Sunday, March 14, 2010

Let’s Go Clubbing at 6 p.m.

When you’re a bit drunk, it’s 3:30 a.m., and your beloved house mother asks you to go see a hip hop concert with her the next day, it sounds like the best idea EVER. Such is how I wound up going with Marianna and the other 5th floor ART girls (dramaturgs Laura and Rachel, voice student Jane) to see a music concert on Monday night, one week after arriving in Moscow.

Marianna’s friend Polina, who is more like a surrogate daughter and just graduated from MXAT, was singing in a benefit concert for some random childhood illness I didn’t quite catch. After a long night of celebrating in the dorm following the opening of our class production Alice vs. Wonderland, a long day of touring the city, we all got home at 4 p.m. totally exhausted. Marianna informed us that the concert was at 6 p.m. and we’d leave at 5 p.m. Luckily, she had made us borscht, which was amazing and totally revived our spirits. So we set off into the unknown…following Marianna blindly. We didn’t know where we were going or what metro lines to take…but that is the Russian way. Follow the leader. Walk with “jet legs,” as my friend Anya put it.

We got off at the Botanical Gardens stop, which was pretty far out of the city center (called the Garden Ring). From there Marianna called Polina and we found a cab to take all five of us. This of course meant Rachel had to sit on Jane’s lap in one of the smallest cars I’ve ever sat in. When we finally reached our destination it turned out to be a multi-storied combination restaurant/theater/club designed and decorated by the Armenian Dali. Clearly we were about to have a cultural experience.

Polina welcomed us, we paid our cover and she told us to go in and get a drink before the show began. We entered the next room and found ourselves in a full blown club: music thumping, spinning colored and strobe lights, bar, dance floor…and about ten other people total. It was so bizarre—the atmosphere of a dance club felt rather ghostly and inappropriate at that hour. And the décor was quite a sight, resembling a cross between a burlesque club and a surrealist trip.

By the time the show actually began there were more like 30 people there, and in the end there were maybe 50. While Polina’s singing was pretty good, unfortunately her sets were short and spaced out between some pretty terrible rap. Jane would translate what she could understand, but both the music and the lyrics were about as cliché as they could get. Let’s just say I now know the word for “my heart” in Russian. Hand gestures helped indicate the state of that heart. Although I must say, setting a rap to elevator jazz music was a strong choice.

Watching the crowd (a mixture of teeny boppers and glamazons with normal looking boyfriends, also bizarre), I didn’t really feel like it was only 7 p.m. Granted, I was still getting over jet lag at that point, but I began to think about how much we tend to associate activities’ appropriateness with time of day. You can drink but only after 5 p.m.; you can’t walk the same streets after dark alone that you would in daylight; you can eat a hamburger with fries at lunch but it would be weird for breakfast.

I might be totally off base here, but I began to wonder if this time/activity correlation works differently in Russia. After all, with so many alcoholics in this country it’s not uncommon to walk by a restaurant and see someone drinking a beer at 10:30 a.m. In fact, I found myself questioning whether I would find the same experience as weird if I were in the States at a friend’s concert. So maybe what I perceived as a semi-bizarre adventure was somewhat normal. Here’s hoping I have some more chances to find out.

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