An Actor in Russia Is More Than Just an Actor

There are at least a few berths in the international market that Russia still seems to have a monopoly on.


They are "forests, diamonds, gas ... and Stanislavsky's system," according to Andrei Goncharov, director of the Mayakovsky Theater.


The enormous, global influence of actor-director Konstantin Stanislavsky's teachings at the beginning of the century and the great theatrical developments they have led to in this centurywill be on display over the next week as 500 students come together in Moscow from all over the world for the theatrical festival Podium '99.


Oleg Tabakov, festival committee chairman, says, "It is important for the students to have the chance to show themselves on a higher level.


"As the old Russian saying goes: 'Watch others and show oneself.' It is a great opportunity for young artists to look at their equals in such festive surroundings and understand who they are amongst them."


Three hundred students from all the main drama schools in Moscow will be joined by 200 more from the United States, Britain, Israel, the former Soviet Union and other cities around Russia.


The festival was christened in 1989 as a "revision of drama education," says acting and directing teacher Rosetta Nemchinskaya.


It was conceived for students in the last year of their acting training. "The main idea was that theater education should not end "with the handing over of a diploma certificate," Nemchinskaya explains. "It should be more like a party."


A regular guest is the Harvard-based Institute for Advanced Theater Training (known for festival purposes as the MKhAT American Studio) whose graduates frequently go on to work for the Boston Repertory Theater. Their performance of the play "Shelter" made an immense impression on the Moscow public two years ago. This year they are staging "A Plot for a Short Story" (based on Chekhov's "The Sea Gull"), led by the same director as in 1997, Yury Yeremin.


An obligatory element of the studio's two-year course is a semester spent in Moscow, proof of the historical importance of the Russian dramatic tradition for Americans. It all began in 1922 when the Chekhov Art Theater, or MKhAT, toured the States, bringing with it the Stanislavsky system of acting that would be adopted by the future frontmen of American drama such as Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler.


The American Studio, says administrative director and founder Alexander Popov, is trying to revive the exchange.


"We bring the best Russian teachers to America," he says. "Our goal is to train a new generation of contemporary openminded American actors."


Teachers such as Yeremin all form part of what Tabakov calls the "unbroken silver line" of the Russian theatrical tradition.


"Most students can say that their teacher was once a student of a student of Stanislavsky and his main followers," Tabakov says.


At the root of Stanislavsky's system, Tabakov says, is "the lively creation of a human being" and its "unpredictability."


This "lively creation" of the human body is indeed the focus of a festival that looks at theatrical education in all its disciplines.


"In the Russian theater traditionally the actor was always complete in his creation," says Andrei Droznin, MKhAT and American Studio teacher of stage movement. "The body was always the concrete material through which an actor would express his feelings."


The stage movement discipline seeks to develop flexibility, strength, coordination and balance. Physical training, acrobatics and stage fighting are used "to make the body do unusual things and widen its capacities."


For Tuesday's class-concert of stage movement at the Shchukin School, Droznin has invited teachers and students from various drama schools to show the work they have been doing such as juggling, acrobatics and fencing.


Another festival curiosity is provided by the Academy of Eurythmic Art and its staging of Pushkin's short tragedy "A Feast in the Time of the Plague." Eurythmics stresses the association of form, movement and color with sounds, spoken or musical. For this show, every letter uttered by the actor is accompanied by a movement to express it.


The language of gesture also runs the show at the State Specialized Institute of Arts Thursday where deaf and dumb students stage "The New Tenant" by absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco.


"This work contains some elements of physical theater, of pantomime. In one scene they will be playing pieces of furniture, in another, metamorphosing themselves," says teacher Mikhail Semakov. His drama department is the only one in the world that offers professional training for the deaf and dumb.


"Intercommunication between deaf and dumb actors is always authentic and very powerful," Semakov says. "I find their inner feeling for rhythm and tempo astonishing: Without hearing music, they often can behave amazingly musically. Also they have an extraordinary spatial way of thinking: On stage it can lead to some things that you will never meet with normal actors."


Unashamed expressivity and experimentation are the festival watchwords in all the shows, whether in the flamboyant interpretation of Shakespeare's play "The Tempest," directed by Roman Kozak at MKhAT, or in the staging of Musorgsky's opera "The Sorotchinsky Fair," by students from the musical theater department of the Russian Academy of Theater Arts or GITIS. If at the Conservatory future opera singers work only on their voice, at GITIS, students study equally singing and acting. For their teacher Nemchinskaya, the problem of opera is how to combine authentic life and the convention of sung speech. She seeks to break the traditional rigidity of opera singing and open up the students' minds to new approaches.


"I make them sing in all possible postures, even with their back to the audience, walk, and move," she says."They have to bring their emotions to such a level, where they necessarily will unconsciously unite real life and theatricality."


For the opera based on Gogol's tale, Nemchinskaya and her husband, a famous circus specialist, introduced all kinds of novelties into the staging: acrobatics and a massive final gopak (a Ukranian dance).


In all its aspects, Podium '99 is about the process rather than the result and the productive relationship between student and teacher.


"My students never let me be sure that I hold the truth at any precise moment," explains Tabakov.


"The vulgarity that necessarily comes with success cannot stay long when you work with students, who from lack of education can be sometimes so authentic that it necessarily makes you think about your own imperfection. Plus they carry the rhythm of life; they bring new information of contemporary life. They are the health of theatrical life."