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.

The Russian Theatre Film Series book - published and available: It’s difficult to find an appropriate description of the book "The Russian Theatre Film Series". Essentially it is an account of an arts documentary series with all its pitfalls, successes, limitations and achievements. The three films which have so far been completed are " Meyerhold, Theatre and the Russian Avant-garde ", " Stanislavsky and the Russian Theatre " and " Vakhtangov and the Russian Theatre ". This book is part of the overall project - The Russian Theatre Film Series and is a milestone and a marker in this developing project. It is also a commentary on what it means to make an independent arts documentary film series in a foreign country namely Russia. Not so much from the technical point of view although there is plenty of technical aspects covered but more from the point of view of a kind of interior process. It is an expedition into the phenomenology of film-m...

Front cover for the book "The Russian Theatre Film Series" Cover completed for the Russian Theatre Film series book. A large step forward as I was worried about how it might look. In the end I only spent 3 - 4 hours putting it together ready for printing.  The book weaves together the experiences of filming in Moscow and Russia on The Russian Theatre Film Series. How it came together, who were the main characters involved in the series and charts the pitfalls, the struggles and the joys of making independent films in a foreign country in this case Russia, Moscow.  Often I am asked how do you begin to make a film, where do you start. For many it is easy, you start and that's it. For others that first step seems like a mountain standing before them. This book attempts to answer some of those questions by re living the steps which it took to make this series. Not necessarily step by step but the book certainly travels a distance that most independent film makers ha...

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.

Dostoevsky and The Fairground Booth Posted on   October 13, 2016   by   michaelcraig Planning an extra chapter about Dostoevsky and the Fairground Booth in the book  Blok, Meyerhold and the Fairground Booth   thefairgroundbooth.com . Its come about due to further research into the symbolist painters of the time who were involved with theatre set design and theatre in general in Russia and Europe: Benois, Somov,Golovin and more particularly Dobuzhinsky. He designed sets for  The Devil’s Play,  and an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s  The Devils . Dobuzhinsky also designed the frontispiece for Blok and Meyerhold’s play  The Fairground Booth. Dobuzhinsky’s illustration for the set of “The Devil’s Play” This chapter and section will give an extra depth to the discussion about The Fairground Booth. It will also serve one of my intention which is to put the play in the wider context of Russian and European literature. Attached are the frontispiece for...

This post is a fragment from a chapter of the book which will be published some time next year. The context is a comparison between the ballet "Petrushka" and "The Fairground Booth". Both share roots in the Russian fairground and the figures of the commedia dell'arte. To understand a play like The Fairground Booth which has no plot, no characters, no real sense of forward movement or natural time and broke from the traditions of realism and naturalism, requires an approach to Russian culture which moves beyond its surface reflections. When, as Bakhtin states, Dostoevsky's work embodies elements of carnival, (something which is not immediately associated with Dostoevsky), then it becomes clear why it is possible to find clues to the meaning of "The Fairground Booth" in works of literature as various as "The Brothers Karamazov" and The ballet "Petrushka" and vise a versa. For those seeking unadulterated cultural forms this approac...