Avant Garde Play, Bridges, Tsarskoe Selo

Last Thursday I went to see the Andreevsky Theater's Production of Andrey Bely's novel Petersburg (staged in the courtyard of the Mikhailovsky Palace). I had heard from Ira that the director, Andrei Moguchi, had a reputation of puting on crazy avant-garde plays and though this was enough to discourage Ira from paying the relatively hefty price (800 rubles ~ 30$) I decided I had to see it, and even suggested it to visitors - Matt's friends Vera and Victor, and Victor's grandmother from Moscow. The four of us sat in a box with benches (one of ten boxes facing each other as below) whose walls opened and closed (and the boxes themselves were rolled around too) throughout the production. The stage was shaped like a runway between the two rows of five boxes of spectators, and in the beginning of the play it functioned well as Nevsky prospect. The small band (brass and xylophone) and chorus stood on top of the boxes facing eachother. For the last fifteen minutes of the production the audience was ushered out of its moving boxes and into the Mikhailovsky Palace where we got to witness the fates of all of the play's characters. In one room the revolutionary son character hung himself, in another the secondary characters were laid out on the floor as if dead for everyone to walk around and look at. The only room of the palace that has been renovated to look as it did two hundred years ago (fourth photo down) was filled with windup clocks. Other characters from the play walked among the audience as they walked through the rooms of the castle acting their parts, perhaps in an attempt to pull the audience itself into the play. As you can see below there were lots of dwarfs and lots of scary make-up. For some reason I feel like in the US avant-garde has taken on a bit of a different, more contemporary meaning - I don't think this would go off in New York. But please let me know if I'm wrong. I'm curious to hear what you all have to say on this topic. Friday night Vera, Victor, Victor's grandma, and I stayed up all night to watch the bridges open and close.



Yesterday Ira, Genya, and Ira's mother took me to the town of Pushkin/Tsarkoe Selo, where one of the most fancy palaces around St. Petersburg is located. The beautifully manicured park around the palace, as well as the wild, woodsy park on its other side were really wonderful to walk through. And I got burned from the hot sun. The "beach" along the walls of the Peter and Paul Fortress. That's the Neva you see, which is not nearly clean enough to swim in, though there were plenty of people swimming in it.