It was obviously a unique course for it brought together two masters, two outstanding directors. One essentially represented the 1960s, the other – the next generation. Both focused their theatrical activity at that time on working with dialogue. That is, they understood directing as the art of turning dialogue into a game. They understood this art in different ways: one turned dialogue into a game by means of acting demonstrations and by creating emotional threads, or conductors, that he called patternings, while the other used a special art of reasoning and interpretation, which ultimately led to the construction of a structure of playacting. Both initially began working with us in a style that could be called the psychological theatre. Vasilyev practically did nothing in the first six months, he analyzed nothing, as he took pains to get to know us. Efros, on the other hand, leaped into work. But before any of that, the institute sent us out to pick potatoes.

I created my first performance while picking potatoes. It was a “simulation of theatrical action,” which terrified Vasya Skorik, the dean of the directing department. He said Efros would not like it if he saw it. We walked around with ropes and strings for a week, rehearsing something quite passionately. Everyone was terribly intrigued. Ultimately, a group of spectators assembled and encountered the following sight: the lights were off, everyone was seated while some individuals tossed and turned on the floor, and "comrades," equipped with army lights, stepped over them. I remember the pulsating light, the disturbing music, our bug-eyed group of students united in a single heartbeat, and an electrified audience expecting something quite incredible. In the end, a group of people just stood there with their cheeks puffed up. We decided to stand still as long as we could. The audience went wild. Periodically someone would throw a tantrum, or, screaming from the innovation that had been unleashed on them, ran out of the hall. But we kept standing there, our eyes filled with crazy, hard-to-disguise joy, our cheeks trembling with tension. Whoever could not hold out would fall and crawl away. And behind him a quilted jacket, with quilted pants, would be revealed to be sitting on a chair. The last one to give up revealed the central jacket – quilted jackets also sat on the right and left, but the central one was crowned by a huge potato the size of a human head that we had found in the field. Illuminated by spots, it was revealed to the indignant public, and we doubled over in laughter behind the doors. Thus began my education. Then we came to Moscow. I must tell about the admission process separately.

After I returned from the army where I wrote my novel The Instantaneous Notes of a Sentimental Soldier, I decided I would go somewhere to America, since there was nothing for me to do in Russia. Then I learned that two masters were recruiting students. And I thought, it doesn’t matter where I study directing, and it would probably be right to apply. Directing, my love, was already an overriding passion for me. I had already been through much in this area. In particular, I had a fight with the chief director of the Bryansk Drama Theatre, for which I was sent into the army. I remember I gave him a drubbing on the 8th of March, whipping him with jump-ropes in the theatre lobby where I played the famous role of Koshchei the Immortal. After that, I returned from the army to Moscow and decided to apply to theatre school. To do that I kept my shaved appearance (as one of my army friends said, my shaved head looked like a diamond). In such a diamond state I knew I would be successful this time. The fact is I was unlucky in Moscow. I always got as far as the last interviews, then they would reject me. For example, Oleg Tabakov told me: “You know, kid, you are a good guy. But I've already put a team together. Tatyana Lioznova told me the same thing at VGIK. A specialist in the applicant process, I felt like the anthropologist Miklukho-Maklai: I studied future students as if they were aborigines. Be that as it may, I had already reached the final stages, the last chance, it was either now or never. So I did an about face, cutting off connection with everyone, halting all communications with people, and I announced I was boycotting the world. I settled into my brother’s apartment in Novogireevo, and stopped talking altogether. I whispered just one poem to myself: Julian Tuwim's “Winter Waltz.” Without realizing it, I employed an Efrosian approach to text. That is, I created a diamond-like sutra – a diamond-like emotional conductor. I transformed each word into an experience, and my reading of this poem formed a string of these distinctly chosen experiential events. At first, I would be surprised upon encountering the word “snow,” as if I were an African seeing it for the first time. Then I began studying its properties and found that it was “falling.” Then I listened: it “falls” “quietly.” Then I turned to an African friend and said: "Look, snow," and together we now recognized its main property: “it rests upon your soul.” We looked to see how it might come to rest, and found out that it came to rest “like white fur.” Continuing this sacred degustation, we understood that it came to rest “quietly, lightly” and “happily.” Then we repeated, now turning anxiously to the whole world: "snow, look." And then, utterly shocked, we realized what was taking place: “an early winter morning echoes as a tear in my soul” – this is either the end of life, time, or love. After that, I appealed to him as I would to my friend, a jazz musician, who, like me, has nothing to lose: “play on, then, in your sadness, a valse triste,” for “the snow is falling,” for “the last sheet is finished."

Not at all worried, expecting nothing at all, I went to meet my idols. The paradox is that I knew Efros well, and had never seen Vasilyev or any of his work. In that sense Efros was a true idol; Vasilyev was more a virtual idol, that is, an absolute idol. But in art you measure your steps by the sound a name makes. You don't move forward in years, but in names. Entering a name is like stepping into fresh snow, or onto a new continent. Thus did I first step into the name of Vasilyev (only later does a name take on personality), and, essentially, first stepped into the character of Efros. Efros auditioned us in the phys-ed hall – it was like a huge, empty warehouse of young talents. There was a long bench, as there would be in a school gymnasium, and we all sat there on that bench like stuffed teddy bears. School was like a fantastic basketball game, but Efros was this tiny basket into which you had to toss your talent. I remember walking past all the shoes, looking only at my feet, and then I turned and saw Efros. He sat before me as a leaf might before grass, so good and kind. Olga Yakovleva sat to his left, someone else to his right. He said to me, “Proceed,” and smiled. “It's all settled,” I thought. I think he thought the same thing. This is how he conducted the auditions: someone would walk out and before they could even say, “Mayakov...,” Efros would say, “Thank you. All is clear. Have a seat.” These were laser-like auditions. He never wasted a superfluous second, functioning in some special manner. I said, “I would like to recite a little poem” (now he'll say, “thank you,” no he didn't). “Julian Tuwim” (now he'll thank me – no). “Winter Waltz” (no). And so, enveloped in Efros's lack of thanks which seemed to stretch on triumphantly, I began reciting my poem, saying, “snow,” but forgetting about my friend the jazz musician. I held a long pause (now he'll surely say “thank you,” but he didn't). That's when I decided that Efros would be my friend the jazz musician, and it was as if he transformed instantly into an African, grew quite mellow and became my brother in swing. I said to him, “it falls and falls so quietly, look, it's snow, coming to rest on your soul, like white fur, quietly, lightly, happily.” Efros said, “Thank you.” And I felt that, even though I had not made it to the end of the poem, he said that “thank you” in a kind of swing rhythm. “Have a seat. Everything is clear.” Then came his commentary that made the entire bench of students shudder and pay attention to what was going down. He said, “I can ask someone to take a seat and that doesn't at all mean I didn't like it. No.” (He loved to talk about himself as the Sun-King might, commenting at a distinct distance.) “It means that everything is clear!” And everyone sort of shuddered in a pious manner in response to the amazing density of the process we were engaged in.

That, essentially, is how my relationship with the masterful Anatoly Vasilyevich Efros began.

To my amazement and joy, the African did not betray our jazz improvisation, and I passed the competition. I never recited poetry again. In a word, Efros admitted me to his course.

So there I was, bald, head shaved “like a diamond,” in a gray velour suit that my father had bought a Beryozka store before I went into the army. When I came home from the army I put that costume on and never took it off again (an army habit of putting something on and never taking it off) – and when I entered the yard at GITIS I saw a bunch of very respectable people, the competition for this course was the biggest in the history of GITIS, 250 to 400 people per spot. It was packed, festive and electric, a very special atmosphere. Around me, I saw imposing, respectable men in beards... and women, and amidst them all was this scrawny greenhorn, an army veteran with a short poem by Julian Tuwim on his teeth. Nothing imposing or respectable about that. Over the few months that I sat in Novogireevo, I probably composed ten explications on completely different topics – if they asked me: “What do you want to stage?” – I would be ready to answer them. I had an explication for Platonov's Dzhan. It was probably the best of everything I came up with back then. But I never had a chance to tell anyone about it. Efros was not at all interested in it. And Vasilyev, he somehow looked at everything differently. In general, when I left that gym hall, I sat on some steps, and smoked a Belomor cigarette, as bearded women wandered all around me. My eyes were seeing four of everything, and I was not nervous in the least. Vasilyev came out and I got a good look at him, or maybe that was another day when I had the interview with Vasilyev, but for me it all comes together on a single day – an incredibly gentle person came out, it seemed to me, soft, long-haired, with a surprisingly bright face. There was something aquiline in him, big eyes. I thought, yes, yes, this is a great director. And my heart grew warm and it filled with love. I thought: what a pity if I'm not admitted. It sounds so good: Efros, Vasilyev. Thoughts tossed and turned in me, and there was nothing else. And then unthinkingly – because everyone somehow stood up, when you're auditioning, you participate in a special herd consciousness, you join it, and I joined too – I saw how some members of our herd stood and we went over to Vasilyev to ask him something, and I thought: I should get up too, and I went to ask something there in this world where everything existed in fours. And Vasilyev somehow backed off from the herd that was pressing around him, and I remember that he kind of looked at me and I asked: "Well, what?" And he said: “Everything is good,” as if together we had planned to rob a bank. The whole situation instantly burst, became normal, the norm, in which there was an element of adventure, and everything was clear. From that second on, in fact, to the end of my days, probably, everything in theatre was clear to me.

In fact, everything was good. Suddenly, everything returned to normal. I saw a normal person before me. I finally had met normal people. My mind dared to be normal again. It was not necessary to exert oneself on either side. It simply turned out that I could trust myself in accordance with myself, my ideas about the world, my soul, people, my hopes, career and art. This was a norm that I had never found anywhere else before. My training began with this understanding. I realized I was in a normal world.

End of Episode One.

 

Efros began rehearsing A Midsummer Night's Dream. Vasilyev uttered the following phrase: “Efros is fabulous at loosening actors up.” We were all very impassioned in the first six months. True, it all began with something else. Efros suggested we do The Impromptu at Versailles. He tried working with us for a couple of lessons on etudes. But before long he said there was no point to it and that we should get busy doing what we would be doing our whole lives, that is, we would be doing sketches for our whole lives, analyzing dialogue and just doing what we needed to do, just work and work and finally we would begin doing it. It was a purely jazz-like approach, for all the melody of the principles themselves. Vasilyev offered us a completely different, academic, complex, even classically sophisticated analysis, for all the “jazz” of his approach to dialogue. Surprisingly, this paradox began to work itself out and reveal its potential further on. In the meantime, I made one artist, a friend of Katya Tolstaya, draw a two-meter by two-meter portrait of Moliere. She painted it in color, very emphatically (this was the first of many Moliere portraits that I have initiated in my life). Much later, in 1986, Vanya Kochkaryov created a brilliant portrait of Moliere for the production I did of The Misanthrope in the early years of Theatre Theatre in St. Petersburg. He painted Moliere as an absolutely bald astronaut, from whom all kinds of wiring shot out into a lunar landscape. It was an incredibly beautiful portrait. Then I cut the portrait into the same number of parts as I had actors, and I created a ballet with words: the actors walked around with these portrait pieces and, as a result, slowly assembled the portrait, speaking words, then freezing in elaborate poses. The staging of a play is a very serious matter. One must know everything about everything. As such, I did not sleep at night as I prepared for the most important exam in my life – I studied the history of the seventeenth century, examined pictures, sat in the library, where I found a picture from Moliere's time: a street on a stage made of houses disappearing to a point, chandeliers with candles on each house and a train of famous actors of the 17th century in various poses. Moliere stood at the far left. I transferred these poses into a scene that I built around the portrait. Why I did the composition like this and not some other way is completely unknown to me – the actors held in their hands Moliere's nose, an ear, a piece of hair, the neck, eyes, and forehead, while they spoke words of The Impromptu at Versailles and slowly put Moliere's face together. All rehearsals consisted of learning to speak one’s lines, make precise movements, derive poses from a picture, and insert the necessary portrait piece in time after the previous one was inserted. It was a rather complicated attraction, a rather interesting performance. For me then, the ideal theatre was a mechanical performance which simply had to be done very precisely. I still think this is the most natural idea of theatre that could have arisen in the head of a young junior sergeant of the late 20th century. My hair gradually grew. Everyone liked my performance. Things took off. All was good.

End of Episode Two.

 

I remember Vasilyev once saying he was summoning the entire director's part of the course for a discussion. He said, “Borya has finally shown something that can be discussed. I see he knows something about something.” Apparently, I had, in fact, understood him back then in the gym hall. I would say that our creative contact – at least from my point of view – has never been broken since. We had to go through a lot, there was one terrible quarrel, then peace was made, and our relationship has taken on various shapes since. But the creative aspect, the aspect originating with Vasilyev, the clear understanding of what I do, and my acceptance of everything he does – that has been constant. I simply came to understand his method over time, I could analyze it, could analyze his aesthetics and so on, I tried on his personality for size, it was all incredibly intense, interesting and entertaining. Basically, it might have been a matter of the times: I think there was a special kind of narcotic in the Moscow air in the early 1980s. Theatre, after all, is a narcotic. It has narcotic properties. Because the euphoria that I experienced from the very sounds, “theatre” and “directing,” can be compared to nothing. I then found myself immediately (as I do now in the territory of my memories) in an air of unadulterated happiness. It's probably like doing LSD – I never took LSD, but it's very much like I imagine it being. Obviously, A Midsummer Night's Dream is Shakespeare's most LSD-like play. And it became clear, little by little, that this was also Efros's method, the Efrosian outline of the role. Efros got in the habit of calling on me to demonstrate his outlines. Jack London wrote a story about a trainer boy who wanted to be a boxer. I was happy to be a happy trainee and Efros would go to work on me – it's amazing how he always did that – massaging his emotional string as he inserted it into our souls. Working with it later during discussions, he would unleash the voltage of his magic. I remember how after all the candidates had been chosen or rejected, one person who had been rejected asked Efros, “But why didn't you pick me, Anatoly Vasilyevich? I know so much about theatre, I have already done so much.” Efros replied, “You're right. That is precisely how I think of you. But it is very important for me that a director have – you know, it's strange, I'm going to say a word now, only don't criticize me for it later – magic. Magnetism. You don't have magnetism.” I remember how this person stared at me – I was standing right there next to them... And I could feel that he wanted to say: “You mean this “...” has that magnetism?” He was right. I was a complete “...,” and I remained one for a long time yet.

End of Episode Three.

 

In other words, the course was bound up in love from the very beginning. At least it seemed so, and when everything begins with love, a process kicks in that exhausts love. As with any love affair, this is the final story. At its core, the whole history of the course is the ups and downs of love, of suffering, of pleasure, of hatred, of anemia and stagnation, of sadness and the friendship that follows it, a cold friendship. This is approximately the composition of our stay in GITIS. It is indecent to stare at such a hot romance. But, if you're careful, you can try. Now is the time of memories, and wise nostalgia.

In the second half of the first year, Vasilyev began working on Duck Hunting. But first he offered us some thoughts. I remember him dropping a wonderful remark about A Midsummer Night's Dream. He said: "So, what is a forest?" He did not intervene at all in our analysis. I remember he usually sat somewhere in a corner – even during performances he loves to sit in some corner – with a notebook and, like a diligent student, he would jot things down. He was very attentive. The way he listened and ran the course gave us a lot. His position as a perceptive consciousness was what was most important for me at first in my coming to understand what directing is. Somehow, I immediately took on the role of the silent entity of perception. There was something true in this, something about the origins of directing. During analyses of Efros's work, he maintained splendid silence and listened well... Sometimes he was absent, then he would meet with us, and we would chit-chat about something. Efros offered large-scale analyses, showed us what he wanted, watched our student sketches, and commented on it all. A Midsummer Night's Dream was in full swing. Then one day Vasilyev called us together and said: “So, what is a forest? You know, maybe people want to go there, like young people want to go to Disneyland or to a city at night, a night full of wonders.” And a certain powerful current of a possible approach became clear and was illuminated brilliantly. It burst forth immediately with a whole system of experiences, very dear and understandable to a young person's consciousness. This was something immediate and of our time, right here, in our life, not some other murky place, where a dialogue and an emotional wire reside, but somewhere right here, for reasons that were clear and convincing. What adventures were lurking in the forest became clear immediately, as did one's return from the forest. The beginnings and ends clearly came together in something emotional. At the same time, you didn't have to be reverent about every stage direction: we played situations, they revealed themselves to us, we played them out in our hearts. Meanwhile, Efros was telling us how to create a portrait. You could do it sketching a whole figure, or you might start with a little finger. And working from “this little finger,” he joined us in making a portrait of Shakespeare, starting with a little finger and arriving at a full composition for A Midsummer Night's Dream. We learned what Shakespearean dialogue is, how to work with it, how to play it. How it happens that one phrase, and a second, lead into a huge monologue, followed by another phrase, a little more and then a lot, or maybe just a little more. In short how these “little bits,” “a little mores,” and “something huge” turn into a performance. When he showed us what he wanted, everything suddenly became clear, clear in a vocal sense, not clear for the whole play, but right here and now, for this episode, it instantly stuck in your memory, instantly you wanted to play it right now, and you could always play it like that forever. A situation arose in which I and she, my partner, for example, or my he-partner, could fit ourselves into. Nothing was clear about what would come next, and when that “next” came around, it turned out that even though we had just been doing what we were doing – and you'd think you could do the next thing the same way – for some reason that would not work for us. Efros, though, he could do it instantly. On the other hand, in Vasilyev's Disneyland, he never said anything about "here," or about any "small" things, but he did make it possible to forget all the "small" things and immediately make things "big." Somehow that stuck in your mind, that one comment by Vasilyev made during those six months. Three times a week you'd hear Efros's “little” and one time you would hear Vasilyev's “big.”

At the same time, another little dose of drugs was injected slowly into your blood, and it became clearer and clearer how one analyzed dialogue. How one worked on dialogue Efros-style. By the end of the half-year, things suddenly and unexpectedly began to click for me: I would take this “little bit” and say, “it's probably like this here.” I could feel Efros coming to life inside me, and I almost said in his manner: “Thank you,” “and here it goes like this," "now let’s try this," "look, it must go like that," and the dialogue would come to life. It’s another matter how it later affected the performance, and how the performance itself affected the perception of it, but in any case, at this particular moment, when a solution suddenly appeared in the territory of speech and demonstration, it all came together. As such, by the end of these six months I was in touch with the Efros inside me, and he was able, by my desire alone, to come alive inside of me and begin to analyze.

As you understand, further on Vasilyev would also appear “inside of me.” And there, “inside of me,” their meeting took place.

End of Episode Four.

 

A few comments are in order: Naturally, it was a fortunate course, for those of us in it had the opportunity to ingest the art of the two greatest masters who lived and worked actively during the years of our creative youth. Efros's method – a mature method – not only included his own personal artistic journey, but also the essence of a specific, academic tradition, the tradition of professional Russian directing in the 20th century. Everything came together in this method – Maria Knebel, Yury Zavadsky, GITIS of that time, the practices of the 1950s, '60s and '70s, as well as Efros's love for Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. Efros's speech was built on his own peculiar vocabulary, he rejected Stanislavsky’s terminology, although in the end it was a full-fledged synthesis, the highest achievable level of psychological theatre. It was something served to the actor as a ready synthesis on a silver platter. As with a ready melody – it was enough just to take it upon yourself and to play it without end. He said: “Any gesture must be like a glass placed on the table. This is how the director should work. No extraneous words, maybe no words at all: you can moo if the troupe understands you.” Of course, this still contained a special kind of idea about theatre, a special kind of ideology, a special worldview, a special kind of idea about theatre as a place that creates a product, although I would only understand this later. Efros had his own limits, not only in a methodological sense. And these limits were revealed to me later, too.

Vasilyev was a mystery, and Vasilyev revealed his method as he analyzed various texts. His method grew, it developed before our eyes. This is a property of his personality, his special kind of consciousness, his thinking with the actor, with the company with which he is creating a performance. It would seem that Efros also had this, that he created what was to be played right here and now before us, but Vasilyev not only created what was to be played, he created a method that would give rise to what would be played. In this sense, this master had some second, additional dimension. We studied with Efros how to create a performance in the here and now with actors. But with Vasilyev we not only created a performance in the here and now with actors, but we also learned a method by which one or another result could be achieved. "Creativity must be enveloped in theory." And, of course, this is an unusually fascinating activity.

Working on Duck Hunting with Vasilyev was a great opportunity to delve into the abyss of contemporary consciousness. Vasilyev told us immediately, in those first six months, to observe Efros and marvel not only at his method, but also at his personality, for, as he accurately pointed out, a method itself is never what is important, but rather how this method is employed by a specific master. It is no mere exercise to hear and understand what is hidden, it is a very subtle and special kind of task, the implementation of which continues inside of me to this day. I often come back to Efros, to his personality, and then the reawakened Efros inside me begins analyzing something, and I suddenly receive knowledge about the theatre, about how everything lives forever in the theatre. It is the crude mistake of a naive consciousness that thinks there is nothing more transient than theatre. There is nothing more eternal than the theatre that stops us in our tracks with its existence. It possesses an elevated status of existence. The paradox is that theatre is stored in individuals. Individuals, like vessels, store this special kind of moisture – the theatrical experience. An individual is a computer of God, and it stores knowledge accumulated or personality perceived in completely untouched form. Moreover, it matures there and continues to live. This is the miracle of storage, where something continues to grow inside the vessel. This is God's greenhouse; beauty grows and develops in it. In this sense, Efros lives where my memories are located, Vasilyev lives there, it is where our course exists, along with that era. For some reason everything is filled with spiritual energy. The property of nostalgia is probably that you turn to your past as if to beauty, for otherwise you could not turn to it at all, for the past is stored in the soul, and the soul makes it possible for everything to reach maturity, to be, and therefore everything that I'm telling you now is perceived by me from here, from the “here and now” of my soul. It's as if I enter from another side, another entrance, I gaze upon events from another time, if it’s correct to talk about time here. Vasilyev gave an amazing analysis of Duck Hunting. He made this production about the “hero of our time.” He latched onto the central theme of the time with this formula – “A man lives, and his life is a run through life, and in this run the soul is erased, all sense of beauty is erased. Then he runs away from the soul that is disappearing in him, trying to escape this very situation, like a ship moving along a lake, algae wrapping around its keel and gradually pulling it down.” He worked with Vampilov as a writer of "flow drama." He worked with Vampilov-the-Vampire, a writer who sucked from Russia the true state of things, the living essence of his contemporaries. Vasilyev, like Godard, dealt with his own generation, creating his own Breathless. I hadn't heard about Godard yet, I hadn't seen the film, so this seemed to me to be an absolutely incredible truth, an absolutely incredible discovery. Vasilyev did a brilliant translation of the “new wave” consciously and beautifully. He took the hero from an open and free cinematic structure, and placed him in the ruthless logic of a closed theatrical situation, all the while discovering new principles for building dialogue, new principles for building conflict, a new nature of the theatrical game in which the hero was not in conflict with others, but with himself! We all participated in this...

End of Episode Five.

 

I still have yet to tell how our work in the course developed in the main, how the relations among students, with teachers, with the method of one or the other master developed, how one era at that moment was changing and approaching its end, slowly, invisibly for all, and another era was beginning. I have yet to tell how I once was jettisoned from the course, from theatre in general, from one era entirely into another and ended up on the street, like a child of Interval, or Hiatus, on the Arbat, next to Alla Pugacheva, with my first production, The Misanthrope, and how from all this, this time of transition, Theatre Theatre was born, how it began to expand and grow, turning into the first independent modern theatre, I being one of the founders of this new, young, parallel, alternative culture, and then how I and Theatre Theatre were invited to the School of Dramatic Art, and how I worked there on The Observer. Only after I left the School of Dramatic Art theatre in 1989 did my apprenticeship period end and was it possible for me to draw conclusions about everything that had happened. I drew my conclusions in the form of the production Octavia, based on the play by Seneca and Trotsky’s essay about Lenin, where the characters were students and teachers: Seneca and Nero, Trotsky and Lenin, and where the student executes his teacher...

 

Misha Slesaryov: the best interpretation of Zilov.

 

Vitya Mosienko worked for Svetlana Vragova, then went into the business world. Igor Chetverov and Seryozha Molchanov disappeared somewhere. Saulius – he used to do rather insane peasant-like etudes, but they were quite strong precisely because of his savagery and precision. The further fate of the course, it seems to me, came together in a more natural way than did the actual training. The learning process itself was, of course, unique, precisely because two masters, two eras, following one another, came together. These were two peaks of unique approaches to directing – one based on pictorial representation, the other on structure. And one of these masters at that time was going through a metamorphosis: he was developing a theory of the theatre of play, something completely new to the Russian tradition. That is, we lived in the heat of the moment, and received a new theatrical worldview, in a sense, we can say a new profession. Then I started working as Vasilyev’s assistant on Cerceau, a production where the transition from one kind of theatre to another was quite dramatic. For the first time in the course, Vasilyev had tried to apply the principles of the theatre of play in his analysis of Woe from Wit, which Efros flatly rejected, as opposed to Duck Hunting, which he accepted despite a kind of competitive attitude. Duck Hunting was a sensational success.

Duck Hunting was a splendid, disquieting end to the first year, a summertime exam held in the densely packed hall of the Small Stage at the Malaya Bronnaya Theatre. It ran for several days in the presence of everyone in the department. Mark Zakharov, Andrei Goncharov and everyone else came to see the unique results of this unique course. Efros offered a program of Hamlet and Chekhov, while Vasilyev showed fragments of Duck Hunting. In fact, it was a complete performance, in my opinion, only without scenes done up with high production values. The analysis was splendidly thorough... It was in this analysis that Vasilyev achieved a new understanding of psychological theatre. Thus, in the second half of the year, we were submitted to “double exposure,” wherein one master developed his pictorial technique, and the other slowly revealed the basics of the last stages of psychological theatre, offering an instrument with which to work with so-called “flow drama.” He changed a great deal. First, for example, the approach to the initiating, main event that he removed from the play, which is precisely why it became possible to work with flow drama. Imagine a man walking past a mirror. Nothing happens as he does so, only something becomes more intense. The beginning of his walk past the mirror, as well as the end of his journey, are beyond the limits of the mirror's reflection. But something happens to him as he walks past the mirror. And whatever is happening or not happening to him is the essence of the action by which the so-called contemporary hero is revealed. Then Vasilyev, as I said, proposed the image of a boat rushing through the waters as algae grows on the keel, gradually pulling it down even as the boat continues to move. This is how the nature of conflict was formulated visually: in the past theatre dealt with situations when one went up against another, the heroes moving in parallel, gradually turning towards each other... Vasilyev saw the contemporary hero as someone in conflict with himself, and he created such a person in his textual analysis. This phrase may seem banal, or it may be surprisingly specific and uniquely useful in analysis. It was the second option that Vasilyev implemented. This is a different kind of theatrical play, another way of constructing dialogue, when deep inside the hero is beset by feelings of: “not to be,” “I am not alive,” “I am dead,” while he is attacked from without by thoughts of, “I am alive,” “I exist!” As such, Vasilyev proposed this formula: “an endless race through life, during which time the soul is erased.” The hero runs away from what he hears, from the knowledge of his own non-being. This was the hero that Vasilyev placed at the center of Vampilov's conflict. This endless race determined the action throughout a continuous string of scenes involving women. He takes mood and situation accumulated with one woman, and transfers that another, and so on. I remember how Vasilyev proposed to structure the finale – Misha Slesaryov was rehearsing Zilov in a kind of endless hysteria, wherein he could not stop laughing. The work on Duck Hunting opened up a completely different way for understanding a dramatic text. It then became clear that it was not necessary to build an unbending line connecting one phrase to the next, but you could reveal behavior in various rehearsal-time acting interpretations that lacked knowledge of how things would end. Structure is, in fact, that internal path provided by the action, thanks to which the acting interpretations during rehearsal begin, and from which they should not detour, thus revealing behavior. This offered us a completely different art, another way of dramatic thinking. Of course, it was incredibly fascinating. But then, in the first year, it seemed that one method does not contradict another. You are able to try on one consciousness as well as another – try it on, apply it to yourself, and so on. I have quite detailed records from that time of the analyses of Vasilyev’s Duck Hunting and Efros’s Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

 

The course bogged down in epileptic fits in the second year of study: The Tempest, The Living Corpse, Woe from Wit – these were the titles we worked with. For some reason Arbuzov and Volodin agreed when Efros suggested working on them in the second half of the second year. After A Midsummer Night's Dream, Chekhov, Duck Hunting, Woe from Wit, The Living Corpse, and The Tempest, we were surprised to find ourselves face to face with Five Evenings. Andryusha Vishnevsky and I read through the stage directions in My Poor Marat and Five Evenings. We decided to treat these texts as the Bible and came up with the following performance: two crazy people flee from the city of White Pillars, and the first book they find on the road is Volodin’s play, Five Evenings. And there, among the White Pillars, these two crazies read the Bible and had very serious philosophical discussions, and therefore, when they find the play, are completely shocked by the incredible depth of its content. For example: "First evening." Immediately they have many plans: "And God said..." Shocked, they look further. And so, we played out each word, revealing its immeasurable potential (as such, enclosed in the word itself). Meanwhile, we're being chased. Then we read Volodin. Generally speaking, for about 45 minutes we remained within the first stage directions. We performed a huge pause, an interlude-performance. We never got as far as the dialogue. Vasilyev was very happy with this experiment.

But that was later. And now, in the fall, Efros summoned me, along with Lyuda Babkina, and said: “What do you say we do The Tempest?” I was almost appointed co-creator of the production, and I got down to business very quickly. He said: “Richter approached me to say there will be December Evenings at the Pushkin Museum. Let's come up with a composition, for it.” He unexpectedly narrated a scene from Forman's film, Hair. “Think about what could be done.” I called Sasha Lisyansky, then Borovsky’s assistant at the Sovremennik Theatre, and I called Vasya Shumov, who, with Schnittke's son, had a group called Center. Then we went with Efros to listen to an orchestra rehearse Purcell. The part of Ariel was sung by Erik Kurmangaliev, a contralto, Viktyuk would later hire him. At that time he was just as feminine and refined, but not yet hoarse. Anastasia Vertinskaya played a charming and tough Prospero. I played Caliban, and staged several scenes with actors from the course – I think it was the prince and his daughter, and the scene with the sailors. Efros included them in his plan, then I came up with the tempest itself. It was like this: I asked everyone to inflate balloons. We entered the hall, approaching like a group from the film Hair, and stared at all the instruments of the orchestra. I was like a conductor. That was the interlude in the beginning – the music stands were already there, but there were no musicians yet, and suddenly we started to inflate these balloons, and when they were fully inflated, we rubbed our palms over them to my conductor's baton, creating the terrible, utterly authentic screech of a ship cracking under the pressure of waves. At that moment, the stage began to fill with the musicians of Center, balloons came and went, and amidst all this, among the bouncing and falling balloons, the music and the sailors' dialogs began. Everything then stepped back, making way for Prospero to appear – Vertinskaya actually wanted to play this role on roller skates. This was the early 'eighties, Efros then adored forest-like scaffolding (Lisyansky said, “There will be lots of scaffolding, and, indeed, there was television-like scaffolding). Sailors crawled along this scaffolding as if on masts, and Caliban climbed up there, too. Vertinskaya stood below. I stood somewhere on the third level of scaffolding, and in our scene, I played an enchanted being who crawled, flew, clambered down, curled up, and twisted around the scaffolding. She grabbed my hair and mopped the floor with me, advancing along a "road of flowers" into the hall. Along the way we played out a stormy argument. The performance developed rapidly: a couple of love dialogues, Prospero's forgiving wisdom – appeasement (Prospero’s internal motives were very important for Efros at that time) and the finale that crowned everything, the amazingly beautiful aria of Eric's Ariel...

Vasilyev called it an athletic duel between Purcell and Shakespeare. I already suspected that the masters were growing unavoidably further from each other, and then I heard Vasilyev's comment... Efros staged The Living Corpse at the Moscow Art Theatre parallel to the work we were doing. We finished The Tempest and went to see The Living Corpse. And now I approach one of the most tragic episodes in my relationship with Efros.

End of Episode Six.

 

My love for Efros peaked during the period of work on The Tempest. I spent time at his house, we talked, he was very kind and supportive, he praised the few scenes that I did, and we rehearsed with Vertinskaya. The Tempest was a success. We played it three times to full halls. Schnittke came, as did Richter and a lot of other people. We had a closing party, the first such theatrical party in my life, and I heard praise all around. I bathed in the rays of this unexpected glory. At the same time, Andryusha and I continued to create our crazy people. We staged another opus, Capriccios based on documentary materials of Joseph Brodsky's trial, Anouilh's The Savage, and some other sources. I worked very hard, I did a lot of independent work, which I showed only to Vasilyev. He would look at it. He analyzed Woe from Wit, and it was very interesting and very joyful. He recommended that Efros view our independent work. Vasilyev then was incredibly approachable, attentive, and understanding. His responses to our boyish personalities were gentle and subtle. We grew under the light of this attention. We had hopes that we could build an individual artistic world, which was so necessary in the late 'eighties for our theatrical generation.

So, Vasilyev suggested that Efros view my independent work. This showing was scheduled after The Tempest (when I felt the power and passion of working on a completed work). I gathered all my works into a single performance lasting two hours. It was a sort of performance collage. Efros, looking at the list of works submitted to him, said: “There's nothing but Yukhananov here! Are we really going to hold benefit performances for someone? Let's move on." Then we were busy preparing for The Living Corpse exam and rehearsals of Woe from Wit. These were works that I really had no deep feelings about at that time. As for my little works, everything was fine. But at that moment a competition was announced for the best student directorial work in Moscow. And I decided to take part in it with my pieces. To do so, I needed the signature of the course leader. I went to Efros and said: “Anatoly Vasilyevich, there is this silly formality. Do you remember when you didn’t watch my independent work? Well, I want to enter it in a competition. Will you give your signature that you don’t mind?” To which Anatoly Vasilyevich said unexpectedly, “How can you receive a medal if I don't know what it's for? Why don't you show it to me, I'll watch.” He scheduled a viewing at the Malaya Bronnaya Theatre, and we began preparing for it. In some ways, this was more serious, deep and intimate, than participating in some obscure competition. The day of the performance arrived. We arrived at the theatre two hours in advance, and I gave my final instructions. Anatoly Vasilyevich arrived, very interested, even inspired. He sat down, the actors began to perform, and a wonderful, sacred theatrical silence arose... The actors performed. Efros watched. I liked the way they performed, they performed well. I liked the way Efros watched, very attentively. Twenty minutes later, Efros stops us. "Stop!” he says. “Sit down." Everyone sits down. And then Anatoly Vasilyevich Efros began to yell. He yelled for twenty-five minutes. He turned red. He shouted obscenities, it was terrible. In his shouting, one could hear that I was a gifted person, but that I will ruin all my talents, if I stay on this path. I must stop, he will not allow this to happen, I will ruin myself, and the people around me. It was utterly incredible, utterly unexpected for me. It was a terrible shock. I did not utter a single word. I just looked at him, at the thick short fingers and the fat palms of an angry Jew... My pupils were dilated, it seemed to me that they filled my brain, these dilated pupils and the screaming, purple-faced Efros. After that, he said: “Think.” I was numb for a week. I did not speak to anyone, did not utter a single word during the week. A week later, I began speaking again. Efros I did not like anymore. That week I stopped loving him. I did not heed a single one of his words, I was strengthened in everything that I did. With his terrible scream, his stopping of the performance, with this whole event, he shaped and concluded something in me. I became a ninja. I became indestructible.

End of Episode Seven.

 

The principle of the course was simple, traditional for acting and directing courses at GITIS: the master chose a play, we worked on it, and he analyzed it in connection with analysis of our works. The words that he spoke about the play on one hand, and about our work on the other, could be applied where the complex art of interpretation and the complex art of the theatrical game was being interpreted and created. You simultaneously inhabited the person performing, and the person doing the analysis. Both actors and directors existed in this territory. Thus, we studied the same thing, the only difference being that the directors did more analysis, although they also performed, while the actors performed all the time, although none was forbidden to take part in analysis. At a certain point, my work habits began to look like this: I did work for Vasilyev, trying to enter into a relationship with what he offered, with his system and system of thoughts; while, in what I did for Efros I attempted to master the logic and method that he proposed. Furthermore, I did work that conditionally could be called "work done for oneself." In this sense, I took on a triple load all the time and tried to stay with it. I think this was the only proper strategy. It was pointless to work for yourself only, because then you could not achieve full contact with the master, something you can acquire only on the master's territory, never on your own. Neither of the masters ever entered your territory, they did not seek to inhabit you, did not seek to be a medium for your individuality. They offered you the medium of their own individuality, their own approach. It seemed natural then, although now I think that the essence of pedagogy lies precisely in the opposite. To avoid the danger of creating zombies, one must celebrate on the territory of dialogue between the Master and the student. It must be a meeting where the student’s individuality, which is not yet fully realized, is capable, if accepted by the master, to recognize itself as if the future has come, and thereby, in fact, to already be in the future. This is a different technique of communication, a different technique of work. At that moment this was all still ahead for me, it was only at the end of the '80s that I decided to adopt this type of dialogue. Moreover, I did not merely decide to adopt it, I could not help but take it up. Everything else for me had been exhausted, including the totalitarian form of theatre with its experience of producing a theatrical performance with the same kind of building blocks that our teachers had employed before us. I could not help but embrace this experience of medium-like sensitivity to the undeveloped individuality of the artist-student, to work on his territory, that is, such work when you present your work to him by means of a totally different, more complete mode of communication. Because there is someone there to give it to, there is someone there to receive it, there is another there, one who is separate and different – and only then will you appear – before the student and in him. There is a place to put all this, something more than the student, and different from you. Only here is a meeting possible...

It is very important, of course, to show a procession of analyses. Because, in any case, having cut myself off from all previous connections, I totally immersed myself for several years in the work of directing: I staged a lot of scenes, I did what is called getting a feel for things. All the while I did analyses, I rehearsed, I showed my work, and so on for several years. I learned to put scenes together like snapping my fingers, that was no problem, you could take any of the proverbial three paths in any three directions. My masters watched what I did, they commented in depth, and this gave rise to results. In general, the course was very lively and intense. Despite all the quarrels – and I don't mean that in the sense of common human squabbles, because there was none of that. The course split in two in another area, not where banal communal passions have sway. It happened differently and was never acknowledged publicly, it's just that an ever greater distance grew between the two masters.

Let me do a quick overview now, I won’t slow down, or stop. In the first year, an incident took place in connection with Duck Hunting. I had done some of my usual crazy work — in addition to other things, I was constantly doing performative pieces, not yet knowing what to call them – and there was to be a big showing of Duck Hunting. I rehearsed with Marina Pyrenkova and Igor Kechaev. We created a scene – a thorough, normal, complex dramatic scene, without any internal summersaults. The time came for the showing. The scene I had staged in a crazy way was in performance on stage. Efros watched it and laughed. Then he said: “This scene is so avant-garde, funny, talented, and full of good ideas. If you had staged this scene as well as the one that Marina and Igor played, I would say you don't need to study anymore.” Pause. Silence... For some reason I did not say I had staged both scenes.

It’s a pity we had no video then, because, of course it would have been proper to record for prosperity these few years when Efros and Vasilyev worked with our course. Their arguments, their break, our stressed responses, their indirect comments made in regards to each other’s work, how the student's discourses changed, how the commentary, the analytical zone – a constant element of every lesson – unfolded, for every work was ultimately analyzed. It is a pity that the lively voice of a master can now be heard only in the jottings of a student's notebook...

End of Episode Eight.

 

Let me jump far ahead. I will neither dwell in detail on the moment when I almost stopped attending classes with Efros, nor on the moment I started working as an assistant on Cerceau at the tail end of my second year of study, nor on that moment when Efros asked Volodya Berzin and me to stage Wilder's Our Town then raked me over the coals again for Our Town, and then again after some time insisted I stage The Misanthrope for my graduation performance, and then still later in my fifth or, fourth year of study, stopped a showing of The Misanthrope at the Taganka and taunted us for being Beatles leftovers, without even watching the second act. As I left the Taganka that day, after my showing for Efros, I never went back to to him. We rehearsed any old place we could, on the street.

Thus begins the story of Theatre Theatre. After my life in academia, a closed, protected five years of feverish work, I found myself in the underground, a wild kind of street life. I had no real understanding of what happens on the street, or who lives there. We played The Misanthrope on a junk heap that was created specially for us in the courtyard of a pawnshop on the old Arbat. Pawnshop – Arbat – April – The Misanthrope. For the first time in my life I understood what it was like to trundle around on a flat-bed truck bearing the slogan, “Komsomol Members Go to Battle.” Vasya Shumov was supposed to arrive on this truck with his rock band in order to accompany The Misanthrope, but the truck arrived empty. I haven't seen Vasya Shumov since, so I never had the chance to ask him what happened. I know he emigrated to the U.S. a few years later. As it turned out it was good that the truck arrived empty because the crowd was so big, the empty flat-bed was the only free space we had. Our set decoration had already been pushed aside by spectators seeking a spectacle. They were sitting on roofs and windows, and had climbed up on each other's shoulders. We performed The Misanthrope on April 1, 1986. Alla Pugachyova wiped us out in the second act, she was in a neighboring courtyard singing into a microphone and you couldn't hear anything but her, not a single word of Moliere's. I wept. The audience insisted we go one. Wiping back my tears, I insisted everyone stop, because I couldn't bear it. “I rehearsed this for a year, what is going on?” I howled. “Where is the acting, the dialogue, the structure we gave it all, the diamond-like patternings?” It had all been wiped out. Nobody heard me, they wouldn't let me stop it and they played through to the end in hoarse voices and shredded costumes on a flat-bed truck proclaiming that “Komsomol Members Go to Battle.” The show was performed. Celimene rejected Alceste. A performance was transformed into destiny. Thus was born Theatre Theatre. Entirely unexpectedly I later learned it was the “first independent Russian theatre of the 1980s.” And I became famous in certain circles on the street. Spectators asked when and where the next show would take place...

End of Episode Nine.

 

A year earlier, Vasilyev had offered two plays to Volodya Berzin and me. One was The Observer, and its author was Alexei Shipenko, a handsome, unknown guy from Tallinn. He graduated from the Moscow Art Theatre, was a very sharp, cool guy that studied rock music and Buddhism. Together with his friend Andrei Pasternak, they recorded their first cassette albums in the studio of the Actor's House. Alyosha wrote a play about rock musicians in an abstract world. The group was called Solar System. Their battles while recording. The second play was a retro romantic love story, Variations of the Dragee Fairy. I decided to do The Observer, and Volodya took on Variations of the Dragee Fairy. I started working with Alexei. Vasilyev said: "I'll cover you." He got us into the Mossoviet Theatre. He told the management there that he was going to be the artistic director of the production. And they agreed to everything! To an unknown author and director, to rock music! This was 1985. We rehearsed The Observer for a year and in the summer of '86 we showed Vasilyev a run-through. He liked it. Next, the theatre had to purchase the proper equipment so the actors could rehearse with instruments. They had to really sing and play rock, the real thing. Rock music was then a denizen of the underground. Management began dragging their feet. I ran out of patience and quit waiting. I left for St. Petersburg to work with Theatre Theatre... I left for unknown Piter – the Piter of the murky underground, nascent pop mechanics, necrorealists, sweet Piter Saigon, Piter, where Viktor Tsoi and Borya Grebenshchikov drank coffee in the morning, and their wives and lovers danced rock and roll on John Lennon's birthday. I went to St. Petersburg, the city that at that time was the sweetest city in the world, a city where I was to learn the happiness of being an unfettered...mad couturier of theatre, or rather, from Theatre Theatre, a city of new erotica and new aristocracy, a city boasting an apartment with a fireplace belonging to the magnificent St. Petersburg orphan Nikita Mikhailovsky, a place where genteel mothers gathered in the '60s, and now their children imbibed port wine and played in home performances. We formed a quartet of spontaneous poetry and put on performances in the locker rooms of skating rinks and the foyers of train stations, improvised fairy tales right on the street and performed them in buses and the apartments of charming St. Petersburg girls, mixing Oscar Wilde with creepy grimaces that we managed to create from our own, still not disturbed by social instincts. It was a wonderful time when I arranged a jubilee battle between the Reds and the Whites at a skating rink, and suggested celebrating the centenary of Canadian hockey with a friendly match at a central stadium, when we persuaded the Komsomol finally to choose a Miss Komsomolka, and the members of the Obermanekens group put themselves forth as an alternative to the municipal supreme council. The artists of St. Petersburg, alternative painters and figures of the "second culture," wandered around the harbor, bearded and wise, with the sad eyes of elderly alcoholics, and put on their exhibitions. We showed up standing on one foot and, pirouetting on the other with a tag stating, “this sculpture is not for sale,” we exhibited ourselves as works of the latest Petersburg balancing act, for which we were arrested because we did not apply for permission to the artistic council, and our friends bought us and tried to export us abroad as works of art they had purchased. It was a happy time, beautiful, no one had emigrated anywhere yet, we did not know what money was and nobody really understood what LSD, acid, tablets, mushrooms, ecstasy and so on were.

The second version of The Misanthrope absorbed everything around it. I came up with a story about a fun-loving crew on a ship that is sailing into the rocks, but only one person keeps shouting about what lies ahead – Alceste. He was the main entertainment for everybody else – this Alceste yelling about the rocks. The play was a premonition, a performance extravaganza. The year of 1986 wheezed along charmingly; the new generation learned the truth of its existence. Coming out of cellars, St. Petersburg communal apartments, crawling out of museums, dachas and graduate schools, people were surprised to find that more or less the same thoughts sometimes crossed their minds. Introverted loners, abandoned by God and humans, learned of the existence of hundreds, thousands of others, like them. In general, things were coming to an end. The empire was dying. Brezhnev's decadence suicidally weakened the grip of the senile oldsters on our young souls, and I found my first producer. Vasilyev wandered around Moscow, and periodically, in various publications from Pravda to Theatre Life and Literary Gazette, alarming signals would appear about the trouble that had befallen the outstanding director, about a production that had lost its stage, about a Theatre that had no Home. The year 1987 began, Perestroika, Vasilyev and Popov found a basement on Vorovsky Street, reminiscent of Meyerhold's happy days on Povarskaya Street, they put their mark, the fires of which continue to burn, on the walls of building number 20 on Vorovsky Street. I conducted open rehearsals of The Misanthrope, I wandered in and around Monrepos, and rehearsed my last St. Petersburg performance, Ha-ha-Funerals. I had already written “The Theory of Inductive Play-acting,” and “Thirty-three Theses on a Theatre of Moving Structures,” and they lay in a folder bearing the doomed title of Journal Journal. Efros was dying at the Taganka; we played Ha-ha-Funerals on December 30th at the Youth Palace; and on January 13th he died. This coincided with the last performance of Theatre Theatre in Leningrad. The Directorate of the Palace of Youth finally realized our aesthetic incompatibility and drove Theatre Theatre out of the Palace.

End of Episode Ten.

 

If you take on Moliere and place his play at the heart of your theatre, be prepared to be a vagabond. I already understood this then, which has never weakened my love for Moliere, and now, at the beginning of 1997, ten years after the events I am describing, in the midst of preparations for the virtual holidays of the 10th anniversary of Theatre Theatre and “new culture,” I find myself rehearsing Don Giovanni and I will wander among Moscow's stages, the same defenseless boy as I was previously in the distant, blessed times of the first year of the second half of the 1980s.

Theatre Theatre lives! The young generation chooses Theatre Theatre. The game of Playing XO continues – it's a game of crosses and zeroes, a game of slanting sunlit rain made of skewed crosses and tortured zeroes, a game in which a cross is formed using a special exercise, where one line that we call life is crossed out by another: here is my life, so I have crossed it out. Zero is nothing, multiplication by zero gives nothing, and this is the main mechanism by which the young generation deals with surrounding reality. Yes, we just multiplied reality by zero. Multiplication. An inductive game with X's and O's. “Xo, xo, xo,” – this is what Nikita Mikhailovsky shouts in the film Playing XO, which Seryozha Borisov, Theatre Theatre and I started filming in 1987. Thus was born the World Theatre Video Theatre (VTTV), and I started my next inductive game, the first evolutionary project called The Mad Prince, a novel told in 1,000 video cassettes.

I assisted Volodya Berzin on The Dragee Fairy. The premiere took place at the Riga Youth Theatre. Right after that, Igor Kechaev called me from Moscow and said Vasilyev suggested I come to Moscow to join his newly created Theatre of Dramatic Art, or, more precisely, to continue my work there on The Observer. After returning from Efros’s funeral, I fell into bed in St. Petersburg in the apartment of Alina Alonso, the grandmother of the St. Petersburg underground. It was a huge nine-room apartment, chock full of masterpieces. I lay on my back, I could not get up. Vanya Kochkaryov and I had just begun playing XO. It was a real tic-tac-toe game on the endless board of life, which later turned into a film, and, together with the film, we moved to Moscow, where I finally settled, having come to an agreement with Anatoly Alexandrovich. I continued work The Observer. It lasted another year, we rehearsed every day.

Theatre Theatre connected with actors from the Mossoviet Theatre on the territory of the School of Dramatic Art. We purchased a Czech drum kit and guitars. We started rehearsing in the empty, cold hall at the Uranus, a former cinema house on Sretenka Street that the city had just given to the theatre. A tombstone workshop was located below on the first floor. I liked that because the underground was finally starting to turn into an attraction. [Shipenko] rewrote the play, turning it in the direction of the new generation that we had discovered. We saw his heroes before our eyes, and we ourselves were these heroes, which we did not suspect at the time.

Two years later, I would have to part with my beloved master, and, cursing my fate, left the School of Dramatic Art forever in 1989 and for the second time ended up in the middle of nowhere, in a void, losing a production that I had been creating for three years and which was performed only once at the premiere in West Berlin, losing Theatre Theatre, the members of which, unable to bear the blows of fate, almost entirely emigrated or went into other forms of art. I descended with the wild beasts of the Moscow avant-garde into a basement chosen at random, a Moscow housing authority office on Burdenko Street, in order to pour out my fiery anger by way of the writings of Seneca and Trotsky in the play Octavia – “an experiment in the new empirical style,” where in forty episodes the harshest of dialogues unfolds between a teacher and a student, between Seneca and Nero... This is the production that ended my training. My active relationship with the 1980s also ended here. Seneca’s play and Trotsky’s essays turned out to be the texts that allowed me to pour out a wave of emotions accumulated over the past decade.

End of Episode Eleven.

 

Naturally, much remains alive in my soul. That particular lexical apparatus that our teachers developed and inculcated in us, their conversations... You absorb and imbibe them as internal images that still remain incredibly lifelike, and which can be turned on at any moment as a kind demon and, using them, move around inside any dramatic text. Their special art was to arrange time and space within the rehearsal, each one very different, with the help of which they organized the secret, internal, unfinished life of the theatre, that is to say, rehearsal. You internalize their understanding of the theatre as a specific case, not a group sense, but a single case, not a studio, not family relationships, not communal relations... Their amazing ability not to fear sophisticated speech or sophistication in speech, giving birth here and now, before your eyes, making discoveries, revealing a play in such a way that understanding occurs and you become a participant in their ideas, their approaches, their personalities... for this open-ended, dissected, revealed process, this train of thought that is projected on you as a rehearsal method, is somehow absorbed fantastically, absorbed into the acting, performing, and directing of a student's consciousness which there, on its own territory, inhales it with the effluvium of intellectual and spiritual undertakings that lay at the base of the analyses, returning it (the analysis) back to the stage or back to the student’s monastic cell. (Sniffles, weeps).

Efros came and said: “You can’t waste time on anything else, you must immediately take the bull by the horns. You must come in and immediately start your analysis. If you start chatting, the rehearsal is lost.” Vasilyev could start from afar, he could run very different types of rehearsal, even then he had developed the complex architectonics of the art of rehearsal, multi-layered, as if located in different rooms, implying that all these different approaches, all these different lines of rehearsal would converge into just one, in fact, when the production was ready. This is a special type of multi-layer, multi-linear, polyphonic alignment. It is a striking contrast! Efros with his one and only type of rehearsal for all the drama of the world. And Vasilyev with his individual approach, each time applying a new rehearsal strategy.

The model of theatre on which our training was based did not wait for us with open arms. It is a huge problem when one completely lacks the ability to work in a traditional, institutional theatre. The refined ability to interpret a scene, the extraordinary ability to deal with dialogue and make the actors play what you want – to work with the actor, work with dialogue and analysis – this was what we studied in our course. But the problem of a big, organizational theatre, a traditional, institutional theatre, in short, the problem of working in a box theatre had been skipped. I must admit that the art of big, organizational theatre, in principle, is lacking in today's pedagogy. Perhaps, there is a calculation that further on, a person finding himself at a “factory theatre,” will master what he needs. Vasilyev sometimes said: “Big production theatre need not be trained, it must be in your blood, it is impossible to learn, it must already exist as a gift, like the composition of blood.” Efros attached no importance to it, either. There were no people there to support us, there were no organizational structures we could lean on.

Even today theatre is in no condition to embrace new directorial thinking, the kind of which first appeared with this course.

Is theatre bound to accept this new thinking, or are people themselves bound to create their own structures?!

This is precisely the question that our generation took up in the second half of the 1980s. Moreover, these “individual structures” began to appear. The next story describes how they were all destroyed. Indeed, one of the great misfortunes of our theatre is that when territory has been destroyed, it is very difficult to recreate it, a place where an individual form of theatre – both in terms of production and art – can exist. But if this “individual structure” is formed, and if – just imagine! – attention is paid to it, then this attention is intense and merciless. It has always been this way, it is happening now. Therefore, almost no one survived. I survived by miracle, thanks to the skills and secrets that I learned in the wild monasteries of the underground. All that was left us at the end of the '80s was to embark on the path of a new method of sacralizing being, where new principles of project development met with “new collectivity” and “new sincerity,” where human spiritual community accompanied each individual development, where “new universalism" fostered a "new mythology"... In short, utopia and the horror story creeped up upon us as the 'nineties began, along with mysterial theatre, although that is another story, if not an entirely new history.

End of Episode Twelve.

 

We constantly analyzed each other's work. Then our masters analyzed it. Then we analyzed our masters' analysis. Thus did postmodernism arise inevitably. Oleg Matveev staged rather detailed psychological scenes, often built on a bifurcated consciousness, a slightly subversive consciousness. Volodya Klimenko (Klim) had long been doing closed works, in which his Kharkovian, west-Ukrainian method of searching had a bright, slow, tense, specifically meditative manner. Gradually, his work also merged with the skills that Efros offered him. Volodya had good contact with Vasilyev and at some point he moved to the level where he was able to combine his unique personality with masterful analysis. His work, preserving his style, took on a delicacy and acquired structure. Volodya Berzin always showed very serious, detailed work, and as if trying to achieve something Efrosian and Vasilyev-like. It’s another thing that in his work I saw less of him. I struggled to distinguish where he was in it. He is a meticulous person, scrupulous – he had a “sane consciousness,” as Efros often said. Anatoly Vasilyevich often praised Volodya, although one could sense he had a chance of becoming a director. Olesya Negrul did very childish works that leaned on nothing for support. They always had a lot of music, unbroken music. They possessed a joyful infantilism, very flamboyant and talented in a homespun way. Vika Kharchenko did cautious work, which at that time seemed over the top to me, but Efros often praised it, too: “These are normal people, I see normal people on stage...” Andryushka Vishnevsky unexpectedly showed beautiful, short, terse works with delicate taste, but he could work only with certain people – for example, with Igor Kechaev. And Vasya Verovchuk constantly inhabited the Moldavian epos, and that's what he constantly worked on, which, essentially, did not suit the high tradition. Vasya never could overcome the folk nature of his talent. And so he moved rather sadly through the course. Although sometimes he gave hilarious performances.

In Andryusha Vishnevsky's huge apartment, in the evening and at night, we rehearsed Capriccios with the exquisite Nikita Mikhailovsky whom we met while conducting these rehearsals in 1983. Obermaneken came and sang their new wave songs, genuinely new, on the verge of rock and dream, with a wonderful swing. Out of reality's reach, they grew wings so as ultimately to accomplish their "flight over the blackout" in New York, the city of dreams and hallucinations...

Little by little, the image of a theatre-bus arose, one that would travel the roads of Europe, a platform extending from the bus where we would perform, then move on. Gradually, I began working on The Misanthrope with designer Sasha Lisyansky, a member of the Nikanory group, which also included Yurka (Yury Kharikov). They were engaged in building the theatre of the future, and constantly participated in architectural competitions, for example: on the transformation of non-theatre buildings into theatres. I remember one name: "The House in which a Round House Lives."

We planted an artificial tree in an Arbat side street, pinched huge dolls from Mosfilm, and Katya Leventhal took rags from her mother’s and father’s chests and sewed costumes for The Misanthrope. Bit by bit, this itinerant theatre came together out of various sources. We loved our homelessness – we hardly even noticed the gentle, central process of brewing up a theatre. In 1985, I began staging The Misanthrope and The Observer almost simultaneously, and thanks to matters involving The Observer I ended up in St. Petersburg, and then Vyborg, where Monrepo Park revealed its secrets to Kharikov and me. One must follow a certain route, which then matures in your soul. Actually, Yura was the bearer of this route. He said: "Come, I will show you a certain path in this park." And we went down this route together, walked among the benches, through the flat areas, climbed on masses of boulders – these ram's heads, this faded but still not fallen heather, and we suddenly found ourselves on top of a hill, from which a view of the flat terrain below us opened up. I suddenly bent over to pick up a matchbox that had fallen underfoot out of my pocket, and when I straightened up, I sensed how the territory around us had changed. The whole place began humming with a different rhythm. I looked down and said, “Something strange is happening.” Yura said just one word: “Benches!” The benches had changed – they now were stone benches that could not be replaced. Yes! We found ourselves in a different space and time. The context had changed. In a second, the plot of the novel revealed itself to me – a secret tale, the legend of Monrepos Park. Suddenly, instantly, in a single moment, it unfolded in time – the entire linear narrative of this story that we later turned into a script and a performance. As a result, this park became a place of sacred pilgrimage for participants of Theatre Theatre and The Garden. Hence arose the Park-Labyrinth-Garden trilogy on a territory that I still occupy, and which has fed on many adventures – performance actions, events, and productions, and so on. For example, Octavia is already The Labyrinth, while Monrepos and The Misanthrope are The Park, while Ha-Ha-Funerals is also The Park. Then the mirage disappeared. Everything became what it had been, we returned, drank vodka in a small Vyborg hotel, and Yura told me about the northern modernity, regaled me with legends – for example, one about Hackman, the owner of the most beautiful mansion in the city – and all these legends suddenly belonged to the romantic space of this park. The novel-as-performance, the park-as-performance began penetrating my real-life experience. I experienced life as a text, a kind of magical text that you can learn to understand, moreover, space as a life-giver revealed to me its potential. This is the origin of Theatre Theatre's inductive games, the new-erotic and new-aristocratic balls, and even The Garden project, which probably began then on the hill. This temporal journey continues to this day. I now am working on the sixth regeneration of The Garden. These paths, the paths of the park, are like the paths of a text. Later, when I turned to Borges, and the park was transformed into a labyrinth, I understood that I needed to remain in the park, that I just should not enter the labyrinth. The labyrinth was dangerous. In 1989, we rehearsed a performance of a Borges text in Leningrad in MIR-1, the first group of the Studio of Individual Directing. We performed it in beautiful halls, then simply on the street among people, or in the vertical space of those St. Petersburg courtyards – and it grew into a maze-performance. Octavia burst forth in Moscow, a new imperial style, in Yura's design the Kremlin towers cum swelling nipples of an inverted she-wolf. This all happened at the same time somehow. After Alceste, Nikita played Lenin and Nero knocking heads under the influence of Seneca's stoic monologues. All this was compressed into a single continuum. The labyrinth had become almost unbearable. The exit was marked by our Shagreen project, which Andryusha Kuznetsov, Yura and I composed together. For some reason, it turned out to be a ballet – this was the way out of the labyrinth. It turned out that the law of time was exhausted by something called a contract with death. It was especially timely for the 1980s: “life after death,” “the death of the word.” There was a lot of death. No wonder the necrorealists had blossomed in St. Petersburg. New artists matured in the desperate urban actions of Mitkov, the Club of Mayakovsky's Friends, and Pop Mechanics. Multiplying by zero provides a special understanding of stupidity, maturity, and irony. All these artistic strategies characteristic of the late 1980s, that same St. Petersburg underground, still continue in the movement of squatters, Boatsmen Club members, ravers, and hackers, among whom we can find my students from MIR-1. Now it’s “new classicism,” “new academism,” “Apollonian art,” Alexander Brener's tragic dollar sign disappearing into Malevich's white murk, or Hogarth’s line of beauty crossed out twice, like infinity crossed out twice, “new money,” “Animal Party,” and the cries of a black goat rising over the city...

I’m speaking now about the moment when it became clear that this contract with death, this very shagreen leather, is precisely the main danger that arises before us, this stroke of the pen – “$” – is a sign that in another great novel an uncle draws with his foot in the sand before the eyes of his indefatigable nephew Tristram Shandy...

We took the first forty pages of Balzac's novel The Shagreen Skin, then I developed a special text-based way of reading it. We discovered in it the story of a fallen angel. Finding itself in reality, the Angel makes a pact with Death, from the hands of which it receives life. We chose to turn this story into a ballet. It was intended to have dramatic scenes. Death was to be played by Nikita. We worked on this ballet for a year, accomplishing much. Yura created intensely beautiful sketches for the costumes, a set model containing a staircase to heaven and a guillotine. Flying and falling were reduced to an image that avoided metaphor. A metaphor often obscures meaning. Therefore, to break through metaphor to meaning, to allow space to participate in the formation of meaning along with dance, performance and the mises-en-scene – these were the principles from which the scenography emerged. The set model and costume sketches were ready. We signed a contract with the Mikhailovsky Theatre of Opera and Ballet and began working. We rehearsed. Andrei Kuznetsov choreographed all the dances. We began run-throughs of the ballet in a classroom. All that remained was to open the show. Then Nikita came down with leukemia. The theatre had no money to finish the production. I returned to Moscow to work with MIR-2, began reconstructing Chekhov, and ended up in The Garden!

The mirage, appearing before us constantly in the form of a real amount of money given to fund the production, disappeared when almost everything was ready to go. This mirage pursued us constantly, and Shagreen was its final victim. Later we decided also not to succumb to the power of the basement, the power of the lower depths, the dictatorship of a small budget or a lack of control over aesthetics – we would escape the dictates of money. This was our next push, the next breakthrough to be made.

I’ll try to add a few discrete incidents and thoughts to the first half of the '80s, the final years of our training. A cord was stretched between the Theatre on Malaya Bronnaya and the Taganka. Vasilyev went to the Taganka, where Lyubimov sheltered his Vassa. Efros lived on Malaya Bronnaya. And here this cord – a special kind of road – this cord gave off a very lofty chord. Each master occupied his own space: Vasilyev the small stage of the Taganka, Efros the Malaya Bronnaya. Stretched between these two theatres, passing through GITIS, through our souls, our hearts and our studies, the cord gave off a sound. And then... Yury Lyubimov stayed in Europe, Efros decides to take on his theatre but is forced to leave, driven out by a terrible person, the managing director of the Malaya Bronnaya, and he moves to the Taganka. Now a short-circuit takes place. The cord curled into a closed loop. And this loop was thrown over our course. It began drawing tighter. If the two individuals had worked on the stages of different theatres, the cord would have given off sound. But when the two directors came together in the same theatre, the loop tightened. The two directors, being in the same theatre, diverge – they do not bounce off of one other, for each has his own journey – they diverge, and the loop is revealed to be a noose. This is an objective moment, it does not belong to any one person. In any case, that's how I experienced it. With any movement you made, you realized you were tightening the noose. It was unbearable for everyone. It doesn’t matter what people’s intentions were – any parallel or other kind of movement – a loop/noose formed and it drew tighter. At the Taganka Efros rehearsed The Lower Depths, while Vasilyev rehearsed Cerceau. Everything became claustrophobic, everything began to buzz, one sound blocked out another, while it seemed that acoustic and optical tricks began to happen. I remember once in class I allowed myself to utter the word “structure,” and Efros for some reason blurted furiously: “So, what is structure? Why structure?”

“Well, it's another way to move inside the text,” I said.

“There is no other way!” he said.

We were then rehearsing Bulgakov.

“It is another way to experience the composition,” I said.

“What other way? There are no other ways. Everything comes back to dialogue.”

Later I sat down and wrote down in detail the gist of our conversation. I wish I could find that piece of paper. In fact, the whole lesson turned into an argument. I felt the noose tighten on me. Shagreen was still gathering dust on a shelf, and I was rehearsing interludes for the first edition of The Misanthrope, and Mozart and Salieri with Kostya Kinchev and Yura Naumov. Katya Leventhal was sewing the first version of costumes from rags, Lisyansky was out freezing in an Arbat courtyard, dragging a dead tree from corner to corner – we were all ecstatic about that... No, there was no courtyard yet, I am mistaken, there was no courtyard, there was a big rehearsal room upstairs at the Taganka, where we planned this performance. For a third time Efros interrupted one of my showings – he didn't stay to watch the second act. Roughly speaking, my neck was fully encircled by the noose. So I went out on the street, to a place where it seemed I could find love and happiness, into the courtyard of a pawnshop. The first half of the '80s was coming to an end. And then it happened: everything began buzzing, it all started up not only from the influence of our desires, but also of other forces. It was Efros’s birthday. We decided to give him something, and Valera Syrovatkin helped out – he makes excellent caricatures. He drew a big caricature of Efros on cardboard and we cut it out and made an art object of it. We gave this Efros with a big cardboard face and hands folded on his pot belly a working-over. We gave him a Karabas-Barabas whip and some batteries... Basically we created a homemade object with a lot of love and a lot of humor. Then we drove to his dacha in Peredelkino to wish him a happy birthday. I remember the nasty, one might say, merciless words that Natalya Anatolyevna Krymova said about it: “Maybe they are talented, Tolya. But why is everything they do so drab?” Maybe we were only talented when bringing them homemade objects. It was a special “sixties-seventies” egocentrism, in the light of which the previous generation evaluated the following one. All of this had a different side, too. We lived within our course, knowing not that Moscow, like Petersburg, had long ago been split up according to whoever wielded influence. In St. Petersburg, this was expressed most clearly in the power held by Tovstonogov. This strong man from Tbilisi with the help of the City Council held all aesthetics in his fist, all relations in the theatre. Not only did he use live human relationships to boost and juice up his own productions, he also played out semi-invisible games with the city's theatrical map. It was essentially the same in Moscow. This was the backside of the palace that comprised theatre at that time. You could only escape from this palace by going home. The house built on the small stage of Taganka, in fact, was a haven that Vasilyev used to express his relationship with his era. The story about colonizers, about these forty-year-olds who finally found their place in history, who found their place in time and sensed within themselves the "beauty that is sandwiched between two Apocalypses" – is precisely what emerged as the theme of Cerceau. I was drawn to this place that was slipping out from under the palace. I was drawn to this place, where I sensed the opportunity for an unadulterated territory, for a pure feeling, for something else. So I left the course in order to assist Vasilyev. After that I didn’t want to return. I could not tolerate the very atmosphere, the very spirit, the very substance that gave rise to the discourse of Efros's analyses. I left the course before I physically expired in it. I achieved a special distance, the distance from the inside of an oasis that is doomed, built not on love, nor on a feeling of happiness, but on joint participation in the beauty that Vasilyev built inside his performance. This is the life I began to live. Here I encountered true theatre and, for the first time, understood and truly experienced over the period of several years how space and profound design are mutually present in each other. Later, after Cerceau was completed, I shot the film, The Mansion (it was, in fact, the first film I made with Theatre Theatre, our Worldwide Theatre Theatre Video, VTTV in 1986). I invested in the video the distance that I was already beginning to sense to this magnificent production. We named our first film The Mansion. My true experiences poured out of me and came together in a complex landscape consisting of Theatre Theatre on the street, Theatre Theatre at home, Theatre Theatre in an attic, Theatre Theatre in a park, Theatre Theatre on television, Theatre Theatre in monologues, in a lifelike scene where it is difficult to distinguish what is real and what is artificial, psychodrama or fantasy... All of this merged into a single nesting place, not yet ready, still very raw, sometimes bleeding with real monologues, real destinies, but suggested by a photograph or some action, a performance, visualized as video... There was something to all this... something almost artless. And this mixture of the artless, the genuine and the spontaneous is what permeated our film and our lives at that time. Monrepos the theatre performance, and The Mansion film were a special place, a way of opposition, a kind of jargon, a Park. The first part of a trilogy not yet known to us. I never imagined then that it would become The Labyrinth, or that it would mature in the depths of The Labyrinth, and, transforming it into a sacred text, would penetrate The Garden. All this is both one and different, the temporal stages of a single story. Only when we first lost Kamenny Island, then the mansion where the production was performed and the film was shot, only when we were expelled from the Youth Palace to the groans of Ha-Ha-Funerals, only when we found ourselves in Alina Alonso’s apartment or in other apartments, only when instead of theatre we began working on Worldwide Theatre Theatre Video and taking part in inductive games – the rules of which were created as the game unfolded, only when Vasilyev invited Theatre Theatre to Moscow, and we went and began mixing with local avant-garde artists in spontaneous performances such as AIDS in the Time of Plague and Vertical Flight, only when we ended up in the former apartment house on Povarskaya Street, in apartment 4 where The Observer began taking shape, a performance that would be born in a huge West Berlin disco then disappear into oblivion – only then did I begin to sense the form of evolution that was approaching me, and I sat down to write an explication of Hamlet, a production that I still have not been able to begin.

 

End of Episode Thirteen.

 

I must, of course, list the authors who influenced our course, an inspired cavalcade of playwrights: Moliere with his Impromptu at Versaillesand The Misanthrope – our training seemed to be split between Impromptu and The Misanthrope – Shakespeare's Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream, Tolstoy's The Living Corpse, Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, the Arbuzovs and Volodins, Woe from Wit, with a great analysis, in which Vasilyev first tested his theatre of play on us. I remember him asking about Chatsky: "Who is he, a bomb that explodes in a play, or a comet flying over Moscow?" And he answered himself: “This is the story of an emigrant: Chatsky arrives and sees that Moscow has overtaken him, Moscow is ahead of him. It is west of the West, more relaxed and unfettered. This is a Moscow, where smart people like Skalozub relish nonsense, where new fictions are on the verge of coming forth, and gossip begets itself..." It was a strikingly accurate look not only at the play. Then, in the early '80s, almost no one dared hear such topics in the nature of the events that were ripening in real time. He gave outstanding analyses of Woe from Wit and Duck Hunting. I hope Anatoly Alexandrovich will publish them someday. I remember how later, after several stages of rehearsals of Woe from Wit, several of us met numerous times with Vasilyev at the Taganka, and recalled his analysis, discussed and commented on it. I seem to recall that this happened with a dictaphone present, and somewhere Anatoly Alexandrovich must have these records. These were wonderful conversations on their own. It was a special type of contact. I could not imagine this happening with Efros. Communication with Efros could take place either only in the territory of life – a birthday at his dacha – or only within the rehearsal, where he put together the outline of the role, and you performed it. Any other type of communication was impossible with him. Vasilyev revealed to us theatre's capacity for being a dialogue, for being commentary, an interpretation that arises not only where the theatrical game is played, but also where people gather around the game. This revealed the potentials of thinking, and made it possible for speech as such to to play a perfect part in theatre. I have never celebrated within myself the antagonism that existed between Efros and Vasilyev. Inside of me they are friends and they understand each other perfectly. They are my teachers... Efros often compared the dramatic game to the violinist: he once conducted just such a lesson, he brought us Yehudi Menuhin’s diaries, set them down and said – this is directing. We listened to how Menuhin manufactured a melody. In this sense, he said that a performance must be set out as you might a glass on a table. Vasilyev at these same times spoke about form, recalling an amazing image: say you have water, it is a puddle, in order to give it shape, you require a glass into which you pour it. Efros then would put this glass on the table. And everything seemed perfect. But along the way some water spilled. Or the glass was broken. Although the glass was unbreakable. Something happened. There was Shakespeare with his Tempest, there was Anouilh, Williams, and Gogol's Portrait. I remember deciding to do a very negative performance. I went to VGIK where they have these huge two-meter coils, incredibly thick coils wrapped with black paper. Secretly, at night, we unrolled several kilometers of this somber paper in order to pack a stage full of it, to pack up all the heroes, the whole country – a performance based on Gogol's The Portrait. I remember the naked Nikita leading the procession of these strange characters breaking into hints of a minuet as they entered in Capriccios. I was holding a toy of some kind, a music box made of glass and metal, and Nikita, the naked clown in a jester's cap, spouting obscenities exquisitely, took the lead. We showed all this to Vasilyev, and he watched with pleasure. I played a dissident, a janitor wrapped in a cloud of clothes. I was simply a round ball, wearing one hundred layers of T-shirts, pants, jackets and so on. Underneath it all, I wore a tape recorder playing Bach. And we all moved to this music. Marina Pyrenkova played the judge who judged Brodsky, played by me. We lined up two rows of chairs as a kind of bifurcated smile, and we seated the audience there. I lay among them, sandwiched in by the rows of chairs, around which Capriccios was built. With slobbering lips and spitty fingers I pawed and leafed through Mandelstam in the morning, then went out as a janitor to Patriarch Ponds to sweep and mop, after which they tried to arrest me. This was expressed by Marina attacking me like a terrible monster and ripping at my clothes to get at Bach and the tape recorder. But Nikita would leave, and I would accompany him to the airport, reciting Brodsky’s poems and other words. We would embrace. “They tell me I must leave, well, then, I say, I’m leaving.” It was a passionate and tragic janitorial-dissident Capriccios. I remember the joy of rehearsing in Andryusha’s apartment, in the luxurious interior once belonging to General Vishnevsky, outfitted in the refined taste of Andryusha’s mother, who hailed from a family of Kazan University rectors and famous astronomers. It is amazing how later this emigrant theme, which we picked up intuitively, affected the life of Theatre Theatre in reality. Nikita died of leukemia in London, the Obermanekens are now in New York, and Vanya Kochkaryov lives in London... Of course, we could show this to Vasilyev with joy and hope. There was “nothing” for Efros to see here. There was no dialogue, it was a kind of specially organized pause, a sophisticated sketch, a “fanciful notion,” as Efros would have said. The compositions we were supposed to be doing then for communication with Efros would never darken his enlightened gaze.

It is amazing that the fantasies and semantic territories which nourished his plans somewhere in the mysteries of mystical being, intertwined with the energy of a professional – they were all full of just this kind of composition. Before approaching dialogue, Efros would allow himself to soar absolutely freely in spaces where Stanislavsky, Picasso, Visconti and Fellini might meet with his notions. He seemed to recreate his favorite authors and characters in his own cinematic mirages. He would then begin to hear dialogue, and his vision of theatre would arise. He invented. Author's directions, filled from within by this amazing vision, suddenly would take wing. This flight soared in the magic crystal of his imagination, transforming into performance and production. Right here and now, before our eyes, he presented this to the actor, and the actor accepted it, ripping it directly from Efros’s consciousness that had birthed it. And if the actor didn’t connect immediately with the topic that was intuitive and unspoken, but was always felt, then the flight of fancy dried up in the actor, and the production would die before it was born. This is why Efros always enveloped his flight of fancy in a specially articulated understanding, thanks to which the actor could keep the outline of the role alive in himself. The idea would come to life like a fantasy, expressed in a specific playful step, in a specific playful flight of fancy. It was revealed by being shown in a specific motif, psychological gesture, psychological twist. And it was was reinforced precisely with spoken, vivid meaning in this emotional, semantic string. These three stages were mandatory in work on any scene. He once told us – I already wrote about it, but he repeated and repeated it, and I will repeat after him – that you can draw, first outlining a figure's general contours and gradually reducing it to concrete specifics. But if intuition awakes in you, if you temper it with experience and foster in yourself this special magical camera that helps you accurately read the plot zigzags and your own basic plan, then you can even do a painting of a finger, and you will not be mistaken in the layout of the overall figure. And he would begin with a “painting of a finger,” paving the way for dialogue, and turning it immediately into performance, without too much thinking. This is the ultimate gift, one I never saw in anyone, a pure, Mozartian creation of melody. Efros's Theatre is a theatre of rehearsals, in which these three acts, these three stages, unfolded right before your eyes: imagination, fledged by action, cultivated and brought to life in commentary. One could see the features of a truly universal theatre in his brilliant rehearsals. I was always thrilled by the pure brilliance of his artistic talent, this amazing gift of a method given to him by God. He was a very balanced person, very harmonious, but he sometimes wasted harmony not on harmony itself, but rather on something less than the harmony it was spent on. It's similar to forging a rather banal figure out of precious metal. I loved to play along, to participate in his showings, and at first he loved to call on me and work on things with me. It was beautiful, it was joy, it was a pleasure. The first time I experienced the pleasure of the universe was with Efros. As such, I consider myself his student, and it seems to me that my search for “universal theatre,” “theatre as such,” “theatre as a whole” – the names can vary – “theatre of moving structures” and so on – whatever I might call it, it finds its origin in Efros's universalism. It was always a joy, no matter what might be said about it. I think Anatoly Alexandrovich also deeply appreciated and loved precisely that in Efros, his absolute gift...

Of course, “everyone then closes the door behind them.” But if you managed to experience the joy of a true meeting, then your profession and your productions come from that. Memory that is specifically expressed, articulated in professional activity, deep in rehearsals, revealed to a student's still tender youthful consciousness, arises from the memory of happiness. Efros knew this of course. That's why he said... In fact, what else did he say? He repeated it over and over and over again. These blessed rehearsals lasting five years, gradually shaped an inner consciousness that turned out, in fact, to be capable – if the talent was there – to reproduce itself further in the name of other ideas, feelings, meanings, undertakings, concepts and projects. Efros, with his gift of method, pointed to the possibility of creating a universal language that knows no boundaries, can withstand communication with any nationality, and any type of theatre. I am forever grateful to him for this, and often, when I sense his presence in my life – it may happen in a dream, or I might suddenly hear his voice – it seems to me that he's looking on from there, and somehow I sense what he approves of and what he doesn't; I am in dialogue with him. This is something else, this is a vertical dialogue, and it is incredibly active at times. He was especially active this fall as I was analyzing Mozart and Salieri. If we talk about method, I was trying to apply the psychological environment of rehearsing a role outline to the mysterial theatre. And I want to dedicate the analysis I did of Mozart and Salieri in Kiev to Anatoly Vasilyevich... He had unusual hands, the short fingers of an irascible Jew; he had an incredibly soft manner of speaking; and a harmonious peace hung over his rehearsals. These were all properties of his vitality. Vasilyev has the same quality when conducting rehearsals, an amazing calm, extremely conducive to creativity, takes shape. At the time I realized that theatre might change, and people might change, but if this peace were lacking, there would never be that blessed silence that arises between the stage and the auditorium, of which Brook speaks so often, sometimes tragically. It seems to me that this peace is what unites people of the theatre. The peace of harmony imminently reigning, as the result of relationships that are established among people. Perhaps governments, in the name of this peace, relate so intensely to theatre, for theatre is a place where, as in a sacred grove, the living peace that humanity requires is preserved. No one can ever deprive theatre of this function, it can never be taken away. If it exists in the production too, then it is a masterpiece. But if this peace did not exist during rehearsals, then it cannot be there in the performance. A great tension was required to safeguard and establish this peace amidst the bombed-out era in which our masters found themselves. They were surrounded by a sociocultural bazaar that already contained the passions that would acquire criminal aspects by the mid-'90s. This defense of the sacred drove Efros to death, and Vasilyev to that isolation which, perhaps, he sometimes experiences even in the midst of his blessed theatre.

Listening to the rhythms of my speech, I hear that it leads me to a code where a summing up occurs, and at the same time something new begins. It is odd how my speech exists when I refer back to these times: a lot of finales have been experienced. It is a special harmonic structure, in which there are many finales, and which is interconnected by its finales. Eras are connected to each other by finales. Maybe that's why such attention was paid to the main event in the 1980s. Not the originating event, but the main one. The elaboration of the main event was – and remains – the most important property of analysis extending on from those times. In Theatre Theatre, on the contrary, I turned to the originating event. And it became common for me at the next stage to analyze more actively, to work on the originating event, and to worry about the main event to a lesser extent. That is how “variable theatre” began to emerge, with the result that completely new harmonies began to accumulate in the territory of real life and work. Efros, having perfect pitch for action, rarely spoke a word about through action. He “painted fingers,” he embraced the main event, but he did not build it. He just immediately turned everything into an outline of the role, he immediately offered behavior as a solution. Vasilyev basically avoided behavior. He allowed behavior to come about during rehearsal: he also sought and constructed behavior, but behavior was cooked up in rehearsals. Actors were allowed to discover it. That is why the art of constructing an etude was of such importance for Vasilyev, the analysis of a provocative etude, taking note of the functions that have already been applied to structure. Structure is a special kind of analysis, a special path, a deep, internal channel of playacting that, when it is laid out, helps you create for the actor an opportunity to evoke behavior. After that, this behavior does not change. Efros sometimes wondered how it was possible during rehearsals and run-throughs of Duck Hunting to find well-defined contiguous scenes. It was characteristic of Efros to build spaced scenes, while contiguous scenes would just arise and take shape freely as the actors moved under the influence of the structure. Efros drew his conclusions based on results, but, along with Vasilyev's searches in the territory of Duck Hunting and, of course, Woe from Wit, new theatrical optics arose. We began to see within ourselves a new theatre, an invisible space, a specially arranged invisible space, on the territory of which, in fact, a performance comes to life. These new optics sometimes played wicked jokes on us, although they were very real. Because we had begun to work with this invisible space of playacting, with those connections that are so clearly distinguishable in the territory of these new optics, Efros sometimes swore bitterly that actors were playing badly or something else was wrong. Because he approached it from a completely different standard. He often said: “I don’t understand, where is the melody here, what is actually being performed here?!” At those moments I saw a beautiful scene. I understood it, it seeped into me with vivid understanding. Efros did not see that... These new optics took shape in me and some of my fellow students, and we used them as a tool with which to make theatre, a scene, an acting performance. In fact, that's what Vasilyev trained us to do during rehearsals. Thus, this art of distinction gradually arose from real dialogue and analysis, from comments made by the master. As a result of our training, we received a set of instruments that enabled us to make a completely different kind of theatre. A theatre where ideas could live, a theatre in which a brilliant structure could reveal its tensions, and where it took on a life of its own. It's as though we acquired two professions. We studied two arts at once. As a result, an inner individual body was tempered in those who were capable of it. As it seems to me, that early period when we moved outside the course to do our experiments was associated with discovering this body. It determined the search for a theatre of the young in the second half of the 1980s. Many young directors, one way or another, required an individual theatre space, a requirement that has not yet been satisfied. Moreover, venerable, friendly critics selflessly devoted their incorruptible inspiration to the destruction of the very first attempts to build such spaces. These nascent bodies were the target of the sharpened, inspired, poison pens of our theatrical humanists, just as they still are now. Inertia in theatre gives rise to a pragmatic consciousness – why take risky steps? – and a catastrophic model arises, from which you want to escape into other forms of art. Still, some choose to take on the beautiful, long and sometimes seemingly doomed journey... There is a brilliant example of this in Louis Malle's last film, Vanya on 42nd St. It offered a view of theatre that could be achieved only on film. Now I have become a teacher. So I end my story where the transformer of evolution temporarily concludes its work. From a student illuminated with love for his teachers, one who experienced the magic of the phys-ed hall, and entered the happiness of studying directing, I myself emerged as a teacher. As per the folk saying, having named myself a mushroom, for nearly ten years now I have been building a basket into which I put myself, into which I jumped with the name of Theatre Theatre on my lips, and the Studio of Individual Directing in my heart. I think of Efros. I think of Vasilyev. Paradoxically, I think they could have come together again. Whatever may have happened in our course, it was always clear that an enormous distance always separated them both from the common theatre in Moscow. That was always incredibly clear, and sensible. Whatever schism we saw form before our eyes, beginning as a small crack and growing into an insurmountable fissure between them, it was nothing from the point of view of the distance that separated them from the common Moscow bazaar. This “distance from the bazaar” had a particular effect on the lives of most of my classmates. It is very difficult to overcome this distance, for people headed into the kingdom of this distance without a name and deprived of support, for the course, not yet having matured, was orphaned...

I inherited a precious distance from my masters, maybe this is the same Puss in Boots that every young director must plug into his journeys. In response, society will accuse you of all the mortal sins. However, society is also a wonderful market where they sell invisible hats. I buy them in batches, knowing what they're worth.

 

End of Film.