The First Siberian Contact Improvisation Festival

I am back in Moscow on my way to London on my way to Spain. It has been a wonderful, exhausting, trying, inspirational, confusing, and mind-twisting (among other things) trip.
In the last episode we were leaving Moscow on our way to Novosibirsk the capital of Siberia. Before this I thought of Siberia as being in the far north, but actually it is most of Russia east of the Ural Mountains and goes down to the southern border. The flight to Novosibirsk was uneventful and we were met by Masha, one of the organizers. We then spent a lot of time in a post office because Caroline's and Otto's registration turned out to be incorrect. Don't ask but if you ever come to Russia and stay in one place more than three days, you will have to register. Check you registration immediately! If the dates are incorrect it turns out to be an unpleasant, time-consuming hassle. I spent a lot of time copying forms using cyrillic characters, but all to no avail. What we had to do couldn't be done there. Eventually we were brought to a pleasant spot by a river where we got on a bus for the eight hour drive into the Altai mountains. By this time it was 7:30 at night so the interesting part of the journey happened in the night. We arrived at the camp where the festival was held as the sun was coming up so we had no idea where we were. The camp was pleasant enough, up to the usual summer Bible camp standards of my youth. It was beside the Katun river, a cold, beautiful, fast-moving and noisy affair. The first day was spent getting organized. It turned out to be rainier than expected so by the next day, the first day of classes, everything had been reorganized and the schedule had changed. There were only three of us who didn't speak Russian and they kept forgetting to translate important details so the first days were confusing and sometimes frustrating. However, everything sorted itself out.

I wasn't teaching but I did two laboratories. The first was an ongoing "unannounced performance" lab which was basically a practical investigation of performance theory leading to an "announced 'unannounced performance' performance" which went very well. The participants were eager and asked very interesting questions and did very interesting work. At the end of the festival I did a second lab on sound and movement. The first part was a basic sound production warm-up leaving to movement and in the second part we went outside and did some work with movement and language using a combination of Simone Forti's and my own techniques.

I was very happy with the work the participants and I did together and I have made some connections which I hope prove to be ungoing.

There was a two-day break in the festival and Caroline and I joined a trek to seven glacial lakes higher in the mountains. This turned out to be grueling. Food was disorganized so all we had for breakfast was what we could get at an understocked little store. Then we road on a bus for an hour or so to a place where we transferred to a monster of an army-surplus four-wheel drive truck. It followed a barely existant trail for two hours while we bounced around inside on very uncomfortable seats. The windows barely existed so we couldn't see where we were going. Eventually five us wedged ourselves together on a long backwards facing seat and lay down on each other and so stayed in place and actually slept for awhile. On the way back, the others insisted that Caroline and I sit up front with the drive. We saw then that the road was two more or less parallel ruts through the woods. The truck was too big for the bridges so it forded the many streams. It seemed as if there was more water than road.

Finally we came to the starting point. Caroline got on a horse and I hiked. The way up was muddy but the rise in elevation was not too bad. I took it slow and made it. At the top there was a camp with a kitchen where they cooked over a wood fire. We had delicious soup and a macaroni and ground beef dish that tasted delicious after our ordeal. Then it was time to walk around the lakes just as a thunder-storm started. I donned my parka and headed out in pouring rain. The lakes are basically set in a stony swamp so the whole walk was on very slippery rocks. The lakes however, were beautiful and when the group climbed up to the top of a waterfall, I stayed put and had an hour and a half by myself alone in the Altai Mountains.

The Altai Mountains are not high but they are home to an indigenous people and they are many legends surrounding them and they are seen as a mysterious and powerful place. There is an eerie weirdness about them that grows on one. The wind blew, the trees groaned, the waterfall sang and I was very happy.

On the hike down, I was very tired and began to fall a lot. A husband and wife from St. Petersburg who spoke English adopted me and one walked ahead and the other followed and I made it to the bottom in one piece although I did have some spectacular falls. On one, before they took pity on me I bruised my right side so that even now it is a colorful sight.

The spell check isn't working, and I have to catch a plain to London so this is it.

Next time, Lake Baikal, Irkutsk and the Trans-Siberian Train (definitely not an express).