Tonight Konstantin Arkadyevich held his final meeting with his first year students, giving them their homework assignments for the summer, and preparing them for next year. The students will continue their curriculum of etude work, but instead of etudes based on observations, objects, paintings, animals and the like, the students will delve into what is called этюды к образу. In english, the best way to identify this concept of work is 'etudes as a step towards a character/image'. It's not quite pedagogical scene work, but it is a step towards creating a sharpened representation of a character, one that is truly 'far from oneself'. The literature to be used for the purposes of these etudes will be Dostoevsky's 'The Brothers Karamazov'.
I've mentioned this before, but I love sitting in on Raikin's classes. The man has a plan, and it seems he has a very good idea of where he wants his students to end up at the end of four years...and it's only the end of year one. And he's already hinting at it. Of course there will be changes along the way, but the amount of thought and foresight used to structure the entire four year course of study is inspiring.
Of course most of the evening was spent talking about Dostoevsky's book, his last and greatest achievment. Raikin even quoted Einstein as saying that 'not a single book I have read in my life has ever invoked in me a larger desire to live and to create than The Brothers Karamazov...' (sorry for my paraphrased translation of the quote....It's probably not exact, but that's the drift.), and said that The Brothers Karamazov was a work of such rare importance that one can divide a person's life into two periods: before reading Brothers Karamazov, and after. It's significance and message is that essential and universal.
Raikin also spoke about the need to encounter certain authors during a students course of study, likening them to 'fronts on a battlefield'...'As we were encounter these authors, as we travel through the zones they occupy, we learn something about them and about ourselves as we struggle with them...'
This is a concept I've heard Raikin mention before. I remember translating him for a question and answer session he gave the A.R.T students in 2006, at which point he mentioned that there are certain authors a student must encounter before they can truly count themselves an actor. For Raikin, those authors are Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Ostrovsky, and Chekhov. As an addendum, as if reciting the vowels of the alphabet 'and sometimes Moliere' was added, but he admitted that every teacher has their own taste for what they think their students must encounter on their path to the profession.
The value of this selection is that each of these authors demands their own unique approach to the material; one cannot play Shakespeare the same way one would play Chekhov, and so on. The more of these great authors we encounter in our training, the more well rounded and better actors we become, better suited to face the challenges of the various genres these authors left after them.
Perhaps one of the more memorable quotes of the evening was the closing note of Victor Rizhakov, quoting an ancient Arab philosopher, reminding the students of the kind of approach they must take towards the great tasks imposed on their summer: 'Don't try to find logic in time, as there are only two things in the world; love, and love.'
It is this love, he said, with which we must meet the work presented to us.
-A
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