Michael and I were supposed to teach our English lesson at
the Resource Center yesterday. However, when we arrived we were greeted by dark
rooms, a locked door, and a man who just kept saying “No-No-Ara-Nyet.” As we
tried to kindly escape the No-man so that we could phone Nino and figure out
how everyone but us had been told class was cancelled, Giorgi walked up. Or
George, perhaps. The theater director.
It turns out that he is running theater workshops for
children as well as for adults. He asked is we were coming to the workshop.
Since we had suddenly found ourselves free for the evening, we thanked him for
the invite and followed him upstairs.
For the past few nights, I’ve been going to the adult
rehearsals with Maguala. I go for a number of reasons. First, I understand a
few more of the lines each night. This means the story is revealing itself to
me with more and more detail each night. Second, I like listening to Giorgi and
watching him work. I’ve always liked watching creative people work, but here
the situation is rather special. Most of the actors are older people from the
town. From what I can make out, most of them have been dancers, actors, singers,
or artists. In one conversation, an older woman asked why a handful of people
whose family name has a history of being attached to creative people weren’t
there. Giorgi replied that they had all declined to participate in his show.
They said they’re too busy. However, the show is being dedicated to their
surname’s most famous patriarch. It will be performed in a theater that was
named after the great man because of the great works he directed and acted in
there. Now here’s this (brilliant and well-intentioned) outsider (he has a
different surname) come from Tbilisi (even though he’s from Racha) to try to
revitalize the theater in memory of their patriarch…something they never did
themselves. Think there’s a bit of jealousy here? I do. It would explain why so
many people close to the surnames of my host family are involved in the play and are critical of Keti’s puppet show.
It’s like I fell into the world of the Montagues and Capulets—were they
families of mountain artists—and didn’t realize there was a feud until I had
already become attached to the people on both sides. After a bit of fumbling,
I’ve learned how to be as vague as possible if I ever have to talk to people on
one side about people on the other.
I was on my way to saying that I like to watch Giorgi work
with the older people. He addresses them as “aunt” and “uncle.” His lead is our
Giorgi: the bus-driver with a law degree who loves singing about Racha and is about
Giorgi’s age. The two of them spar and shout and then laugh and go back to the
show. Some of the older women consider themselves divas. The dialogues are in a
heavily poetic dialect that everyone has trouble with. In short, Giorgi has to
somehow demonstrate how much he respects each of these cast members while also
managing and directing them to prepare for the performance. The very first
practice, he had to remind them that “it’s called a repetition (the Georgian word for rehearsal) because you’re supposed
to repeat! You can’t do something different each time!” Yet he had to say this
to people who consider themselves quasi-professionals without sounding
patronizing.
So when yesterday I found myself following Giorgi up to the
rehearsal room a full 2 hours before Maguala’s rehearsal, I was intrigued and
excited. We joked as we walked up the stairs, but when we entered the rehearsal
room, his whole demeanor changed. There were about 15 students from age 11 to
18 waiting for him. Some of them were from my school—some of my cleverest and
most charismatic kids. Giorgi continually addressed them as “kids” or “my good
ones.” He was strict: correcting their posture, barking at them for whispering,
calling them out for not supporting each other. He began by sitting them down
and explaining what kinds of behavior he doesn’t like in children. Then he told
them what kinds of behavior he likes in people.
He asked them about their names and backgrounds. He asked
them what they think theater is and what they consider Georgia’s conflicts to
be. From there he went into an exercise. He asked how many of them were
familiar with Tbilisi. All except one student raised their hands. He
congratulated the one girl who didn’t raise her hand, and then he asked the
others if they were familiar with the metro system. They said they were. He
asked them to close their eyes and picture a subway car. When they opened their
eyes, he asked how many seats their subway cars had. The answers ranged from 6
to 12. Then he asked if the people on the imaginary subway cars were talking to
each other. The students said no. He explained that he wanted them to notice
how they each counted the subway seats differently. This, he said, was because
they each have their own minds and imaginations, and that this is part of human
nature. Then he remarked that it’s true that people in such a small space as a
subway car often don’t talk to each other, and that this is part of our nature
too.
He continued: “Theater is about conflict. When people have
conflicts, they can go in the street and start hitting each other in the face.”
I can’t directly translate what was said next, but the gist was that theater
presents a better platform for analyzing and resolving conflicts. In part, this
is because the actors learn how to empathize with someone else through becoming
someone else. On stage, he stipulated, they were to keep their street lives to
themselves. What was going on at home, who they liked, whose family they
disliked…all of it was banned from the stage. Then he put them through a series
of exercises, including one which—remarkably—had them sitting on the floor.
Maybe I'm a bit awe-struck.
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