First Experiences of Moscow!

I guess the beginning is a good place to start, but the beginning consists of a four hour layover in Switzerland sitting on the floor, so I’m going to by-pass that and get to the juicy stuff. We finally arrived in Moscow, Russia after almost 23 hours of traveling (oy!) on planes trains and automobiles. Our dorm is fantastic, and we are settling in comfortably. We’ve started making friends with some of the Russian students, who are kind and willing to put up with our questions about the city. We’re living right off Tverskya street, the equivalent to New York’s Fifth Avenue, so there are plenty of shops, restaurants, and hang outs nearby. I immediately felt and saw the differences in myself and my country when arriving in Moscow. There is such a denseness of history here, you can feel the history in the air and in the people passing by you on the street. It is dense in every sense. In the architecture, the greenery, the air, and the history. This part of the world has lived through something I’ve never experienced, and for the first time, I am the outsider. People tell me I speak quickly, can’t understand my questions, and are constantly staring at the Americans in the corner. However, most Russian people I’ve met and talked with have been very cordial. A clerk in the grocery store asked if I needed help (it’s a big deal that he approached me!) and then proceeded to explain almost every product on the shelf. He later went back to his co-worker who was impressed by his ability to speak to an American and have it go over so well, and concluded that all it took was a smile. A woman working in a book store went out of her way to give us jelly beans! It finally hit me where exactly we were when we attended our first performance, Opus 7. The show was a modern piece exploring the persecution of the Jews during the Holocaust in the first act, then of Russian composer Shostakovich in the second act. The latter centered around an extremely large puppet of a Russian woman (representing Soviet Mother Russia and Stalin’s regime) and her ability to destroy the artistic and physical soul of one of it’s greatest composers. The piece was moving, to say the least, but watching my fellow Russian students experience the piece was insightful. Although they may have not been alive during Stalin’s regime and consequent purges, they come from this history, it is imbedded in their lives, and it is reflected in the way the city runs today. I’ve never felt something so completely outside of my experience before, and all of a sudden, I’m dropped right in the middle of it. 

The Moscow Art Theatre School is incredible. The history that exists in those buildings is overwhelming, and enough to make you feel like an ant crawling around the subway. We visited Stanlislavki’s grave today, and although I wanted to pay my respects, I must say that Stanislavski is not lying under that piece of marble. Maybe his body, but his spirit is indeed roaming around the halls of MXAT. His presence is very much alive in that theatre and school, and he is still running the place. The poster outside the theatre of him and his creative partner and co-founder of the Art Theatre, Nemevorich-Danchenko, makes it feel like they are waving hello to you every time you pass by. 

We’ve already started classes: we’re taking acting, singing, Russian ballet, stage combat, movement, Russian language, Russian theatre history, Russian cinema history, and stage design. Our first cinema class was overwhelming, but incredible - packed full of information. We began with the earliest silent Russian film, and ended with the first Russian animation, starring dried bugs turned into puppets. We have Sundays off for exploring and seeing theatre. Our MXAT Student ID (so I’m told) can get us into almost any theatre for free. I believe our teacher is a third generation from Stanislavski himself. He is one of the leads in MXAT’s production of Circle Mirror Transformation by Annie Baker, which we read in Text Analysis last year. Time outside of class has mostly consisted of finding/cooking food, navigating the grocery stores, the subway, and rehearsing our group etudes that we present each day. Actors and theatre makers are held in high regard here in Moscow. Along with vast historical differences, there are also vast cultural differences. Theatre as a non-commercial event is one of them. The Russians love the repertory system, producing audience favorites over and over. I’m excited to see some of these classics, as well as new work (Swan Lake at the Bolshoi coming soon!) Can’t wait to keep everyone posted on the happenings here in Moscow!!

Z

One Week Until Take-Off

It's been a summer of Stanislavski, Chekhov (both of them), Bulgakov, Gogol, Gorky, Ostrovsky, Meyerhold, Turgenev, Smeliansky, and Brecht.  It's been a summer of FedEx, NY Performing Arts Library, Drama Book Shop, Uniqlo, Capezio, Staples, and Amazon.com. It's been a summer of student Visa applications, body conditioning (do yoga and Pilates count?), attempts at learning Cyrillic, and listening to everyone tell me to be careful because, in case I hadn't heard already, things aren't going so well in Russia.

Today marks seven days before the "O'Neill Group"(as our American program is called) flies across the big pond, over to the big country.  We will be spending three months training at the Moscow Arts Theatre (MXAT), the place where modern acting essentially originated.  I'd say I'm about as ready as I'll ever be.

Questions about Moscow zip around my mind like an electrical storm: Will I actually love it there, or will I be the one person I know who has a bad experience? Will I like and learn from the other students in the O'Neill Group? What are the people like there? What's the food like? Of all the books on the summer reading list, will the one that I didn't have time to read be the one that I'll be screwed for not knowing? Can I get on the Russian professors' good sides? Are the current Syrian crisis and Putin's "war on gays" actually going to put me in danger, or is it all being overblown by the media? Will we be doing more Stanislavski, or Michael Chekhov? Seriously, though, what's the food like? Did I pack enough warm clothes?  Am I going to be the worst one in ballet class? Am I going to wake up on the Moscow Metro in the middle of the night, miles outside the city?  Am I going to have a nervous breakdown?
Is this really going to be the life-changing experience that I'm hoping it will be?

Yaron