an ampersand in the Empire of Signs

They must have been the pre-show, the warm-up act, Russian carnivale before the main performer--Georgian singer Tamara Gverdsiteli.

You could see them from afar, and once you saw them, you knew exactly who they were. All of them were going to the same place--the same place we were going, so that perhaps made us one of them. It was like following a line of ants at picnic--or better yet, pilgrims on their way to some sacred mount. They were clearly of the same ilk; that was evident just by looking at them. The men might have passed for native Canadians were it not for the occasional yellow blazer, black shirt and white tie. And always terrible shoes. These were fashions that even a Mafioso would avoid.

The women were more outstanding. Middle-aged or older "ladies" dressed in what they obviously considered elegant, although I fear that even a country club in Florida might not let them in. Their hair styles were conspicuous attempts at preserving some notion of fashionability, but something went wrong. Women are most beautiful when they age gracefully--with no attempt to conceal nature's inevitable course. Beauty gives way to absurdity when women in evening gowns have colored their hair outside the natural spectrum. Our instinct in nature is to stay away from bright red berries, and bright blue and red hair colors in women over fifty have the same effect on me.

This is a question for philosophers or sociologists. How is it that this aesthetic persists, even though many of these people have been living in Canada for decades? When I lived in Russia, I thought that it was a supply issue. I thought that poorly developed markets and low family incomes meant that only cheap clothes and simple styles made it to the Russian stores. And the suppliers were invariably the same low-cost factories in Turkey or China, so no wonder that people shared the same fashion sensibilities. But here we are in Canada, one of the richest countries in the world, and these Russian emigres dress as if they had just gotten off the boat.

It reminds me of a game that we used to play in San Francisco when Andrey and I were visiting our friend Mike. We would take walks around the city. In the distance would emerge a shuffling mass of dots, usually their big, oddly-colored hair popping out at us first. Then we would see the odd-shaped glasses: octogonal frames or half-ovals or some other combination, often with tinted lenses. There was no point in making this a wagering game--it was clear that they were Russian--is the pope catholic? Who else would go for a walk around Golden Gate Park in full splendor--gaudy rhinestone-covered sweaters and formal shoes--when the California-dreaming natives were in sweats and t-shirts? Confirmation would come as we overtook the ladies and we could overhear their conversations--invariably complaining about something.

The pre-show continued once we arrived at the theater. Our first mistake was arriving thirty minutes before the start. Ever the good American, I wanted to be there with plenty of time so we could wait in line to pick up our tickets, which I had ordered online. Three Russian women were sitting behind a table, looking flustered. Several more early arrivals were trying to buy tickets, and the whole thing looked like a free-for-all. The poor Russian women looked completely flustered, and everybody was passing around the same seating chart for the auditorium. When I finally got to my turn, I said, in Russian, that I had ordered our tickets on the internet. Her eyes got wider as if I had told her I was from the tax police and wanted to audit the whole affair. She got frantic and started asking her friends, "Where are the internet tickets? Where are the internet tickets?" Finally, they told me I'd have to wait for Borya. I couldn't help but smile, but Andrey seemed to have a horrified look on his face.

A few minutes later, along came Borya. The ladies asked about the internet tickets. He said, "Ahh, yes, I saw that you ordered some tickets but I couldn't get the information from Afisha." Afisha was the online service that sold the tickets. They asked me what seats we had ordered. How was I to remember? Then Borya said, "Well, here's the chart, which ones do you want?" And so they gave us better seats than the ones I had ordered. The strangest part is that when I had ordered the tickets online, it looked as if the entire theater was nearly sold out, but once we arrived at the theater, it was clear that this was not the case. People were buying tickets up to the last minute, and it was clearly not a sold out show. Assuming that things would be as well organized as on Ticketmaster was our second mistake.

What happened next was like a scene from a movie. The great Soviet comedic director Leonid Gaidai captured it in his last movie, "There's Good Weather in Deribasovskaya, or It's Raining Again in Brighton Beach." Emigres bring their culture with them, and sometimes they go to absurd lengths just to feel at home in a strange land. A small vignette in the film shows us an older Russian man at a grocery store in Bright Beach. Despite living in the land of supermarkets and convenience stores, he has especially come to the Russian grocers, where everything is set up just as inconveniently as in the Soviet Union. The heavyset sales woman is gruff and unaccommodating. And the old man is complaining that his salami doesn't have a piece of paper inside--a sharp poke at some of the harsh and peculiar realities of Soviet life. The old man gets into an argument, and you can tell, through his frustration, that he is content and at last feels at home.

Perhaps it's the same thing for Russians living in North America now? Andrey and I milled about the outer lobby as we waited for the concert to start. The organizers had closed the doors to the inner lobby; they weren't ready to have people seat themselves. Slowly, the outer lobby filled. The entrance to the theater was below the ground floor of the Metropolitan Toronto Convention Center, and you had to take an escalator down from the main doors to the outer lobby. We stood and watched people descend, as if they were being transported into some alternate universe: The Russky Zone.

More fashion encounters of the Slavic kind appeared, and it felt like some bizarre conference or maybe a scene of My Big Fat Russian Wedding. I couldn't help but smile, because for me it was too absurd. Andrey seemed mortified, and the whole thing was like some bad dream that he thought he had finally woken up from. He escaped to a back hallway of the convention center basement. But even that wasn't an escape. Old Russian men and women shuffled about the convention center, killing time before the concert, crawling into unfilled crevices like bugs.
The concert was scheduled to start at 8:00 PM; the doors only opened at 7:55. Once again, another bizarre element of Russian life was teleported to Toronto: the mystery of opening only one door. In Russian theaters, only one door will be unlocked, even though the theater may have twenty doors. At the end of the performance, thousands of people will stream out at once--and only one door will remain open. I could never understand it, and here it was working in reverse. Hundreds of people had amassed in the outer lobby, and now the organizers had only opened one door to let us in. (Okay, I'll be fair. One and a half doors were opened by the time we got to the door.)

Our third mistake was to expect that the concert would start on time. I expected some delay, since they only started seating people at 7:55. Then it was 8:05. Then 8:10. We waited and waited. Finally, at 8:30, the concert started.

It was worth the wait.

A legend is a legend for a reason, and Tamara Gverdtsiteli did not disappoint. Cesaria Evora is a living legend by force of her spectacular voice and unique musicality. Her subdued stage presence is appropriate for this grand dame of morna music. Gverdtsiteli comes from a different tradition--Soviet Estrada--and that tradition brings with it an entirely different concept of artistry. Soviets and their Russian successors are artistically conservative by nature, and Estrada celebrates basic musical values: superb voice control, emotion, formal costumery, lush music, and direct connection between the artist and the audience. To a non-Russian, it may seem cheesy or contrived. These types of musical shows went the way of Welk. But for Russians they are still very powerful, especially when the songs and performers are familiar. They speak of times gone by, simpler and more pleasant. And they also speak of a communal aesthetic sensibility: everybody watched the same artists and knew the same songs. Hearing those songs inevitably brings to each person a shared nostalgia which I think is difficult for Americans to appreciate. I'm at a loss even to find an equivalent. Maybe it's similar to the emotive power of Simon and Garfunkel or John Lennon singing "Imagine." But even that isn't quite right.

The music starts with a full band, the audience entirely in the dark. From off stage, we hear Gverdtsiteli incanting. There's no better way to describe her voice play. It's precise, controlled and full-bodied. It's both Russian and not, always tinged with her Georgian background. After several bars of Georgian scat, she launches into the song and floats onto the stage. There's no better way to describe her movement. She floats in a deliberate, graceful movement. And the show begins.
Her repertoire is large, and the theme she has chosen for this concert is "Music without Borders." It becomes clear, though, that a bigger theme for her tonight is the music of womanhood. Characteristic of estrada is some commentary by the artist about their songs. The commentary is usually romantic (in the philosophical sense) and deep with meaning. They want you to understand where this song is coming from within their heart. Gverdtsiteli wants us to know what it means for her to be a woman in this world, and what women mean for this world.

Gverdtsiteli sings us the songs of her homeland, much to the delight of the small Georgian contingent in the audience. I enjoyed these songs and regretted that she didn't sing more of them. It seemed that she really came alive with this music, and the motifs proved her vocal range.
Her second song was some Spanish number which was lively but seemed a bit out of place to me. My interest was aroused, shall we say, however, when a young dancer jumped out onto the stage with his chest bare. I certainly wasn't expecting this type of show, but I wasn't about to complain. In all seriousness, he was a welcome addition, who would appear from time to time throughout the show to provide a storyline to many of the songs. He would sometimes be joined by a young woman.

Gverdtsiteli even got in touch with her inner Jew. My Russian may be getting rusty, but I could swear that she said that some of her ancestors were Jewish. That meant we were treated to a resounding chorus of Shalom Aleichem and Hava Nagila. Now it was My Big Fat Russian Bar Mitzvah with a Georgian-Russian-Jewish-Soviet band leader. Things got a bit weird, however, with her excerpts from Fiddler on the Roof. For "If I were a Rich Man," she decided to just scat the melody rather than sing the lyrics, but her noble attempt at "Sunrise, Sunset" confused me when she started singing "Sunset, Sunrise." Who knew how much this little slip-up changed the meaning of the song! Instead of a melancholy reflection on the inevitably of change, aging and dying, the song was now something optimistic: after every sunset, there is always another sunrise. I don't know if she intended to do this or if she just made an honest mistake. Who knows? I was probably the only person in the theater that even noticed. She also gave quite a stirring performance of a song about Jerusalem that made me--not exactly a Zionist--a bit uncomfortable. But it was all probably a good touch for an audience made up of a large number of Russian Jews.

The second half of the show was dedicated to France. It was fun, especially the Edith Piaf numbers, but not necessarily as engaging as the first part. We enjoyed seeing her at the piano, because she pounded the hell out of it, like a mix between Chopin and Liberace (God forbid). All the musicians were quite good, and many of them were Georgian or Russian. At the end of each song, they were in the habit of extending their arms out to each other. Apparently this is a Georgian thing. It was a bit funny to those of us not aware of it, and the Russian trumpeter, who looked like he had been nipping at the vodka off stage, was having fun mimicking his Georgian colleagues.

The concert ended after two encores. Gverdtsiteli had just flown in from Moscow and was exhausted. We shuffled out en masse, all happy that we shared this moment of nostalgia--so far in time and space from the point where the memory began. It wasn't my memory, but I felt that I had been transported for a few hours. For a night, I had been privileged to join in a sacred ritual of reliving something dear to these people--amidst our profane and foreign lives in North America--connected back along the continuum to a place that no longer existed except in hearts and minds and history books.

Up the elevator we went, out of the Russky Zone, back into the night, back into reality. Back to Toronto.

The concert was on April 20, 2006, in Toronto, Canada.

Tags: Tamara Gverdtsiteli, Russia, music, Soviet Estrada, Georgia, Georgian music

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