in a single rehearsal hall or lab, people might engage not just one but several sets of expectations about contact or technologies for intuitions. They might work to synthesize them, put them into competition, or use one to arrive at another. Were we to attempt to tie threads of expertise under a single profession, habitus, ontology, or ideology, we would miss these collusions and conflicts. To follow phatic expertise means to cross professions, schools, networks, and even countries to witness not only tangles and misfires, but also fresh interpretants that refract from even the most faithful attempts to translate.
CIRCLES: EXPERTS AND CIVILIANS
Good places to observe all this include those where phatic experts engage with people who are not, or are not yet, experts. Conflicts percolate through such places about how to gauge contact, how to evaluate communication, how to pick out signs and make channels, with which materials, connecting these people and not others. Among such places, GITIS is relatively insular while also communicatively dense, with constant interaction and discussion of interaction, in classrooms and corridors, onstage and backstage, before exams and after, in the café and in the dormitory, with its late-night chores and midnight meals and rides to and from on the metro. There is no question that GITIS is a “dense node” where resources and people cluster.21 Entire ethnographies could be set within the institute or the dormitory alone; people described the situation as being “as though we live enclosed within a space capsule.” Working, sleeping, and eating with the same people, from morning to midnight, every day, people said they felt in a world apart. While acclimating to the “space capsule” in the first year, for the customary midsemester variety show and party (kapustnik), the cohort rewrote beloved Soviet film song lyrics to convey the melancholy of cutting channels to past relationships, to “Moscow beyond GITIS’ windows.”
Time passed, and people graduated; “GITIS spat us out,” laughed one actress in 2008. Some graduates work together, others meet rarely, to attend an opening or greet a new child. They Skype, some even with me, to practice an American accent or for help with Sundance festival instructions, a few just to talk. Most work steadily in theater; a few are now film celebrities. I am not surprised; their work is riveting. Some take acting techniques into different fields, teaching dramatic skills and theatrical appreciation to businessmen. One has founded a school for the arts in Germany, along the lines of a Steiner school, drawing together international connections from Paris, Hollywood, Moscow, and Tokyo.
I first witnessed how people shift expertise in 1997, among directors and actors in Perm’ who contracted seminars for businesspeople, teaching acting skills to improve communication, and later investigated similar endeavors in Moscow. One that has achieved stability is called Shkola Obraz (Image School or School of Ways, as obraz can translate as “image” or “appearance” as well as “mode” or “manner,” as in obraz zhizni, “way of life”). The play of meanings is fitting, as the school advertises theatrical skills as techniques for living better—by refining intuition.
A graduate of one of the smaller theatrical institutes founded Shkola Obraz in the mid-1990s, soon after the USSR had dissolved, a time in which bursts of self-help courses and books heralded new ways to make contacts and to read others. It was, as so many trumpeted, a new world of new signs, new partners in new markets. The school moved facilities several times in the 1990s and by 2000 had found a long-term space. As a part-time night school, it challenges the hierarchies of theatrical and film production in Moscow, offering entrance to the profession through a back door, with a shorter course of study and without auditions for admission; anyone who can pay may attend. It sells itself also as a path to solving everyday problems in a world where, as the website sympathizes, we all learn to compress our true selves under the gaze of others. There, acting skills (drawn more from Mikhail Chekhov than from other Russian masters) are taught to “housewives and businessmen,” to help them “succeed through play.” The school espouses a ludic, protean philosophy of theatricality (rather than theater as artifice) and touts monthly “happenings” at which students hit public transit walking on their hands or wearing dog collars to free themselves of public inhibitions. Every few months, sandwich board wearers pace central squares, passing out flyers and pinning them on bulletin boards—even in the entryway to GITIS.
The school also delivers lessons in how to relax, the better to channel new intuitions and energies. Shkola Obraz states explicitly that it links psychological knowledge, stage skills, and psychic capacities, offering dual learning tracks to merge learning to act and to meditate. Shkola Obraz, it turns out, is related to the Texas-based José Silva method. With franchises around the world, the Silva method offers “a unique combination of Alpha and Theta level mind exercises, creative visualizations, habit control, and positive programming methods has been endorsed by various thought leaders and scientists.” Trained in electronics, Silva later turned to study of hypnosis and brain waves, dubbing his system the Silva Mind Control method in 1944 and going commercial in 1966. Shkola Obraz forms another turn in the circles of influence that once brought yoga to Stanislavsky’s attention. This time, circuits of expertise cross borders and ideologies to create a hybrid of neoliberalism, occultism, and socialist technological infrastructure.
About midway between Moscow’s center and the suburbs, at the Elektrozavod metro station, Shkola Obraz rents space in the building that houses a school for the Moscow Metro Builders (MetroStroj). Around 2007 it expanded from one to four rooms: three small ones nested together on the ground floor and a larger room for acting and movement on the third, next to Metrostroij’s classrooms for mass transit accounting. A far cry from the grandeur of GITIS, with its grassy courtyard, curved wooden benches, iron gates, imperial heralds, and marble staircases, at Shkola Obraz’s space people practice on gray carpet under acoustic tiles or listen while sitting in office chairs. The downstairs rooms are within view of the building concierge and turnstile where one shows a passport. A small bulletin board announces a low-budget session with a photographer to compile headshots to send to Mosfil’m or the new casting agencies. The innermost room serves as an office, with room for a desk, a shelf displaying several books on acting and psychology, and about six chairs. The middle room is for meditation training, with chairs around the edges. Shkola Obraz advertises a free introductory lesson every Thursday evening in either psychology or acting. Both lectures are available on tape and on the website.
I visited the school several times, attending the introductory lecture on acting in September 2005. Also in attendance were two teenage boys in jeans and a slender girl in stiletto heels with waist-length blond cornrows. They were just as beautiful as any beginning student at GITIS, but they kept so still and quiet that they hardly emitted any signs at all beyond their attire. I imagined that the course might do them some good; however, while Shkola Obraz is itself successful, its graduates have yet to penetrate far into professional filmmaking or theatrical work. During the lecture we learned that the cost for each three-month cycle of study was 7,000 rubles (about U.S. $230 at the time, about one-quarter of the average monthly salary in the city) and that one could attend either Monday and Saturday or Thursdays for a few hours a week: “No one in America studies acting at a five-year institute as we do here! They just take a few night classes…. Anybody can work in the theater after a few weeks training, just like driving a bus.” The schedule and fees, the lecturer said, were signs of democracy.
By contrast, Leonid Heifetz, director and master instructor at GITIS, in his autobiography justifies closing the ranks to provide free education and training single-mindedly from 9:00 A.M. to 11:00 P.M., seven days a week. He addresses aspiring applicants by contrasting the theatrical to other professions: “One cannot simply select theater as a workplace. Theater is a calling. Say you are unemployed, but there are openings in a theater: ‘I’ll just go work as an actor.’ Not an option. You will not make a single step onto the stage if you have no calling…. You need not only innate characteristics, but also a specific school, a set of abilities and masterly skills without which work in the professional theater is impossible” (2001, 5–6).
Our lecturer, Shkola Obraz’s founder, laid out a different reasoning. He swiveled on his chair
