The Fairground Booth dairy 2

The Framed world of The Fairground Booth.

More work on the film the last few days as well the book. Re editing material for the book especially the neo platonism section Over the last week we attended a kabuki theatre production here in Moscow. Meyerhold was strongly influenced by Kabuki theatre and I am now beginning to see why this so. It has a naivety accompanied by a sophistication which is often unappreciated. The fairground Booth in its fist performance was also much misunderstood and denigrated. However it contains many innovations which became part of contemporary theatre as we understand it today.

"The Fairground Booth" has an aura of childlike naivety, however, this innocence is also accompanied by the grotesque of the commedia dell'Arte. The purpose is to disorientate the audience, to make them aware of the unnaturalness and theatricality of what they are seeing. All kinds of framing devises were used by Meyerhold in these commedia type plays, "The Fairground booth" and "Columbina's Veil" to draw attention to the fact that this is not real life. For instance servants were used to perform certain functions like opening stage curtains and helping actors with various tasks, including them in the action in new and unusual ways certainly unusual for the time.

Such framing devises and the fact that the plays are framed within the grotesque, contribute to the sense of another world or another plane of reality other than that to which we are used to seeing in the theatre opening the way to other understandings and sensations in the audience. The sense of the real world being conditioned by a sense of fantasy and grotesque leads the audience to start to make their own interpretations about what they are seeing and in this sense participating and even molding the play's sense. The puppet like quality of The Fairground Booth (The alternative title for  Blok's "The Fairground Booth" was "The Puppet Show") also suggests another state of being or other possibilities for the characters and the action of the play.

The Kabuki play "Yoshinoyama"where  the actors playing the roles Shizuka and her loyal servant  Tadanobu, directly and explicitly points to an art form and a situation outside the play. Tadanobu is firstly not human but is a fox disguised as a human. In one fragment the two characters freeze in pose of a husband and wife paper dolls which stand in the homes of Japanese families as symbols of filial loyalty. The fact that they become frozen as dolls for several moments builds layers of meaning recognized and contributed to by the knowledge and cultural sensitivities of the audience who will make connections to cultural variants outside of the play. The important thing here is that the fact that this is part of the play is also deliberately exposed. The device itself for referencing a particular element is displayed as a device.

The Fairground Booth Studies

This post is by way of explaining why the play The Fairground Booth is important to study and why it is necessary to go back to original sources. An historical approach to acting and theatre can  impact on the technical aspects of acting by explaining the context of present day theatre. This theme will be more fully developed in the book that I am writing about Blok and Meyerhold's presentation of The Fairground Booth in 1906. This play had an enormous influence on the direction of Russian Theatre and world theatre and it continues to influence theatrical innovation even to this day. Why because it established a principle, a new principle with a destructive, deconstructive element at its core. It was not just a question of change in one direction or another or a development towards a new tendency. The Fairground Booth was deeply revolutionary, its central theme I would argue, was the apocalypse and its intent was to create a new theatre without any preconditions. This I believe is what Meyerhold found so attractive in the play. To understand the meaning of The Fairground Booth one has to understand the apocalypse and its place in Russian thought especially in pre revolutionary Russia. The apocalypse was a metaphor or an aesthetic non sociological way of explaining the process of events in history which had not in fact yet occurred. The Fairground Booth was presented just after the first Russian revolution of 1905 which was considered by many as a prelude to events which took place in 1917 and to some extent in the world at large with World War 1 being a catalyst for other events in Russia. 

Cover of the book by Michael Craig

The Fairground Booth both as a book and a film will be part of The Russian Theatre Film Series.  A new book has been published with the same title which is a intermediate publication for understanding the series, a kind of behind the scenes look at how the films were made and how the project will develop in the future.

Why The Fairground Booth

Reasons for filming this play:

Why "The Fairground Booth" or "The Puppet Show" as it sometimes is called - "Balaganchik" in Russian. Well if you acknowledge that carnival has had an enormous influence on Russian theatre especially at the beginning of the 20th century then "The Fairground Booth" is the play which really underlined this fact. It was one of those watershed plays or theatrical events which defined the future and broke with the past. Alexander Blok's play and his cooperation with Meyerhold in "The Fairground Booth" served as a link between the symbolism of the early twentieth century and the revolution in culture and technology and society - it was the nexus between the old and the new theatre.

From this perspective, to pair a film about Vakhtangov, carnival and "The Fairground Booth" makes sense. Each film will stand on its own but each film will inform the other. Moreover it will also sit well against the two films already completed about Russian theatre: "Meyerhold Theatre and the Russian Avant-garde" and "Stanislavsky and the Russian Theatre". This will make up a series of five films covering an area which is less explored than say the theatre of Chekhov.

The connections will become clear over time as each film begins to develop. I will be charting the progress and development of these films here and in blogs and in a series of background video blogs across the internet. Some may claim that Blok's Fairground Booth is just a curiosity piece or not a classic drama. In subsequent blogs I will try and argue otherwise and  that it is as much of a classic as any play by Chekhov, Shakespeare or Ibsen and deserves its place in the history of world theatre. Blok's play paved the way for a new kind of theatre which relied less on naturalism and explored other means of expression.

However the question still arises why Blok and the "Balaganchik" and why now. Russian society and culture was changing at a rapid pace, to some extent this is still true of Russia. Any attempt to hold a mirror up to nature so to speak was then doomed to failure. Naturalism was ill equipped to deal with reality at the beginning of the 20th century. Events move on a at staggering pace. How does one reflect reality of the then Russia, how does one come to terms with it. One way is through masks and masquerades, to widen the expressive possibilities of what was then a narrowly defined view of the role of theatre and the content it should portray. This, in the context of The Russian Theatre Film series  is what is hoped will be achieved

Draft of Fairground Booth book proceeding

Many days work on the project I have been planning for some time -The Fairground Booth or 'The Puppet Show" by Alexander Blok. The play was first put on by Meyerhold in 1906 and I intend to revive a version of it as part of the Russian Theatre Film Series​. I have not fully decided whether to use computer graphics or a combination of Computer graphics animation and actors or just actors. Searching for a computer graphics designer with whom I can work to create the main characters - Pierrot, Harlequin and Columbina. This is a singularly important part of the project, key in fact. One of the avenues being explored at the moment is the links of the play to Shakespeare's Tempest and how Blok was influenced by this play. Both are concerned with masquerades and characters which are neither human or puppets but inhabit some in between existence which Prospero is always, in the case of Ariel, release them from. The theme of transformation and metamorphosis runs through the fabric of both plays alongside the carnival tragic/comic atmosphere which became an integral part of early Russian 20th century theatre.

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The Fairground Booth, Meyerhold and the Grotesque