While we've been in Russia, one director in particular has caught my eye: Yuri Butusov. He is a star of the Russian theatrical avant garde. He manages to produce packed houses month after month, full of people eager to see his challenging productions. His style is incredibly visceral, filled with haunting symbolism and aggressively loud sounds. He does to the old standards of theater what Charlie Parker does to the old standards of jazz. He chops them up, repurposes them, intensifies them. He deletes entire characters, and repeats scenes at his pleasure. He takes the story on long dreamlike tangents of dance and song. I was struck both by the Jazz sensibilities of his directing, and by his particular choice of music. His productions of Flight and The Seagull contained some of the most effective music choices I've ever seen in the theater.
Flight was very heavy on Anglo-American music. Songs from Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon were interspersed throughout. The play opens with a heartbeat juxtaposed with the cash register sounds from the beginning of "Money". Towards the end, "Money", "Time", and "Great Gig In The Sky" are played entirely. They strengthened Flight's themes of despair and desperation. The entire play has the same sort of dark, existential attitude of Dark Side of the Moon. Butusov contrasted the Pink Floyd and difficult, horrifying moments of the play with some extremely upbeat music. "Mr. Sandman", accompanied by a group of women, repeatedly served to segue into some of the shows more bizarre moments. Presumably, to signal dream sequences. However, it's hard to say exactly how intentional all of his music choices were lyrically. I had the privilege of getting to talk to him at a q/a session and asked him how he chose the music for Flight. He said that, essentially, he just listens to a lot of music, and when it comes time for the play he picks songs mostly intuitively. Another person asked if he knew what the words meant for the English music he uses such a great deal. He said that occasionally he'd look up lyrics, but usually just picks them for the way they sound and nothing else. He shared a story about his first production where he accidentally picked a song where the lyrics exactly matched the action, though he had no idea they did. It's hard to tell by watching his plays what music was picked for the lyrics and what wasn't. In Flight, "Mr. Sandman" seemed to pretty clearly tie into the dreamlike atmosphere of the the play, but other music choices weren't so clear. The play featured a cover of "Stacie's Mom" done in a lounge style. The context made it seem like he was going for lounge-y sounding music, but for English speakers the lyrics we comically out of place. The Americans in the audience (us) were the only ones laughing at the song. We got some strange looks.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter. The plays are produced for a Russian audience, and so the lyrics are beside the point. What is much more impressive is how well Butusov's music choices communicate the tone of a scene, or provoke certain emotions. In The Seagull, Butusov himself is a character, and a big band rendition of "Caravan" serves as his leitmotif. He runs on stage and dances to it wildly. The Seagull is all about the difficulties of theater, and "Caravan" comes to represent catharsis for Butusov. His performance in Seagull is extraordinarily manic, especially his dancing to the music. This theme of mania is also present in Flight. Towards the end an actor sings a Russian rock song and plays the tambourine more intensely than I've ever seen it played. His performance was desperate, like Butusov's dancing. The intensity seems very purposeful.
If I had to guess, I would say that his end with all of the deafening music and wild dancing is catharsis. Perhaps this catharsis is part of a larger system. Perhaps the musical mania present in his work is theatrical therapy. It was certainly that for me.
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