Curriculum

“What are you doing in Moscow, Laura?”
“Seeing theater. Every night.”

While I feel like I’ve said this at least once to almost all of you, I realized that maybe I should explain myself a little more. Anatoly and our inexhaustible program leaders, Tanya and Nastia, provide a theatrical itinerary for us that is beyond what I ever expected. And yes, it’s exhausting after a while. Seeing great theater is awesome, but doing anything 9 nights in a row can become laborious. That said, I really can’t complain (although, obviously, I do.)

I feel like the best way to give you an idea of our theatrical adventures might be to chronicle the shows we saw in seven days last week. They are a pretty good sampling of the, um, varied shows that we see, spanning dance, theater, and “other”, shifting spectacularly from astounding to atrocious. The last couple weeks have been particularly interesting because we’re smack in the middle of the Golden Mask Festival, which brings productions into Moscow from all over world for a competition. Anatoly is the head judge this year, so we’re seeing quite a lot.

Sunday: Ulysses, Fomenko Theater. A six-hour production, if you include the two intermissions. Luckily, it was fantastic. The design was really interesting, a mixture of Greek and Irish elements that were rearranged to make the stage look different for every episode. The production culminated in a forty-five minute monologue by Molly Bloom – a forty-five minute monologue at the very end of a six hour production. That’s gutsy. And maybe that’s why I thought this was so great – simply the nerve and skill required to master the sheer impossibility of putting that novel on stage.

Monday: Seagull, the ballet, Stanislavsky Music Theater. I’ve seen next to no ballet. I know next to nothing about it. In fact, the first ballet I saw (that I can remember) was here, which means I’ve seen four dance productions total, in my life. Needless to say, I have little reference for judging dance. But what I can tell you is that the Seagull ballet was stunningly beautiful. They took a play we knew well and explored it uniquely, focusing on the heartbreaking relationships and unrequited love. Instead of a writer, Treplev is a choreographer, and the production has fun making jokes at the expense of both classical ballet and modern dance. This ballet brought out the melancholy beauty of Chekhov’s play like I’ve never seen in an actual production.

Tuesday: Night off.

Wednesday: Opus 7, director Dimitri Krymov. This production is literally indescribable. Arthur would call this a “pious cliché”, but it’s true. Krymov has been labeled a “theater painter”, which means several things: he’s a set designer turned director; he generally works with images rather than words; and he actually uses paint. The first half of the production was about the Holocaust and used haunting imagery and musical soundscapes (actors sang, played instruments, and created sound effects) to struggle to find a way to aptly remember the victims’ suffering. The second half was about Russian composer Shostakovich, who narrowly escaped being murdered by Stalin’s regime and was forced to become their puppet (again, in this production, literally). I’m really not sure how these two themes connect, or if they’re supposed to. But both halves were surprising, striking, and unique.

Thursday: Another Sleepy Dusty Delta Day, Troubleyn Company of Belgium. That day, my streak of amazing productions expired. It was supposed to be a ballet. It was….not. However, it WAS, without doubt, the worst production I’ve seen here. I described it on Facebook as “Sex seizure + model trains + coal dust + canaries + suicide = yikes and a half.” Bizarre? Oh yes. Terrible? More than you know – it deserves extensive description. The piece was based around the song “Ode to Billie Joe“. The stage was covered in piles of coal that had a model train running through them. It also had 12 cages hanging from above, each with a live canary. So, logically, what should happen? The actress read a long suicide note about jumping off a bridge. Then she danced (which looked more like a seizure.) Then she drank a beer and stuck it in her underwear. She danced again, took off her dress, and rubbed herself in coal dust so that her skin was black. Danced again. Then she took another beer, grabbed a canary out of a cage, and bludgeoned the canary’s head. Don’t worry, animal lovers, that particular canary was fake. And she was still naked, by the way. Oh, and then she sang the song. Really badly. In a Belgian accent. Ryan, our Harvard professor who was visiting last week, came with us to the show because he had seen Troubleyn’s work before. He said at that performance, a woman came out on stage, stared down the audience, and then began to crack nuts. She cracked nuts for half an hour, and that was the show. I think I would have rather watched that.

Friday: A Month in the Country, Tovstonogov Bolshoi Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg. An awful production of what, as it turns out, is a pretty good play by Turgenev. The acting was horrendous and the second act deteriorated completely into hysterics. For example, when Natalya admitted her clandestine love, she paced up and downstage, stopping to look at her love and flop her arm around, a gesture that supposedly was meant to send him away but faltered halfway through, making it look more like a tic. That gem was second only to the blaring melodramatic sound effect that accented particularly overwrought moments. (Think, a sudden blaring of horns that happens in a movie when someone discovers a body.)

Saturday: Eugene Onegin, the ballet, Boris Eifman. Eifman is a legendary choreographer in Russia. He focuses on modern ballet. Though the music and design were, well, puzzling at some points (Tchaikovsky, then 1980s rock ballad with screaming saxophone?) the movement was really incredible. I’ve never seen dancers do anything like that before. It was completely different than the traditional conception of ballet and exciting to watch in every moment – which is a lot to say for ballet.

So that’s a week in the life, as they say. A pretty good range, especially if you add in what we’ve seen this week: a Macbeth, an Uncle Vanya, and a student piece based on Carmen. And hey, at least it was a 4:3 good:bad ratio.