Michael Craig - Copernicus Films

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.

In an article by James David Jacobs about Shakespeare and music he writes "The Tempest stands at the crossroads of theatrical history: between the Renaissance and the Baroque, between the Elizabethan theatre of the imagination and the Jacobean spectacle, between the primacy of the word and the primacy of sensory entertainment". Similarly The Fairground Booth was written and performed at the threshold of a new epoch in 1906 in Russia. The common link between these plays is music. It's no coincidence that at the same time these upheavals were taking place in England, the art form known as opera was being born in Italy (the first operatic masterpiece, Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, was premiered in 1607.) And it is not an accident that  The Fairground Booth  appeared at the junction between two epochs and the beginning of what we understand as the modern era.