Day 12...seeing is believing...

This has been another long day, and I’m really tired so I’ll give you the brief version and post of photos for today.

We went to the New Tretyakov Museum of Art this morning.  It is where the 20^th Century Russian art is displayed.  There was definitely some cool stuff there…I gotta start taking my cell phone with me to ‘sneak’ some photos of stuff I like.

Then we had our Chekhovian Costuming class at the “Yellow House” were they make and house all the costumes for the MXAT.  Today we focused on men’s clothing of the period and it was rather educational.  We also got to see and touch actual articles of clothing from over a hundred years ago, including an actually military artillery jacket that was used in numerous productions in the early years of the MXAT.  Really cool stuff.

We then had a couple of hours before our show for the night so I took a nap in the green room of the America Studio and then tried dinner at MacDonald’s here in Russia.  I think I had their version of the Big ‘n’ Tasty…it was really big (the burger itself was about 4” in diameter) and it had bacon, which was good, but also had an interesting sauce on it instead of ketchup and mayo like it is in the States.  I might go back to try a Russian Big Mac but that will probably be the extent of my Moscow Mickey D’s experiences.

For our show tonight, we got to see the final performance for the graduating students from the Moscow Art Theatre School.  They’ve been performing (and refining) this show for the past two years.  It’s kind of a vaudeville/variety kind of show comprised of numerous smaller pieces to highlight their abilities.  The first half focused mostly on movement based thing like dance and choreography while the second half focused on acting.  Personally, I loved the first half…they did some pretty amazing things, some poetic and beautiful while others were comedic. There was some really good stuff from the second half but it’s a little hard to fully enjoy when you don’t know exactly what they are saying.

Well, that was little more than I anticipated so I hope you enjoyed…

Day 11...next to normal...

Today wasn’t a huge adventure day like yesterday but eventful none the less.

We had another History of Russian Cinema class today and this is one of just about everybody’s favorite classes. Today we covered the cinema of the post revolution USSR in the twenties. We saw some amazing film work at the end of the silent film era. For example, we watched an entire film by Dziga Vertov from 1928 called The Man with the A Movie Camera. It was a film with not story and not actors because Vertov despised both! He and one of his brothers just set out with two cameras and shot a ton of footage of everyday life in a Soviet city, they edited together, and called it a film. The film worked on numerous planes and sets of parallels to bring things together. It’s a beautiful film and I highly suggest it, although it can be tough to find a version with the original soundtrack. The one we used in class had a new soundtrack from just about 10 years ago. It was alright but I think the original music would have been even cooler.

Painting class was alright, we just finished up our still life paintings from last week. Mine doesn’t look good to me but I’m super critical of my own stuff. I guess there are a few good things about it but I don’t consider myself an artist when it comes to fine art kind of painting. Next week we get to start a new project…hopefully I can do better.

Fun fact for the day…we went out to the metro station by Victory Park (mentioned a few days ago) because it has the largest escalator in the entire Moscow area. How long is it? Well, let’s just say I shot a video on my camera of the ride down…it took three full minutes to reach the bottom! Now that’s a long escalator…

Other than that, it was a rather ordinary day…Well, there were the belly dancers at the restaurant that we went to for dinner, but everything else not already mentioned was pretty standard…

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.

Day 10...to much to do and to little time to do it....

We did so much today that my mind literally hurt from visual overload.  The was the Kremlin, a back stage tour at the Stanislavsky Music Theatre, and an mind blowing show at the Lencom theater called Шут Балакирев (in English-Jester Balakirev).  The sad thing is that it’s already 1:45am and I’m exhausted.  So I’ll just put up a couple of pictures and put today’s things in with tomorrow because I need sleep so my body and recoup…

 This is a shot of one of the Seven Sisters beyond a statue in Victory Park

 One of the hundreds (or so it seems) churches that I've taken pictures of while over here

 And finally, a family of ducks that Barbara Bush gave to a park 

(it had something to do with a Russian fairy tale)

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…

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.

Day Seven...Relective, Fast, and Furious!

I started today off by visiting Christ the Savior Cathedral for the morning service with a couple other folks on the trip. The church is just gorgeous! Interestingly enough, it is only about 10 years old. The original was torn down by Stalin (because the Communist had outlawed churches so who really cared anyway) and they were going to build a massive monument/build in its place that, at the time, was going to be the tallest building in the world. That never happened so it ended up being a really large open air pool until the early 1990’s after the fall of the USSR. They rebuilt the church as close as they could to the originally using sourses from all over the world. I thought the exterior was beautiful…then I walked inside! The Icons that cover the walls are a little different than what I am use to seeing in Orthodox Churches but stunning none the less. Then there was all the different marbles set in wonderful patterns on the walls and floors… Words can’t do it justice by a long shot. Unfortunately cameras are not allowed in the church so you’ll just have to suffer with this exterior shot.

The music was also simply stunning. I have several different ROC services on CD’s that I often listen to but hearing it in real life in an authentic setting…priceless. I’ve sung my fair share of ROCM and this just warmed my heart. You can’t help but think that there is a Creator after having listened to that.

We spent the afternoon on a bus tour of famous sites in the city. The first stop…Christ the Savior Cathedral! Go figure…well, it allowed me to get some pictures that I hadn’t been able to capture in the morning so it was all good. Oh, I forgot to mention that there is an awesome museum of historic ROC relics, icons, and other stuff that I hope I can get a chance to go back and look at…and it’s all under the church! Ok, well technically the museum is under the plaza that surrounds the church. Under the sanctuary there is a smaller sanctuary with more traditional looking icons on the wall.

We stopped at a couple of other places but I think my favorite of the tour was Victory Park. It was opened in 1997 for the 50th Anniversary of the end of the Great Patriotic War (WWII) and as an honor to the 30,000,000 Russians that lost their lives. We only had a couple of minutes there so I’m hoping the designers can go back some time because I could probably spend a couple of hours walking around the park taking pictures.

We ended the evening with a performance of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at the Lencom Theatre. To be truthful, I wasn’t that impressed with the performance. The only actor that I thought did a spectacular job was the guy who played Billy. His consistency and mannerisms were spot on throughout the performance. They also either used a very different adaption, made a ton of cuts, just simply changed parts of the story, or some combination of the three because there were some elemental keys to the storyline that they left out that really hurt the overall impact of the show. The set, however, was pretty cool; walls of white “tiles” with vents hanging in the air…very sanitarium like. The cool thing was that the tiles were actually made out of a white opaque plastic so there were times when some of them were backlit to change colors, and I’m so stealing that idea for some show in the future.

This is just a funny little photograph of some flowers that I took with the Moscow State University in the back ground.