I’m going to an interview. A colleague, a theater director, is calling, discussing a joint project. Meanwhile, the car stops at the TV studio. I say, “That’s it, I’m sorry, I’m running to the set.” In response, I hear: “Good luck! Are you going to talk about musicals?” “No, it’s not about musicals this time,” I reply. She asked with understanding, “Is it about the theater anyway?” “Imagine, it’s not about the theater at all,” I say, and I’m surprised at myself. “I’m going to tell you about the newspaper Abroad, which was very popular in Soviet times.” A colleague paused and said, either with disbelief or disapproval, “Well, you’re a multi-student…”
The amplitude of my professional runs is actually specific. If I were a journalist, it wouldn’t be so exotic, because the essence of journalism is to write vividly and catchingly about everything, without really understanding anything deeply. I foresee that some colleagues may be offended, but this, on the contrary, is a compliment.
I’ve experienced it myself. In the late 90s, I got so tired of writing about music that I asked the editor of the magazine where I worked as a music reviewer to give me some unusual assignment. He commissioned a large article about the Central Moscow Hippodrome. There was no limit to my enthusiasm. Two days of work, and I learned everything I needed to know. I met the headmistress, met with the jockeys, talked to the grooms, made a bet and lost, had coffee with a representative of the roof, found out the difference between horse racing and running, found out who was the favorite at the next race, rode a red convertible with the owner of the horse that won the derby, and in the final went to the stable to hug the horse itself, which was named Broadway (after all, the theater did not want to leave me alone), and this campaign almost ended badly for me. And although the contact with Broadway Horse, unlike the Broadway musical, turned into a severe allergic reaction, I was over the moon. For a week, I flaunted my knowledge of jockeys and horses in front of a friend who was betting on a sweepstake (betting on horse racing). Then I forgot everything, even the names of the jockeys. And I think if the horse’s name wasn’t Broadway, but something else, I would have forgotten him, too. Because I’m not a professional at this.
The topic of professionalism has always interested me. And the question has always bothered me – what determines it? If a person has graduated from an electrotechnical institute and does not have a conservatory diploma, can he be considered a professional composer? For example, Alexander Kolker, the author of smash hits, film music, and the famous musical “Krechinsky’s Wedding,” was simply attending a seminar by an ascetic teacher named Pustylnik, who devoted himself to amateur musicians, when his colleagues were receiving academic education at music universities. And the result was convincing: Kolker took his place of honor on Olympus among the composers of his generation.
Dilettantism and self–activity are almost abusive concepts. And if a person is rushing from the hippodrome to the opera, from opera to writing advertising slogans, not only for the theater, but also for real estate, and then, having written a play, organizes a PR campaign for a commercial project, simultaneously developing a teaching course “External communications and journalism in the field of musical culture” What should I do with such a person? How can I attribute it? Should he be considered a universal, surrounded by honor and glory and awarded with a specially established Leonardo da Vinci Order? Or should he be stigmatized for the insolence with which he climbs into all the cracks?
And the offers keep coming. Two years ago, Alexander Kozhevnikov, a professor at the Moscow Art Institute, approached me with an offer to meet with his students and tell them about the theater.
“Why do they need a theater?” I asked.
It turned out that Professor Kozhevnikov had developed a unique course on “Designing Theatrical buildings” for architecture students. Students gain special knowledge in their field – constructive, acoustics, and many other things that I can’t even name. But, as the professor explained to me, they need to understand not only “how?” but also “what?” So what kind of theater is this and what is it for? Why is it necessary to design and build it?
It was an interesting task. And I gave my first lecture at the MARCHI, where in an hour and a half I talked about what, in my opinion, is the phenomenon of theater, what is its specificity and what it is like today. I was pleasantly surprised by the reaction – sincere interest, a lot of questions. Some of them were unexpected for me – for young architects, what was new was something that seemed completely obvious to me. However, I imagined that I was listening to a lecture on architecture for the first time, and I thought that I would also make a lot of discoveries for myself.
A year has passed… and Professor Kozhevnikov called me again with an invitation from MARKHA. I happily agreed – it was already a new set, and the opportunity to tell another generation of young architects about the theater was tempting. But here a surprise awaited me – the course leader felt that one lecture was not enough, that students should get an idea of the history of the theater, understand the vector of its development, meanings and forms, styles and genres.
“It’s about musical theater, I hope?” I asked, although I knew perfectly well that if the subject “History of Theater” was included in the program, then, of course, musical theater alone would not do. And so it turned out: we need Antiquity, the Middle Ages, William Shakespeare, Jean Baptiste Poquelin Moliere, the Spaniards, the Russian pre-Petrine theater, and so on. No professional would undertake the presentation of the world history of the theater in four academic pairs.
And then, after weighing the pros and cons, I decided that I would try to cope with this task. I want future architects who will design a theater building to understand what it is for, what kind of mystery, what kind of shamanism, what kind of mysteries will take place there. If there is even the slightest chance to infect any of them with my vision of the theater as a sacred institution capable of influencing the human soul, then I will shake the student’s antiquity, sit down at textbooks and master the materiel. And the fact that I am an amateur, or rather, a neophyte, only makes me related to them, to these young guys who entered the theater from another space – not from poetics and aesthetics, but from the world of drawings, calculations, and planning solutions.
A series of lectures followed. As a result, there were not four, but five of them: the students wanted to know what immersive theater is, and we dedicated a separate meeting to it. As for the world history of theater from Antiquity to the present day, including opera, we have completed eight academic hours. It wasn’t so important to us how many of Euripides’ plays had survived to this day, but it was interesting to learn that an artist in an ancient Greek theater could smell the blood of a victim recently sacrificed to Dionysus. We were talking about Leonardo da Vinci, who was a great set designer. His performance of “Danae” in Milan became a sensation. The staged effects would be the envy of Broadway: Mercury descends from heaven, Jupiter pours out a golden shower, the walls shake. In the finale, Jupiter rides out of the depths of the stage space on a throne engulfed in flames. In the present, of course, video projections did not exist.
Together we figured out why Shakespeare’s Globe Theater turned out to be round, and then we all lamented when we learned that it had burned down due to carelessly executed special effects. We were proud of the Russian theater, which in the shortest possible time went from total expansion of European culture to complete self-sufficiency, which allowed it to become a legislator of theatrical technologies and methods in the twentieth century. Most of all, we talked about meanings, that the thesis “The world is a theater, the people in it are actors” is not about acting or pretending, but about metaphysics.
It is possible to tell about the history of the theater in eight hours. Of course, if we talk about the essence, and not to sort out how the beads, facts and names.