Artitudes:

One artist's emotional travels

Charles Fowler once remarked that, "it isn't intellect that connects us to other people; it is feeling." I experienced something akin to this on Tuesday.

Walking by a campus billboard on Monday, I happened to spot a poster announcing a lecture by Sergei Artsibashev, a noted Russian theater director and actor. The event, put together at short notice, would be held the following afternoon.

A small group sat in Wilder 112; maybe twelve people. Various members of the Russian department as well as a few students from the Theater department languidly sat about enjoying their lunch and chatting. But the man at the front of the room grabbed my attention. Artsibashev sat-up straight, peering over slightly darkened spectacles, the curves of his bald pate accentuated by a freshly buzzed crew-cut. There he sat, eyes glancing around the room, hawk-like, in a dark blue double-breasted suit and a V-neck sweater underneath. I could imagine him, during a particularly impassioned rehearsal, waving a cigarette around and taking long sucks from it when he was too wrapped up in an idea to articulate it just right.

There he sat, silently, sporadicly muttering this or that in Russian to his translator. All the while I stared at him - an utterly Russian presence in dress and composure - wondering how he would convince me his theatrical imprint was such a pressing one.

Artsibashev was introduced by his translator and, like clockwork, he sprang out of his chair, his eyes drilling into everyone in the tiny audience. He paused, and then the Russian began to flow.

He is the artistic director and founder of Moscow's Theatre Pokrovka. The theater, which opened one week exactly after the 1991 putsch, is renowned for presenting visionary productions of the great Russian classics as well as new works. I was reminded of Great Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company and its credo: "to produce new works as if they were classics, and classics as if they were new works."

Watching this small, tightly coiled man speak was a performance in itself. He gesticulated wildly and to thrilling ends. The stories he told, of growing up with five siblings under the watchful eye of a tough-as-nails father, were compelling ones. The first thing that came out of his mouth was that "ever since I could remember, I have wanted to be a theater director." Artsibashev kept this vision in clear focus even while under extreme familial pressure from his father to go to technical school. In fact, the budding thespian's future was not much of a debate; he was going to technical school and that was that.

Through technical school, Artsibashev endured the grueling rigor of enrolling in three acting schools. Here, Artsibashev grew really excited. He began to mimic the reactions of his past teachers and there puzzled looks when he explained to them that "really inside, I am not a comedian! I am a tragic Hamlet!" The moment was a touching one, as I began to consider the number of acting students who implore their teachers to believe that they too are Hamlet, or Ivanov, even Lear.

But the Russian theater-training system is a very different one than what we are familiar with in the States. Artsibashev's naïve imploration had much more riding on it than innocent vanity. In the Russian system, an actor becomes locked into a certain type of role from the most formative days. Artsibashev was deemed a comedic character-actor by his teachers. Over the years that he trained, this was consistently the only role that would be offered to him.

So it was with extreme emotion and passion that his final acting class was called to the bedside of his last teacher, an elderly man nearing the end of his life. Here, Artsibashev became deadly serious. He peered at all of us. With the merest of gestures he defined the room and the bedside of his professor. He described what it was like to receive from the teacher an envelope. Inside each students' envelope was written the roles that the teacher thought they would be capable of performing. "On my envelope," Artsibashev paused- "Ivanov and Hamlet." He smiled wistfully.

Theatre Potrovka emerged like a phoenix, out of the tumult created by Glasnost and Perestroika in 1991. Artsibashev spoke about his theater's calling-card production of Checkov's The Three Sisters that was staged for an audience of sixty. The play takes place in a dining room during a birthday party. In his production, the audience walked into the small theater space to discover an elaborately set dinner table for sixty. Crystal-ware adorned the table, as did appetizers. In his production, the audience was part of the dinner experience. The actors, who didn't stray a word from Chekhov's original text, conversed with, danced with, cried with and laughed with the audience. Rushing right up close to me, inches from my face, Artsibashev intently intoned that "his production was totally experiential. The audience was another character." His company performed the production for audiences who knew zero Russian. They, like the native speakers, laughed and sobbed at the exact moments intended in the script. Language became merely a conduit for emotion.

Unmasked emotion: Noted Russian theater director Sergei Artsibashev proved, in a recent lecture, that emotions can be translated into any language. (photo courtesy of Oberlin Review)