People continue to cross these fields. In September 2002 I audited a college course at the Russian State Humanities University, Experimental Theater for Psychologists. The department catalog explained that this class, required for the major, illustrates Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky’s stages of development through theatrical techniques. As students, we went through abridged versions of drills in use at GITIS. By way of introduction, the instructor put us in a circle: we were to hold hands, imagine a color, then squeeze the hand of the person to the right. At the end, we reported results ranging across the rainbow. We had failed, the instructor said, because we had “not yet established contact.” Next we were to close our eyes as she described a rural landscape, then open them to take up poses representing some part of the landscape: a tree, a flower, and so forth. She likened the activity to a “shared dream…. [W]hen you filled in the picture, you obshchalis’ (’communed,’ ‘interacted’), yes? The text itself is not important.” Then we repeated the circle—this time, colors linked, ranging in greens and blues: “There, you see!” Having made this point about contact, the lesson plunged into Vygotsky’s theories of the social processes of mental development, whereby interaction with others leads to “internal speech.”
At our next meeting we made another circle; much as at GITIS, students waited, “gathered energy,” and then, all together, were to step forward in unison. The professor informed us that this, too, was a theatrical technique and seemed to know that at GITIS, the point of the drill is to develop attention, to convert phatic energy between working actors into connection with audiences. Her purpose, however, was to demonstrate how children learn to subsume and to differentiate the self and must switch among these positions before thought emerges, before the mind feels itself to be individuated, charting on the blackboard how interactions can oscillate among senses of you/I/we.
Even where ideologies and practices converge, actors still aim for different points, to produce different knowledge from those points. GITIS teachers used drills to criticize sociological generalizations, while the psychology professor made analogies between the contacts we were making and “cultural mentalities.” She asked us to ponder uncanny contact phenomena, moments when “two people suddenly find the same word! How do we do these things?” She continued: “Maybe you do most things like a European realist painter—you look at nature a bit, then paint a little bit. A Chinese painter, however, will look and look and look and look, and then, suddenly—an impulse.”
So, while phatic experts develop authority not only within institutions or disciplines but across them, actors who pull drills from books on social psychology and drama therapy and vice versa, having borrowed terms or tools, sometimes vociferously discredit the very field they have borrowed from. They can evoke intersections to undermine, such as when Soviet newspaper articles in the late 1980s discredited Gypsy fortune-tellers by calling them “good psychologists” who “read faces” and “track eye movements.”
Even in a single rehearsal hall or lab, people might engage not just one but several sets of expectations about contact or technologies for intuitions. They might work to synthesize them, put them into competition, or use one to arrive at another. Were we to attempt to tie threads of expertise under a single profession, habitus, ontology, or ideology, we would miss these collusions and conflicts. To follow phatic expertise means to cross professions, schools, networks, and even countries to witness not only tangles and misfires, but also fresh interpretants that refract from even the most faithful attempts to translate.
CIRCLES: EXPERTS AND CIVILIANS
Good places to observe all this include those where phatic experts engage with people who are not, or are not yet, experts. Conflicts percolate through such places about how to gauge contact, how to evaluate communication, how to pick out signs and make channels, with which materials, connecting these people and not others. Among such places, GITIS is relatively insular while also communicatively dense, with constant interaction and discussion of interaction, in classrooms and corridors, onstage and backstage, before exams and after, in the café and in the dormitory, with its late-night chores and midnight meals and rides to and from on the metro. There is no question that GITIS is a “dense node” where resources and people cluster.21 Entire ethnographies could be set within the institute or the dormitory alone; people described the situation as being “as though we live enclosed within a space capsule.” Working, sleeping, and eating with the same people, from morning to midnight, every day, people said they felt in a world apart. While acclimating to the “space capsule” in the first year, for the customary midsemester variety show and party (kapustnik), the cohort rewrote beloved Soviet film song lyrics to convey the melancholy of cutting channels to past relationships, to “Moscow beyond GITIS’ windows.”
Time passed, and people graduated; “GITIS spat us out,” laughed one actress in 2008. Some graduates work together, others meet rarely, to attend an opening or greet a new child. They Skype, some even with me, to practice an American accent or for help with Sundance festival instructions, a few just to talk. Most work steadily in theater; a few are now film celebrities. I am not surprised; their work is riveting. Some take acting techniques into different fields, teaching dramatic skills and theatrical appreciation to businessmen. One has founded a school for the arts in Germany, along the lines of a Steiner school, drawing together international connections from Paris, Hollywood, Moscow, and Tokyo.
I first witnessed how people shift expertise in 1997, among directors and actors in Perm’ who contracted seminars for businesspeople, teaching acting skills to improve communication, and later investigated similar endeavors in Moscow. One that has achieved stability is called Shkola Obraz (Image School or School of Ways, as obraz can translate as “image” or “appearance” as well as “mode” or “manner,” as in obraz zhizni, “way of life”). The play of meanings is fitting, as the school advertises theatrical skills as techniques for living better—by refining intuition.
A graduate of one of the smaller theatrical institutes founded Shkola Obraz in the mid-1990s, soon after the USSR had dissolved, a time in which bursts of self-help courses and books heralded new ways to make contacts and to read others. It was, as so many trumpeted, a new world of new signs, new partners in new markets. The school moved facilities several times in the 1990s and by 2000 had found a long-term space. As a part-time night school, it challenges the hierarchies of theatrical and film production in Moscow, offering entrance to the profession through a back door, with a shorter course of study and without auditions for admission; anyone who can pay may attend. It sells itself also as a path to solving everyday problems in a world where, as the website sympathizes, we all learn to compress our true selves under the gaze of others. There, acting skills (drawn more from Mikhail Chekhov than from other Russian masters) are taught to “housewives and businessmen,” to help them “succeed through play.” The school espouses a ludic, protean philosophy of theatricality (rather than theater as artifice) and touts monthly “happenings” at which students hit public transit walking on their hands or wearing dog collars to free themselves of public inhibitions. Every few months, sandwich board wearers pace central squares, passing out flyers and pinning them on bulletin boards—even in the entryway to GITIS.
The school also delivers lessons in how to relax, the better to channel new intuitions and energies. Shkola Obraz states explicitly that it links psychological knowledge,