets bored with her, betrays her love, and leaves her. She then commits suicide…I’ve to learn that this is a typical ending to many Russian tales. For this retelling, it started in a movie theatre and progressed for about 75 minutes to the end where she died in his arms, from a broken heart I assume.
Tonight I will be up late working on designs for three different show; Three Sisters for my scene design class here in Moscow as well as The Magic Flute and The Wizard of Oz for Bay View…good thing the show was out by 20:30 and I was able to write my blog early today!
Interesting day. Loved the photos. Thanks for keeping up with your blog so faithfully.
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