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Published: December 31st 2008
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Opera and Ballet
The House in a different season. Inisde is better Perm Stage I: Jizzel and Thanksgiving
My connections with the Perm stage began a month and a half ago, when Sveta and I accompanied an American attorney to the ballet Jizzel. Permians take great pride in their ballet house and company. I’ve been told by a number of English teachers, including Sveta, that the Perm ballet school is the second best in all of Russia. Only the academy in St. Petersburg is more renowned. That would be the academy for St. Petersburgers. I guess that’s how one calls a resident of St. Petersburg. This means that someone from Hamburg is called a Hamburger. But Perm has a distinguished high art history. Diaghilev, leader of the Ballet Rus called Perm home and Tchaikovsky came from a town to the south.
Jizzel was my first live ballet experience, and, like my first live opera experience a few years back, I was dazzled, or "Jizzeled," if you will. Sveta and I were in charge of the American attorney, meaning we were to speak English with him and make sure he did not get mugged. Olga had the attorney before us and handed him over outside the opera house. Our charge practiced bankruptcy
Bradford cowers
Squanto/Igor is to my right. Later we would play basketball. law in DC. He implied that he was friendly with Mike Johanns, and he also had the habit of making jokes at the expense of my fellow English teachers. So I figured he had two strikes against him. The attorney avoided the third by buying me a drink at intermission. Also at intermission he explained what to me seemed to be just garden variety rudeness as “I’m just joking to loosen the girls up.” Before the lights dimmed, he told me that his daughter attended Creighton Law, which for whatever reason he felt he needed to justify. “Now the only I guy I know from there is Johanns, but I maybe people back East just don’t know about that little gem you guys got.”
Then the dancing started. Both the attorney and I were riveted. After intermission, the performance really took off. I forgot about my earlier resentment, and we ended up agreeing that the mid-1960s produced some pretty good rock and roll bands.
So everything started out great. I went to the ballet for free and really enjoyed myself. Two weeks later, I was called to act.
I am the leader of the American Corner’s Sunday
Bradford explains
I remain skeptical. It was a nice stage. Conversation Club and have responsibilities to present the best side of America. Back in July this meant that I participated in a quiz game. So when Thanksgiving rolled around it was a no brainer that American Corner’s second-in-command, Natasha, would ask me to join the Corner Players in their theatrical adaptation of the original Thanksgiving.
When the roles were dished out I got passed over for Squanto and William Bradford and had to settle for what in the script was simply “Indian Chief.” Fine. They threw me some bones, a few lines. All the Englishmen in our play spoke Russian and the Indians gibberish. But we were playing not as part of the conversation club, so there was no “English only” requirement. Our performance was to be part of a charity event out at an orphanage across the river. Even so, I decided I would give the Indian chief some dignity, a language: broken Spanish. Igor, a Conversation Club regular and physics student at the University got Squanto. A big Russian guy who had done an exchange program in the U.S. played Bradford. He wore a cowboy hat, a white frilly shirt, a pair of giant black boots, and a pencilled in moustache. Many times I wished I had remembered to bring that Pilgrim’s hat from my wedding. To get properly into my role, I was given a plastic headdress and a furry scarf. I complemented these with red war paint, a pair of Rainbow-brand flip-flops, Sveta’s Bolivian sweater, and a devastatingly dignified bearing. And when I yelled “Como te llamas” with menacing dignity, Bradford cowered appropriately. To my surprise, Squanto/Igor followed my lead and spoke his lines in German. The story ended with some “tribal” music, a shaman’s dance and that big feast. I thought about the “hegemonic” narrative and then realized that what we presented wasn’t a narrative at all but a surrealist experiment. Afterwards, the red war paint refused to wash from my face, and so I looked like a baboon.
The older orphans were not merely confused by our performance, they were deeply unimpressed. They were even more unimpressed after the play finished. That’s when the kiddie games, charades and such, began. Igor, the Prussian Squanto, had an idea: basketball. Igor and I joined two thirteen year-olds and slipped out of the hall and into the gym for a game of basketball. As a representative of the homeland of basketball, I felt a little nervous. Igor was out of breath almost immediately, alternately hunching over the ball in exhaustion or tearing after his man with his arms in the air. What my partner lacked in skills, he made up for in ferocity and a willingness to break rules. Igor’s forearms and elbows were continually in our much younger and smaller opponents’ faces and stomachs. He seemed incapable of not double dribbling, and when he failed at even that, he just picked the ball up and ran. Our opponents, on the other hand, were scrupulous adherents to the rules of half court basketball, checking the ball, taking it backcourt when possession changed -- they even erred on the side of caution when the ball out of bounds and it wasn’t clear who touched it last. Igor and I always got the ball. And those thirteen-year-olds killed us.
“It sure is different than playing against the computer!” Igor concluded. Indeed.
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