The Fairground Booth Dairy - 4

The King of Time

Reading a book called "Deleuze and Futurism" by Helen Palmer and there is mention of Khlebnikov and his poem "The King Of Time" - a title which it appears he also applied to himself.  

Trained in the natural sciences and mathematics and an artist and poet, Khlebnikov thought he had discovered the Laws of Time and Tables of Destiny, by which enlightened humans could live in harmony with themselves and with nature. He devoted his  restless life to finding a language which would articulate his vision. Experiments with words became  paths to a reinvigorated future, and produced some of the most extraordinary poems in the Russian language.

The presence of time in poetic rhythms forced him to look for rhythms beneath the conventional ones to seek meaning in the cyclical patterns of the universe, according to Helen Palmer the books author. This links to Blok who also sought patterns and rhythms of history below the surface of facts and chronological events of the day to day. 

Andrey Bely and other authors of the time were also engaged in a similar task. In addition, Larionov developed a model of time looking backwards and forwards simultaneously. 

And this in turn links to the idea, popular at the time that there were different layers and dimensions in reality. 

This also connects to Blok's ideas in The Fairground Booth, the Avant-garde, theatre etc. One of the weaknesses of and dissatisfaction with theatre of the time was that it was stuck in one point of time. It could not move forward. It was stuck at a historical time and stuck at the time the play was written or the time in the play itself in that it had to adhere to an accepted or conventional idea of time and the time that was being represented in the play. 

The Fairground Booth abandons these notions of time. It is as if time does not exist. In the play there is no historical time. The mixture of genres especially theatrical genres across time in one play seems to encourage the idea if time being concertinaed into a flexible simultaneity, where time has all but disappeared. 

The Fairground Booth Dairy 3

Porcelain Dolls and Masks

Whilst working on two projects at once, there is one which I cannot talk about at the moment. However The Fairground Booth is always taking small steps forward. I have come to the stage where I am thinking about casting The Fairground Booth. Overall I have realised what kind of look I might want for the actors. Essentially I will begin the search for faces which have a natural soft porcelain skin - like porcelain dolls, human but pale and smooth so that perhaps no makeup or very little will be required. Riding on the metro yesterday through Moscow I began to seek out such  unusual faces and they are there to be found, so this is the direction I will take on on casting. One of the advantages of this apart form being on theme is that the "look" should cross between puppets and graphics and pictures and masks and actors so that the difference between all these components are blurred or at least ambiguous.

There are of course other grotesqueries in the characters of the play but that is a different casting decision.

I also plan to film some buildings on Ostozhensko Street not far from Christ the Saviour Cathedral. There are a group of art nouveau (or "Modern" as it is in Russian) apartments with fantastical swirling mask like designs and grotesque faces from that period.  I had intended to film some buildings of this style but these are better as the motifs are mask like and can be integrated into the film by dissolving to real masks. The word here is grotesque. Even though the lines and the  motifs are beautifully designed there is a strong hint of the grotesque as the swirling plaster and stone images return and delve into the mouth of the "mask" which is not in fact a mask but the suggestion of a mask which makes it all the more effective and illusive.

The porcelain is akin to the plaster of the decorative designs on the buildings linking the architecture to masks and in turn to a face.

Harlequin and Chariots

The Fairground Booth update

Work on The Fairground Booth film proceeding well: My intention is to start a journal which will chronicle the progress of the actual process of editing and producing the film.

Blok's aim in writing The Fairground Booth is to liberate us from whatever trust may have been placed in traditional theatrical practice. Part of this process involves another form of understanding. The Fairground Booth therefore has a visuality or pictorial sense in its graphic unworded movement.

Blok wants us to see that out of the chaos emerges a new form or sense of order through the theatrical.

The author is introduced  not as a god like creator but as fallible and weak.

For Blok, the Cosmos as a subject underpins the apocalypse - as in the fall of the stars and the heavens crashing to earth.The very multilayeredness of themes invokes and multiplies new themes, direction,openings and expansions.

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.