“Stanislavski” by Tatiana Tatarchevskiy

Studio 6, when she entered it, turned out to be a square empty space, with black walls and soft grey linoleum floor. There was nothing about this place that her eye could hold onto, no posters, no props, just a few randomly assembled wiry chairs stacked on top of each other. She turned the light switch on, pulled one of the chairs and sat on it, leaning on the wall. Through the thin partition, she could hear the voices in the nearby studio, ascending repetition of piano scales, someone’s rather bad singing. It was still early, only 9am on a Sunday. If it wasn’t for this workshop, she would have slept longer. But it was Helen’s present for her birthday and so she had to come.

It had been some time now that she and Helen decided that for each other’s birthdays they wouldn’t exchange any physical objects as presents – there would be no more of another pair of earrings or silk scarves; instead, they organized special experiences for each other. A ticket to a Japanese modern art exhibit in Barbican, a guided bus tour to the Seven Sisters cliffs, an Indian cuisine cooking class at Borough Kitchen. This year Helen had a proud expression on her face when she pulled out a printed page from a small ivory envelope, “Something you might appreciate – an acting class! Based on Stanislavski’s method!”

“Helen, dear, but I am not an actor…” she said instead of thanking her.

“Don’t worry! They advertise it as suiting anyone who wants to gain control over their emotions… Confidence building, you know. Great for women our age…” This last phrase was said with laughter. Typical Helen, she thought now, slightly aggressive, always sarcastic, making her feel happy and self-conscious at the same time.

“Ah there’s no one here…” she heard someone say, as the studio door opened, and the other workshop participants started entering in. Among them was a man in an orange and black bicycle attire with large lettering on his chest, a young woman with a gate of a ballet dancer, another woman whose face expression had something of a little girl’s look, and then, later, a tall blonde with beautiful waist-long hair, massive earrings, leather pants. Suddenly, she had an urge to leave – regretting that she had come after all. Who was she to even be here, sharing the floor with these tall slim people, all talented actors, all younger than herself? Damn you, Helen.

Finally, a man – a red and white stretched-out oversized sweater, tired swollen face – entered the studio and she realized this must be their workshop tutor. In the workshop leaflet he was described as a seasoned theatre director, working the stage of many Russian theatres, experimental and classical, before emigrating to the UK. She tried to remember what she knew about Stanislavski. The only thing that came to mind was that the famous theatre director used to shout, “I don’t believe it!”, when acting wasn’t persuasive enough. She would sometimes use this phrase to end an argument with her husband.

“At the core of Stanislavski’s system,” the tutor began, squinting at the scribbled notes on a yellow pad, “was the idea that actors should train their personality. This is what we will try to work with today…” He looked at them from above the small glistening squares of his glasses, as if preparing them for what was coming.

She didn’t believe in the possibility of training one’s personality. In fact, it’d been a long time since she decided that it was impossible for people to change, a seemingly simple realization, although she regretted it’d taken her so long to arrive at. That’s what she would end up thinking of when talking to her mother who insisted on keeping their old flat in Russia, even though  none of them had any plans on ever going back again, or when thinking about her husband who kept chasing another new enterprise around the world, moving between Hong Kong, Dubai and Palo Alto, gracing her and their son, who at twenty-nine still lived with her, with his presence around Christmas time.

“First things first: let’s start with being on stage!” the tutor continued. “We all feel rather uncomfortable when facing the need to talk in public. That’s because you need to approach it with the right mind. And what would Stanislavski mean by the right mind?”

To illustrate, he asked them to rearrange their seats, with all the chairs pulled on one side and a heavy blue cube pushed towards the center of the room. The ceiling light was adjusted in such a way that the cube was right underneath it, in the limelight. The instructor asked for volunteers, and the bicycle man eagerly raised his hand. He walked to the cube enthusiastically and sat on it grinning, his arms crossed on his chest.

“Take a good look at him!” the instructor pointed at the man. “Let’s all spend some time looking at him!” Doing that felt uncomfortable, she could see that the others felt uncomfortable too, attempting to mask the discomfort by jokes and giggles. Soon the bicyclist – or who was he really? perhaps it was just an outfit? – pressed under their stares began shuffling his arms awkwardly, an uncertain smile on his face.

“Now,” the tutor prompted the man, “think of something! Think about your day up to this moment. Think about it in as much detail as possible.”

The man took an exaggerated deep breath and closed his eyes.

“Think of when you woke up, how you placed your feet on the floor, what kind of cornflakes you ate.”

“It was eggs and bacon!” the man interjected, his eyes open, a wide grin on his face.

“Fine, eggs and bacon! But when you are thinking of it, play this like you are watching a film in your head! A film of your day!”

She noticed now how, slowly, as the man was getting deeper into his thoughts, something about his body had shifted, his posture becoming steady, his ironic smirk disappearing; as this happened, she could see how his face began to look different, how it turned lyrical, even interesting.

“See!” the tutor pointed at the transformation in the man. “By replaying the events of the day in his mind, he engages in what Stanislavski would call “inner action”, and this idea is at the core of Stanislavski’s method. Because he would say that at the center of any emotion is action. Even if we are sitting still, we still can imagine doing something. This inner action can guide our presence on stage!”

She didn’t want to participate in the exercise. She knew she would feel uncomfortable sitting on that cube with everyone looking at her, making her feel small, bare, unprotected, and that no amount of trying would help her feel otherwise. Besides, she thought, there had been nothing interesting about her day. She remembered how that morning before leaving, she had peeked into her son’s room, his things scattered on the floor, as if he was still a teenager: a pair of jeans, a pile of music scores, the unpacked sound equipment from his concert last night, his guitar. She remembered one of their recent conversations, the typical kind of conversations they had lately. How he told her that he no longer believed in a career in music. How he was doubting himself. How he was tired of having to trail to Greenwich early in the mornings to teach music to a flock of nasty Year 8s after a night gig. She also remembered how he told her that he was thinking of moving to Brazil, following a friend, and how, when he said it, her face dropped. Brazil? As if moving to another place you can change anything about yourself! No, she didn’t say that. She hoped she didn’t.

“Body and inner world! The two are interlinked, forever connected,” the workshop continued. “Stanislavski wanted actors to constantly observe – themselves, others, people’s gestures, facial expressions, reactions – so that once they are on stage, they can easily use all this toolkit to play anger or love or indecision.”

For the next exercise the tutor asked them to imagine an object and try to engage with it. The first volunteer to participate was the girl-woman. She walked over to the center of the room and stood there, smiling, stretching the folds on her bell-shaped skirt.

“Imagine you are holding a balloon!” the tutor said, and the woman’s face lit up. “Think about it. Is it a big balloon? A small one? What color is it?”

With each of these instructions, the woman had adjusted her moves – stretching her hands or drawing them close to each other – to demonstrate the shifting size of the balloon.

“Now, pull it by the string!”

Watching the woman move, the other participants also stood up off their seats and soon everyone around her was moving frantically, haphazardly, pulling the strings of some invisible balloons. What nonsense, she thought. There is no balloon.

“Now, imagine that this is not a balloon but a snowball!” said the tutor. With these words, the room had transformed yet again. The woman at the center started moving her hands as if she was shaping a small snowball. The bicycle man was throwing something at the ballerina girl; the long-haired goddess swiftly darted, as if trying to divert her body from an imminent snowball. Even though she didn’t want to participate, she suddenly felt her hands grow cold. She looked at them, turning them palm up and down, and had a sensation – not a thought but a faint tingling sensation in the tips of her fingers. Mittens! She wondered where she had kept her mittens.

“Shape it into something else…” the tutor kept giving them directions. “Yes! Roll it, make it into a big ball that you want to make a snowman of!”

She remembered a recent call from her mother. As was common lately, her mother, who lived in Miami, would call her at odd hours, forgetting about the time difference, often just to recall her recent trip to the pharmacy, or to talk to her about a film that she had watched. This time it was a film about a French woman who had traveled to London to be a nanny and had fallen in love with the boy’s father. While her mother was talking, she inspected the details of her face, magnified by her laptop screen, and this time registered her mother’s heavy breathing along with two odd red stains glowing on her chin and left cheek. When she told her mother that she should call the cardiologist first thing in the morning, her mother said that she had no need for a doctor – she was still doing her morning exercises and was now trying a new set of breathing techniques.

A snowman? When she looked at her hands, strangely, she could feel the freezing sensation in them growing; it was as if they were filled with some substance that was increasing its volume, becoming shapeless, getting out of control. Snow? At some point her hands had trouble fitting this substance into one mold. She dropped whatever this was on the floor and sat down.

*

During the break she headed to the café located on the ground floor of the building. The place around the cafe, an open floor with low chairs and small tables, was buzzing. Lots of children, mostly girls, all a certain age: five- or six-year-olds, all somehow looking strangely out-of-time: in neat pinafores, their hair tightly gathered in braids tied with ribbons. They must have arrived for an audition held at the studio next door. As she was walking by, she noticed the mothers, their stern faces, their utmost concentration. One of the mothers, holding a curler over her daughter’s head, hissed at her child to stand still.  For a long time, she had been like these women. When her son was younger, she would constantly drive him around London, find him the best music teacher, best guitar, sign him up for competitions, recitals. Once recently, she asked him to share what his earliest memories were. There were a lot of things that he came to recall. A worm inside an apricot cut in half; diving off board a small boat on the Volga with his father; and how his grandma once fed him her medicine taking it for sweet syrup.  They laughed, amused at this random assortment of memories, but then she found it a bit painful that he didn’t mention any memory of her.

As she was standing in the queue in the cafe, the tutor joined her. She nodded at him and, as they began to talk, she told him that she was Russian, like him, and that she had left the country over twenty years ago. Up close she noticed that he looked much older than she thought of him; maybe he was even her age…He told her that he had left to join his husband in 2005. After that, he said, they moved around Europe, first Berlin, then Paris. Now London. Sipping the oat latte, she told him how she always thought there was a moment of something accidental about the place where we eventually landed. He said that was true. Pure accident. But then, he added, the places where we return to are not an accident at all. After all Stanislavski had many chances to immigrate, to leave Soviet Russia, but always went back.

*

“For Stanislavski, part of working on a role was trying to live through the same experiences as your character,” the second half of the workshop began. “An actor should become a collector of experiences; experience as much as possible – because our bodies remember!”

For the next exercise the tutor asked them to stand in a circle, himself in the center. When he pointed at one of them and said, “Splat!”, that person was to duck down and the two people on this person’s side were to point their conjoined fingers at each other, as if it was a gun, and say back, “Splat!” Whoever didn’t catch it, didn’t duck, said something else other than “Splat”, was out of the game. “Awaken your bodies! Stop thinking! Just react!” commanded the tutor.

So they went. The tutor pointed at a bicycle man, and he ducked, while the women next to him, the blonde and the ballerina, pointed their imaginary guns at each other, although ballerina, instead of saying “Splat”, said something like “Oh!” and was instantly out.

She thought back of the tutor’s words about how we keep returning to a certain place. What was this place for her? Was there such a place? She remembered how once – it was still back in Russia – she had been stopped by a Romani woman on the street, begging to read her palm. At first, she wanted to walk away, but then something made her agree. The woman took her hand and was gently cradling it. “You have so many of them!” she had pointed at her palm punctured by multiple troughs of lifelines. It had always puzzled her too. “This one is very short!” the woman’s finger was tracing the most visible line. “But then next to it, there is this one – it has many breaking points. Disease or heartbreak! And the faintest one of them breaks here, in the first half of your life, but then it continues, and is the longest one…” She asked the gypsy which one it would be after all. But the woman never had a chance to respond, having to retrieve quickly, as the police raid was approaching, thus leaving her in limbo.

“Splat!” the tutor was pointing at her, a touch of smile on his face. Without a pause, she said “Splat” back – with her pointed fingers shooting at the bicycle man.

“But is it possible to learn how to do this?” asked the long-legged woman. They all stood in a circle, their cheeks red and hair disheveled. Now she noticed that this woman was not a goddess, as she seemed to her originally, that there were blemishes on the side of her cheek, and the way she talked in a high-pitched voice indicated that she probably was still a student. “Isn’t it that certain people are just born with it?

“Born with what?” asked the instructor.

“Well, talent?” the blonde said smiling. “Acting talent?”

The tutor walked along the front of the room, quiet, before coming with an answer. “Well… No! And that is the trick!”

Then he paused and glanced around the room.

“Stanislavski would say that anyone can be an actor but didn’t want anybody to act! He wanted his actors… to play! We all do it as children. We should be able to do it as adults!” Here he paused, scratching the back of his head for ideas. “So let’s try it – pretend that I have just received an alarming text on my phone. Here…” He pulled his phone out, exaggeratingly shaking its black screen in front of their faces. “I’ve just got a message that there is an active shooter in the building. “Emergency!” We cannot leave, we cannot stay. What do we do?”

Right away the mood in the room had changed: a waft of anxiety entered the air, everyone’s movement was touched by agitation, perplexion on everyone’s face. The man in the bicycle attire grabbed a leg from the nearby chair, brandishing it with both hands, as if it was a baseball bat. The wide-eyed woman-girl ducked down and trotted along the wall towards the door on the other side of the studio, locking it with an imaginary padlock. The blonde clasped hands with the ballerina, attempting to hide under an imaginary desk, whispering loudly: “I can hear his footsteps! What are we going to do if he walks in?”

It was just her who couldn’t do anything again. Yet this time it was not because she didn’t want to participate. On the contrary, she could relate to this situation quite well. A roll of film of distant memory had started unfolding in her mind – but then this memory saddled her, as if that snowman that she’d just been making suddenly turned into a lump of heavy wet snow dumping her underneath it. She couldn’t move; she felt her legs trembling; inside she’d become so weak that she had to seek for that cube and sat on it, in the middle of the room, her arms crossed on her chest, but this time no one was paying attention to her, as everyone around her was playing with their utmost vigor the suggested scenario.

“Are you alright?” asked her the tutor.

“Yes,” she said. “I am fine.”

The studio had another door, on the other side, and she realized that while the opposite door was shut, this door had been ignored. Sitting on the cube, she was now fully focused on this door, her mind fixated on the silver bulb of the heavy round doorknob. The door wasn’t locked, that was all her mind was able to think of, her teeth clutching. It’s not locked! She thought she could hear the footsteps, the swoosh of gravel, cursing – they were getting closer, like on that day, once, back in her previous life. As if through a telescope, she could see the doorknob move closer and closer, magnifying, its size increasing, until she could discern every tiny screw keeping it in place, every tiny dust speck on it. And then, suddenly, she thought she could see the doorknob move. Twitch, roll left and right. She felt the need to do something – move? Run?  But she was now completely paralyzed. Frozen. She couldn’t even scream for help. It felt as if the others in the room were far away, at a distance. She could register their bodies, huddling, crawling – but it was as if they were wrapped in some grey fog. And then, just when she thought that the doorknob’s jiggling was intensifying, she jumped on her seat and ran towards the door, switching the lock with a loud click, making everyone turn their heads towards her. The door now was firmly shut.

“Tremendous work, everyone!” the tutor’s voice called them back to reality. “You have completely inhabited this world. Stanislavski would say that he believed you.”

*

When she left the studio, the foyer was empty and quiet. All the girls and their mothers were now gone, only someone’s brown scrunchy lay forgotten on the floor. The café had a hand-written sign “Back in 15 minutes” pinned to the cash machine. Even though she wasn’t hungry, she stood lingering by the counter, looking mindlessly over the spread of waffles, tuna sandwiches and boxed juices. At this moment the workshop tutor hurried past her towards the exit. Seeing her, he slowed down and approached her.

“I hope you found our workshop interesting,” he said.

She let out a smile and then, surprising herself, said, “It actually happened to me.”

She had rarely shared that story with anybody; in fact, it had all but left her, buried deep in her memory, as one of those faint lifelines that ended abruptly, but she liked the tutor and didn’t want him to feel bad about his workshop.

“That summer, back in Russia, the three of us – my son maybe 3 or 4-years old, myself and my husband – stayed at a small family resort on the other bank of the Volga, you know, a camp of 10-15 bungalows,” she began, hurrying, as if the story, having arrived so abruptly, could leave her any minute, as abruptly as well.

Their days were filled with river swimming and spotting hedgehogs in the forest surrounding the camp, and also her son’s favorite – fishing in a small creek nearby. The three of them would wake up before the sunset to trail to the creek and stand there, knee deep in the duckweed-adorned water, later returning with a bundle of small fishes that she would fry on a portable stove, set on the floor on their hut’s porch. She remembered cleaning the fishes with a pocketknife, rolling them in a deep coat of salt and flour, deep-frying them in sunflower oil with their heads attached – and then eating them, spitting their tiny heads out.

Then one day her husband took a boat back to town on the other bank of the Volga for a meeting, leaving her and their son in their small hut. Her son that day had asked her to go fishing but she said let’s just stay and wait for Papa to come back. They were sitting on the porch of their small hut, her son playing with his toys, she suntanning, when they heard these snapping sounds.

“At first, imagine, I couldn’t understand what it was,” she said, ridiculing her shortsightedness at the moment. “A car engine firing off? Fireworks?” The instructor stood silent next to her; she felt that he may have needed to be somewhere but she was intent on finishing her story.

When she looked up in the direction of the pops, she saw them. A small band of men, their immense torsos naked, in camouflage pants, with their military boots on, three or four of them, with semi-automatic guns in both hands, walking methodically, firing off in all directions. This was 1993 or 1994, the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the news was filled with reports of gang shootings and dead bodies; so seeing these men, she immediately knew what was happening. Her next move was to grab her son and run inside their bungalow. There she slid him under the bed and placed her hand over his mouth to keep quiet.

“He must have been three years old, there was no way to explain to him what was happening,” she accounted for her actions.

“I am sorry…-”

The tutor shook his head trying to find the right words, but she gestured him to stop, as now, carried away by her story, she didn’t want anything to interrupt it.

“The strangest thing was that for some stupid reason – an instinct maybe – I had left the door open. Well, maybe it wasn’t that stupid. Because at that moment I thought this would signal to the shooters that the hut was empty…”

As she said that, she thought that again she could hear the approaching footsteps, the swoosh of gravel on the path leading to their hut, the ascending heavy steps on the wooden porch that still had the beach towels drying on it from the previous day. And after that – a plaintive cracking of their bungalow’s door, as it was prodded open wider, pushed by some invisible hand, the sound that lasted an eternity.

“They left eventually,” she said. “Only one person, the resort driver, was gravely wounded. Perhaps it was the case of them coming just to intimidate the resort owner. So, all ends well that ends well. Wasn’t it Shakespear who said it?”

“I am sorry,” the tutor said. “I didn’t mean to stir these traumatic memories.”

“No, no, please don’t worry!” she protested. “I loved your workshop. And Stanislavski.”

She remembered that on that day her son, while she was pressing his mouth so that he wouldn’t utter a sound, fell asleep. Didn’t see a thing! After the shooters were gone, they stayed under the bed for what seemed like eternity, her entire body shaking, unable to move, while her son was peacefully asleep. When, in the evening, her husband returned, he had trouble finding them; his hands were shaking when he helped them out from under the bed.

*

On the way home, on the upper deck of the bus, she scrolled her phone. There was a reel about a woman and her husband who was French, and she referred to him as my prince. She wouldn’t refer to her husband as prince but now she felt grateful that all those years ago, after that episode at the summer camp, he applied and won the green card lottery – he’s always been so lucky! – and they moved to their first immigration destination – the US. Later, with the US passport they got the freedom to move to any other country they wanted to. Isn’t that what that Romani woman had seen in her hand after all?

The man in the reel was cooking something elaborate with cauliflower and turkey breasts. She remembered that it was her birthday dinner tonight but then all she had in her fridge was a head of old lettuce. Her son had told her that a friend was coming over. She googled lettuce recipes. But all she found was its nutritional facts. 5% of daily potassium intake. And a video advising how to grow perfect lettuce every time.

This was the friend that he’d be following to Brazil; this was probably what the conversation would be about at the table. She should be more prepared now, she thought. She will keep her face straight, she will imagine something, as if she really couldn’t care less for her son leaving. Thanks to Stanislavski’s method, she now knew how to do it. As she was about to put off her phone, a call from Helen had arrived. She wanted to answer the call but then lingered and eventually decided not to. Hid the phone in her purse. Put the purse on the seat next to her. She would text Helen. Soon. And maybe one day she will tell her more.

From the author: “With thanks to Konstantin Kamenski for his workshops on the history of Russian theatre where we laughed and cried and experienced moments of absolute magic.”