most common
JAPAN’S POSTAL MARKS
Her Majesty Postage Stamp! It is a unique invention in itself. And she appeared at the behest of the time. Rather – at the behest of economic progress.
The vigorously developing capitalism of the mid-19th century, industry, trade, transport, or, as they say now, “business”, needed a connection. Moreover, the communication is well-established, reliable, and, most importantly, publicly available, convenient and cheap. And this, I think, predetermined the fact that for the first time a postage stamp appeared in Great Britain, which had become by that time a powerful colonial power, a “workshop of the world”, a “world cab driver”, and a “world banker.” And the communication system that existed in the country at that time was cumbersome, expensive and required streamlining.
In 1837, a member of the House of Commons of the British Parliament, inventor and educator, Sir Rowland Hill published his project “Post Office Reform, its Importance and Feasibility”. In his work, he proposed to unify the postage Continue reading
MASAHIRO YASUDA AND HIS THEATER “YAMANOTE”
With this pensive, phlegmatic (as it seemed to me when I first met) man I first met in the summer of 2000, during the Moscow Theater Olympics. Having put Meterlinka’s Blue Bird at his Yamanote Theater in Tokyo, he wanted to talk with one of the Russian theater specialists and find out how Stanislavsky’s performance at the Moscow Art Theater looked like. Translator Yukiko Kase, a very nice girl who graduated from the philological faculty of Moscow State University here in Moscow and defended her dissertation on Gogol’s work, called me and asked for a meeting.
The day we spent partly at my home, analyzing the little that we managed to get about the Mkhatov’s “Blue Bird” (sketches of costumes and scenery, photographs, memoirs of the participants), partly in the Kuskovo park, the summer cottage of Count Sheremetyev.
Communication was intense. The percentage of questions Yasud asked was many times greater than the percentage of questions I asked him. Therefore, it will be more accurate to determine the nature of our conversation as his questions and my monologues. And the subjects of interest were such that, when satisfied, they meant global calculations and they Continue reading
MIN TANAKA: DANCE OF THE WORLD
The building of the Theater School of Dramatic Art Theater on Sretenka is not just a wall. This is a huge bright space, getting into which, a person immediately becomes an object of art. Architecture (one of the authors of the project is the Artistic Director of the Theater Anatoly Vasiliev) is designed so that anyone who appears there feels as if in the arena, on the podium, and it is not by chance that the white walls do not imply approaching them, it is no coincidence that there are no chairs along walls. You must perforce move, climb and descend through the numerous ladders, getting onto balconies and platforms, every second building your relationship with space, with an echo from your voice and steps. The theater has already begun. Continue reading
