The World of Russian Language and Culture: A Dance with the Ocean – a Waltz with the Art by Alessandro Baricco and Oleg Menshikov

"He, who wins life, loses fortune"

Leonid Zorin

“I have always been amazed by such things with paintings. They hang for years. Then, for no reason at all, bam, they fall down. They hang there, on a nail, nobody touches them. Then, one moment, bam, they fall like a stone. In absolute silence, everything around is quiet, there is not even a fly nearby, and they fall, for no good reason. Why at that precise moment?”

Travel on an ocean liner is a dream for many of us… Bam! A painting fell down. Your dream can now become reality. Some of us during our entire lives have not been able to go up on a ship, while others never took the risk of descending upon sinful earth. What is better, to exist in a dream, without living, or to live without a dream? You have a chance to try and understand this, if you embark on a most unusual voyage. You will not need a visa, or a suitcase. It is enough to just buy a ticket… to the theatre…

“Ladies and gentlemen, signore and signora, madam and messier - Welcome to this ship, this swimming town, entirely like the Titanic. Calm down, stay where you are, the signor is worried, I can see it clearly enough. Welcome to the ocean… ”

Just don’t forget to turn off your phones. Video and photo recording is prohibited. Trust us, what you are about to see and to hear, you will not be able to tell anyone. It is too personal. Instead, buy them a ticket for the next “trip”, so they hear everything with their ears and see it with their eyes, and most importantly, feel it with their hearts.

“… before your eyes is a miracle, in your ears – amazement, in your legs – rhythm, and in your heart – the sound of a unique, impossible to imitate, endless ATLANTIC JAZZ BAAAAND!”

“If you don’t know what it is, then it is jazz.” For some reason it has become fashionable among the rich to listen to the music of the poor…

What kind of ship is it? Oh, it is a unique three-deck dream-liner, history-ship! As the greatest musician of our ocean likes to say: “You are truly alive only as long as you have a good story and someone who you can tell it to.” So, let us first go up.

Here is the first class dance hall, and here is a legendary piano, where a box with the newborn stood. The baby’s parents foresaw a bright future for him. Otherwise, why would they have brought him here? Suppose they dreamt that their child would be found by some tender-hearted rich lady or a gentleman, generous and not poor. But everything turned out much more prosaic. Ladies, prepare your handkerchiefs: he was found by a sailor of the “Virginia”. And, what is worse, he gave the child a name that is completely impossible to understand. I am certain such name is very infrequent among us. Denny Boodman T. D. Lemon Novocento – this is how the new daddy called the baby. How do you like it? It sounds quite promising to me. Such name is difficult to fit into any official document. And no one bothered to do it in all of his 32-year life. Strange, isn’t it?

In this very spot, eight years later, Novocento would be found again, a second time, and he would be playing this same piano, although just a couple of months before his fingers did not know the keys.

“He was sitting on a chair before the piano, his legs not even reaching the floor. And, I swear to God, he was playing… I don’t know what kind of music he was playing. It was simple and … wonderful …”

The weather is changing. It seems there is a storm coming. O! This is your first unusual voyage and your first storm. Let’s see what’s next!

That night, in the eye of the storm, looking like a signor on vacation, he came across me, lost in one of the hallways, with the face of a corpse, looked at me, smiled and said “Let’s go” … we came to the dance hall. And then, me swaying back and forth, and he seeming to have rails under his feet, we came to the piano… “Release the brakes”, he said. “If you trust me, release them”. “He is crazy”, I thought, and then released the brakes.

“And now come over here and sit down”, Novocento said. And then, no one has to believe it, and, to be honest, I would never believe it if anyone told me something like this, but it is true – the piano began sliding along the dance hall, and behind it… And while we were circling among the tables, touching lamps and chairs, I understood that what we were doing at that instance, what we were really doing, was, dance with the ocean. We were crazy dancers, beautiful, drawn into a whirlpool of waltz, on gold-plated parquet of the night. O, yes!”

Dance with the ocean during a storm can be compared to a one-person show in a full theatre of more than a thousand seats. Why?

A one-person show is life since no one has a chance to overdo any scene.

A one-person show is jazz, the music of soul. One artist improvises on the piano of his soul, turning a crowd of a thousand into a jazz orchestra. And everyone has his own music in his head.

A one-person show is a confession. To reach every person in the theatre, you need to turn your feelings inside out, open your soul. And this requires talent, actor’s maturity and bravery.

Every one-person show is a new storm, a new confession. I was in such a one-person show and saw a dance with the ocean – a waltz with the art. What I felt during that storm, I had not felt before, anywhere else. It was like a rapid takeoff, master class. Tears were streaming like hail, but not from sentimentality. No, it was something else. Maybe it was some pitiless sincerity.

Why so artists do it? Maybe because they feel an inner need to tell something, which they are unable to hold inside themselves. If God gave you such talent, you simply have to give people minutes of happiness. Novocento was not brave enough. He tried to come down from the ship to the earth once, but was unable to make the last step. He was unable to overcome himself.

A duel! What can be scarier: a competition in performance virtuosity between two musicians or an elaborate duel with oneself, or, to be more precise, with the image that was once attached to you by the crowd? Who will win? Is it an exterior shell or your inner self? To find out, you have to see it and to hear it for yourself.

“You are that creator of jazz, are you?” “Yes. And you are that guy, who can only play when he has ocean under his butt, are you?” “Yes.” So they met. Jelly Roll lit up a cigarette. Then he balanced it on the edge of the piano, sat down and began playing Ragtime. It seemed that no one had ever heard this music before. He was not playing. He was sliding…

They were screaming and applauding, they had never seen it before. It was looking like a New Year celebration. And then I was before Novocento: he had a most disappointed face in the world, and also, slightly surprised. He looked at me and said: “But it is absolutely silly…” I did not respond. There was nothing to respond. He turned to me and said: “Give me a cigarette, will you…”

Gentlemen! Smoking here is … recommended. Quite possibly, the ship is full of dynamite. It is time to come down to the engine compartment, since that is where the most explosive is. When the “Virginia” was stuffed with dynamite to be exploded out in the open sea, Novocento came down there and “sat on a box, which looked like it was full of explosive, took off his hat, laid it down on the floor and stayed there, in silence, not knowing what to say.”

“He really was the greatest. We played music, he was playing something else. He played… Were you ever scared that you would be torn up to the smallest pieces only because of a single thought about the hugeness of the world… Just to think about it, but to live there…”

Maybe many of you simply did not think about it. You should have. Explode, only for a split second, all the vanity of your exterior world, and you will discover a human secret, which is hidden deep inside every one of us.

“You should not think that I am unhappy: this will never happen to me again.”

This is simultaneously happiness and unhappiness, joy and suffering, farce and tragedy. A plain, sentimental, sometimes merry story right in front of the viewers’ eyes first grows into a philosophical parable, and then into a confession – and all of this is a single one-person show, a revelation. Like the ship “Virginia” cutting into a theatre, this show cuts into the soul of every one of us and stays there forever.

Now you may take a walk around the ship by yourself. But here is a request – do not come close to talent. Otherwise you will break the harmony of the Universe, and the ocean will devour you.

“Take off the brakes… Now don’t be afraid”

The ship crew:

· Alessandro Baricco and the characters of the “Novocento” (one thousand nine hundredth). “In people’s eyes you can see what they are about to see, and not what they have seen. This is what he said: what they are about to see.”

· Oleg Menshikov in the one-person show “1900” and his co-authors. “I always tried to win fortune and never tried to win life.”

Russian version: http://www.etoya.ru/culture/2011/7/2/17373/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alessandro_Baricco
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_1900
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleg_Menshikov
http://www.menshikov.ru/eng/
http://lib.ru/INPROZ/BARIKKO/novecento.txt
http://www.bibliotekar.ru/rusAyvaz/