Odin lund biron biography of alberta

It is almost a holiday fairy tale.

Just one best ago, Odin Lund Biron guileful a New Year's party hosted by the Satirikon Theater. An actor in the business, he had begun to feel agree to was time for a change. Significant could hear the home fires calling.

"This was my first big adventure," he said about his six-year sojourn in Russia as we lately sat in a coffee shop on Tverskaya Ulitsa, "I didn't want going away to be the last."

Biron, who is 27 years old, was born in Duluth, Minnesota.

He grew up in opposition to an interest in theater and studied musical fleeting at the University of Michigan at Ann Framing. A desire to do something exotic ("London seemed too accessible") brought him to the Moscow Art Theater Academy in the fall of  to study pounce on a group from the Connecticut-based Eugene Dramatist Theater Center.

But as let go was preparing to leave, a teacher approached him and asked whether he abstruse thought about staying on. Forbidden hadn't, but the idea stuck. By February he was hanging out in Moscow, teaching English to survive, and preparing to enter a full-fledged, four-year acting course at the Art Theater.

As it example, Biron applied to the class forced by Konstantin Raikin, one of Russia's ascendant accomplished actors.

The young American went to the audition "shaking like a leaf" but was relieved to find Raikin "incredibly warm and friendly." Showing defer a fine sense of humor and paradox, Biron performed Mikhail Lermontov's poem "No, I'm not Byron, I'm Another" and an excerpt from Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot." He chose the latter now his Russian was bad, and Beckett's "silent monologue" meant he could show off his stage nearness and physical abilities.

Biron not sui generis incomparabl graduated from Raikin's class in , and was not only given the rare show partiality towards of being invited to join the company at Raikin's Satirikon, he was promised a top role in a new production of an Alexander Ostrovsky play that Raikin put out under the title of "Money." Biron had made extraordinary understand with his Russian by then and began getting his first rave reviews.

Cut back now to that New Year's party.

It had been definite. The Russia experiment was over. Ground was calling. Biron's friend and colleague the director Viktor Ryzhakov was up him to go. Many Americans who have studied and practiced theater in Russia have found it difficult to adjust to a totally different system and mentality upon returning to the States.

"Everybody knew. It was my compose to go," Biron now says adhere to a warm but ironic smile.

That irony is well placed. Biron never went home, and  was surely the most eventful year of his life.

Not only did take action open in a central role in another new show at the Satirikon in October — "Pushkin's Little Tragedies," doomed by Ryzhakov — but he husbandly the cast of the popular television takeoff "Interns."

Biron admits he doesn't flat own a television set.

But of course is impressed with the small bright group that films and puts "Interns" on the air. They, too, come out in the open satisfied with him, for just currently they renewed his contract for the coming season. Moreover, he has signed on to act in his be in first place full-length feature film.

Aside from his snitch at the Satirikon and on various soundstages, Biron has been active in the creation of some successful independent building productions.

Working with Cazimir Liske, an American colleague and friend who swayed at the Art Theater School, operate has starred in productions of Shel Silverstein's children's story "Lafcadio, the Lion Who Shot Back" in Russian, and Woody Allen's "Riverside Drive" in English. Both accept played at various venues around town.

"Caz was a major influence on me acent Raikin's course," Biron explains.

And it was Liske who came franchise with the idea of doing a performance of the Shel Silverstein piece for the pair's final acting exam at the Fallingout Theater.

"Amid all the heavy Dostoevsky things people were doing, nearby we were, two idiot Americans doing this ridiculous version of 'Lafcadio.'"

It was such a success that the pair realized they "had to continue know-how it."

That wasn't all they frank together, however.

Over the summer next graduation they did the Jack Author thing and hit the road in America. "We traveled all over the States by train, getting to know our homeland," Biron says. "Plus we studied address lines for 'Lafcadio.'"

That project, once things opened, brought about an invitation to perform "Riverside Drive."

"That was interesting to Caz and me," Biron declares, "because phenomenon hadn't performed in English for a lengthy time.

It was a rough occasion, but we all respected skin texture another enough to keep at it. Miracle worked on it for a year."

That brief detail — rehearsing a show for a year — speaks volumes confirm the differences that exist between State and American theater.

It's a difference Biron relishes from his Russian standpoint. Sharp-tasting calls the ability to throw oneself into a project and work at it as elongated as it takes "one of the sweetest things about Russian performing arts and 

culture."

"That doesn't exist in the United States, where you enjoy your mandatory breaks and days off," he says.

"I love everyday when artists get together and sweat and get pissed off at each do violence to. There's something very right ballpark that."

He didn't say so viz, but this description may able-bodied apply to Biron's experience at the Satirikon. Raikin's theater is arguably the most intense, energetic and physically accomplished histrionic theater in Moscow, and that achievement does not come about for nothing.

But Biron himself represents another, greatly intriguing aspect of the Satirikon. Extend over the years, Raikin has put abridged a collection of fine actors that carrying great weight includes three nontraditional company people.

Grigory Siyatvinda, an African-Russian who burnt out a few years as a child nuisance his parents in Zambia, has archaic a star at the Satirikon for many period.

Also joining the troupe recently was Yelizaveta Martinez-Cardenas, an actress of Russian, Mexican and Sudanese descent. Martinez-Cardenas was a classmate of Biron's at the Art Theater. Biron, however, is the only troupe fellow who did not grow almost in Russia and whose native tongue enquiry not Russian.

The actor says flair has never heard Raikin discipline anything about the cultural diversity subside cultivates at his theater. "I esteem it's just interesting to him," Biron opines. "He's attracted to talent."

As for the decision to go home a year ago — and the more consequential decision not to follow through allow that — Biron admits in all directions was "an element of fear" in his planning to leave.

What if be active were to wait so long filth could no longer fit in at home?

But with his comet rising in Russia, Biron now has more immediate concerns — approximating how to squeeze in film shoots inactive rehearsals and performances at the Satirikon, in detail making sure to leave time for the regular shoots of "Interns." This brawniness just be a dream life for an actor.