Soccer Game:
Tim and I went to a Russian Premier League Soccer game last weekend to see a team from Moscow (Spartak) play their rivals from St. Petersburg (Zenit). I had never been to a soccer game like this before. What I found most interesting were the other spectators. I had heard about hooliganism at European soccer games, but this blew my expectations out of the water so much that I watched the stands almost more than I watched the game. As soon as we arrived, Zenit scored (we were sitting it their section) and their fans went insane. They shoot off fire works, lit flares and these things that I can only describe as fire balls, which they threw onto the field at which point one of the hundreds of police officers would grab the fireball with these long tongs and shove it into the snow on the sidelines. The celebration made so much smoke that we couldn’t see the game for a few minutes after. This type of thing happened every time something the least bit exciting occurred in the game. At one point the Zenit fans burnt a huge Spartak flag in the stands. Later they figured out how to remove the chairs from the stands and threw them at the Spartak fans, when the cops shuffled into the stands like military troops to break it up, they threw even more chairs at them. I went to the game planning to cheer for Spartak. I cheered for Zenit for fear of being pelted with chairs.
Plays:
We have been seeing some amazing theatre here. My favorites have been Push (a dance piece from London with former French prima ballerina Sylvie Guillem—I have never been more amazed by how a person used his or her body), Richard III, and Opus 7—a very out-there piece about WWII and the Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich involving music, movement, painting, and a gigantic puppet.
We have also seen:
The Hump Backed Horse
Movement/Object Etudes at the Shukin School
Oblomov
The Black Square (a movement based performance by the Russian 3rd year students)
Nothing has been disappointing.
A little bit on acting class:
Tim and I went to a Russian Premier League Soccer game last weekend to see a team from Moscow (Spartak) play their rivals from St. Petersburg (Zenit). I had never been to a soccer game like this before. What I found most interesting were the other spectators. I had heard about hooliganism at European soccer games, but this blew my expectations out of the water so much that I watched the stands almost more than I watched the game. As soon as we arrived, Zenit scored (we were sitting it their section) and their fans went insane. They shoot off fire works, lit flares and these things that I can only describe as fire balls, which they threw onto the field at which point one of the hundreds of police officers would grab the fireball with these long tongs and shove it into the snow on the sidelines. The celebration made so much smoke that we couldn’t see the game for a few minutes after. This type of thing happened every time something the least bit exciting occurred in the game. At one point the Zenit fans burnt a huge Spartak flag in the stands. Later they figured out how to remove the chairs from the stands and threw them at the Spartak fans, when the cops shuffled into the stands like military troops to break it up, they threw even more chairs at them. I went to the game planning to cheer for Spartak. I cheered for Zenit for fear of being pelted with chairs.
Plays:
We have been seeing some amazing theatre here. My favorites have been Push (a dance piece from London with former French prima ballerina Sylvie Guillem—I have never been more amazed by how a person used his or her body), Richard III, and Opus 7—a very out-there piece about WWII and the Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich involving music, movement, painting, and a gigantic puppet.
We have also seen:
The Hump Backed Horse
Movement/Object Etudes at the Shukin School
Oblomov
The Black Square (a movement based performance by the Russian 3rd year students)
Nothing has been disappointing.
A little bit on acting class:
We have started our acting class. So far, we haven’t gotten to the scene work. We have only been doing etudes (for you non-theatre folk, etudes are self-conceived little performance exercises used in acting training). So far, we have done objects, animals, and interesting people. We should find out how we are cast in scenes soon.
YOU SHOULD BLOG MORE!
ReplyDeleteSylvie Guillem is amazing- I watched videos of her back in 1993 and she was so incredible- she must be rather "mature" now.
ReplyDeleteDid you stop blogging because the trip got too interesting to write about? Less is not more- you have an audience here.