Each fall at midterm, students in many Russian schools stage a kapustnik (“cabbage festival”), a satirical variety show. Village collectives stage them as amateur talent parties; urban working theaters stage them as internal festivities. At the academy, cohorts introduce themselves to each other with kapustnik skits that parody theatrical education; the second-year directing cohort sent up the concept of “internal dialogue” with an actor confused by his own voice booming over the loud speakers, commenting absurdly on his every encounter with stage props: “There is that chair, again.” Our younger cohort crafted a sketch with cameos by all of us non-native Russian speakers, singing in Arabic, Korean, French, Ukrainian, Daghestani, and English while an actor standing to the side pretended to translate. My snippet of “Downhome Blues” was translated into a Russian verse about the free kasha offered free at the academy until 11:00 A.M., while a Kuwaiti student’s round in Arabic on the Ud became a verse about sleeping four hours a night and missing home.
Officially, the academy prefers to stress its function as a node for new contacts, bringing people into communication from far-flung places. Funded by the Ministry of Culture, this elite school is tasked with nurturing a national theatrical tradition and competes with the Moscow Art Theater (MKhAT) for international fame: to learn here, with students of students of Stanislavsky or of Vsevolod Meyerhold, is to drink at the fount of modern stagecraft. For more than a century, people have come from all over the world, to observe or to enroll for weeks, months, or years. I was easily admitted as an observer; the road had already been paved by a century of institutional procedures for including and recruiting observers from other places.
Students were not always so ready to animate such channels or maintain all foreign contacts; while I was there, an entire delegation of American drama students who spoke no Russian joined our cohort for two weeks in the spring. A few students complained later that they had crowded the rooms and slowed them all down, to which the instructors chided, “They are not ‘ballast’! No! How do you think we pay for these light bulbs!” Still, American cultural and social capital earned a lower exchange rate at the academy than it did in other contexts. Contra allegations of Russian inferiority complexes after state socialism ended, at the academy, American know-how was of limited interest. For example, any tenuously imagined connection between me and say, Hollywood, was trumped by teachers’ contacts in the Moscow theater world. No academic or foreigner could compete with the gazes of these directors. On the contrary, they absorbed my camera into their rehearsals, appropriating not only its recording functions, but also its capacity to quickly key shifts in contexts, to stage frames within frames: “Ready? Action!”
Ethnography presupposes presence or proximity, the possibility for making contact not only through technologies like camera or telephone, but also through long-term mediations of the body: the technologies of voice, hand, and eye. Many of my interlocutors at the academy shared this definition of ethnography and valued the observational power of prolonged contact. In the summer of 2001, a visit I made to the office for foreign students secured for me a meeting with the chancellor, to whom I explained that I wanted to observe directing courses and student life in order to write ethnography. She looked at my university card, took a long drag from her cigarette, and through the smoke pronounced knowingly, “Ahhh! Yes! Ethnography! Then you will stay in the dormitory with the students, so that you learn how they live!”
To observe, to listen, to attend to, to take in—these acts can perform contact. In theatrical work or filmmaking, too, to observe is not to distance oneself from others, but to involve oneself in collaborations that demand organization via reflection—to provide mirrors. I was never the only observer, foreign or internal; observation was a central activity offstage and on, learning to observe and to mirror others being among the earliest lessons. The teachers taught in teams, two or three at a time: a master, his or her assistant, and sometimes an intern. To watch and listen as an ethnographer among the instructors and students not onstage was just a minor variation in the social field; my notes roused little notice when all the interns and assistants took them, as did students. Looking over people’s shoulders, I would see the same phrases copied into quad-rule, vinyl-covered notebooks as captured dialogue between teachers and students or in streams of teachers’ discourses. The academy archives volumes of notes, transcripts, and fictional dialogues like those published by Stanislavsky, depicting a version of himself and an imaginary student. To carry out rehearsal ethnography has long been a phase in the curriculum. In 1936 visiting American director Norris Houghton wrote that when observing rehearsals at the Vakhtangov Theater he “used regularly to meet a boy and girl from GITIS [abbreviation for the Soviet-era name for the Academy, Gosudarstvennij Institut Teatral’nogo Iskusstva, or The State Institute for Theater Arts] who were watching rehearsals, and at the rehearsals of Enemies at the Moscow Art Theater, two young men from the Institute were present, like myself, to study the director’s methods (1936, 48).
All this did not make all research methods easy or appropriate. Teachers cheerfully allowed me into classes, and when I asked permission to photograph or record, would exclaim, “Radi boga! Chto ty sprosish’!” (“For God’s sake! Why even ask!”), but at day’s end they would apologetically run to rehearsals at other theaters; overextended, they had little time or incentive to sit down with a foreign scholar. Dyadic channels, such as those afforded by interview situations, were difficult to set up. The head instructor might agree to an interview, but by the end of rehearsal would sigh from exhaustion and avoid eye contact, collecting his things, while students would mediate, “He likes you! He had a hard life; he hates to talk about himself.” During previous fieldwork I had avoided the interview genre when it seemed it would be an imposition in families or spaces where people rarely practice the tête-à-tête. The point of ethnography of communication is to comprehend relations and patterns across a range of situations, not only those created by an interviewer. At the academy, while many had experience with the genre, and while people frequently staged dyadic interactions (romantic scenes, showdowns with landlords), it was nevertheless difficult to get anyone to sit one-on-one. For one thing, to the vexation of those in their first year, the schedule saturated every moment from nine in the morning until midnight, leaving little time to participate in smaller conversations, much less an interview: we began talking, someone suddenly notified us of a turn with the vocal teacher, someone walked by having finally found that red gauze, or someone wanted me to film a scene. Conversations always broke off when a teacher entered the room for the first time of the day, as we stood to greet him or her.
There were also differences in the ease of making contact. Despite my age and academic rank in the United States, I made enduring connections only with students. During acting lessons, critique sessions, or talks by important visitors, directors like Zakharov, Heifetz, or Fomenko, I sat with students on the floor. When students demonstrated their work, we mixed in behind the instructors on benches or chairs—although students sometimes rushed to free a seat for me, or even fetch a chair, as they might for an instructor, suggesting that my identification with them was partial. During breaks between classes, I stayed with the students as they practiced in the homeroom or paced in the corridors, memorizing poems, making tea, or experimenting with makeup. We tried to peer behind the weekly paper schedule filled in by hand and pasted over the glass walls of the directing department office, where instructors met to evaluate students’ work before returning with critical notes. We could watch them talk, but never hear them behind the glass. But sometimes, in noticing that we shared a space cut from contact, we might start a new circle or send out a fresh ray.
Introduction
TECHNOLOGIES FOR INTUITION
It is deep December in the center of Moscow. A dozen acting and directing students in sweatpants or tights sprawl across a wooden floor in a studio at the top of the central building of the Russian Academy for the Theatrical Arts. The central campus occupies a block on a quiet, tree-lined street that curves off a central artery to the Kremlin, across from stately prerevolutionary neighbors, an embassy, an elementary school, and a theater. That morning students had cleaned the herringbone parquet with thin lengths of grey muslin, but now it is afternoon and dusty again. Facing the dozen at work sit senior and junior instructors, interns and apprentices, this author, and the other half
