“You can’t work for a murderer and get paid by him.” Elena Kowalskaya posted this on Facebook on Friday. Kowalskaya has been the artistic director of the Meyerhold Theater Center, a place of theatrical experimentation, since 2013. She was born in Ukraine and has been working in Moscow since the early 1990s. So now she is announcing her resignation. “The Meyerhold Theater Center is a state theater and I will not work for the criminal Putin’s state.”
There is also massive resistance to Putin’s war of aggression in the rest of the Russian theater scene. The courage involved is considerable. The magazine theater For example, publishes a detailed chronicle of the unfolding events on its website, reports on 7,586 arrests of anti-war demonstrators in Russia since February 24 – 758 of them on March 2 alone. The magazine also published an article calling for the signing of a petition against the war and published an open letter from directors and actors initiated on Facebook by Maria Revyakina, the director of the “Golden Mask” festival, which showcases the most important Russian theater productions excellent.
The letter was signed by many prominent personalities – the general director of the Bolshoi Theater, Vladimir Urin, for example, or the conductor Vladimir Spivakov. Some of the signatories are known as the so-called trusted faces of Putin – which means that they are renowned artists in Russia who can sometimes approach him directly with concerns. State Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin calls the signatories “traitors” in the press and suggests denying them the money they receive from the state budget.
The persecution of Kirill Serebrennikov was staged as a warning to all theater people
the taz also reports that five directors of state theater institutions have resigned from their posts in protest against Putin – among them Mindaugas Karbauskis. The Lithuanian-born theater director has been living and working in Moscow since the late 1990s. Since 2011, he has held a senior post as Artistic Director of the Mayakovsky Theater, a top-ranking Moscow institution. Various festival directors and artist associations have also positioned themselves against the war. Students and teachers at Russian universities have posted a petition online.
On the other hand, Grigory Saslavskij, the director of the respected Gitis Theater Academy in Moscow, took a different approach: he signed a declaration in favor of recognizing the separatist areas. As a result, the theater critic Alyona Karas resigned as a professor of Russian theater history. In the past, the Gitis often followed a course of an almost Soviet-looking authority.
The Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson also broke off a project at the GES-2 cultural center prematurely. Choreographer Alexei Ratmansky finished his rehearsals at the Bolshoi Theater. Others, like Dmitri Volkostrelov, deputy director of the Meyerhold Theater Center, were fired without further explanation by the Moscow Department of Culture.
You have to know that the major state theaters are under the control of both the Ministry of Culture and the Moscow Department of Culture. Their leaders do not have the right to speak openly, lest they lose their jobs, grants, and even their freedom. The prosecution of Kirill Serebrennikov was staged two years ago as a warning to all theater people. In the meantime, Serebrennikov was even able to work in the West again. But the way there, to freedom, was very arduous and a sign of the arbitrariness of the Russian state power.