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Marina Davydova

Marina Davydova

area: Theater, Theory

Key Facts

nationality

Russia

area

Theater, Theory

residence

Moscow

recommending institution

frei_raum Q21 exhibition space

time period

April 2021 - April 2021

Marina Davydova, a theatre critic, historian and producer. Graduated cum laude from the department of theatre criticism of the Russian Academy of Theater Art (GITIS/ RATI) in 1988. Defended the PH. D. dissertation «The Theater Nature of English Post-Renaissance Tragedy» and worked as a senior researcher at the Institute of Art Studies. Also taught a number of courses on the history of West European theatre at different institutes and gave master-class on theater criticism at The Russian State University for the Humanities.

Author of the monographs The End of Theatre Epoch (2005) and Culture ZERO (2017) analyzing the last twenty years of the history of Russian theatre. Author and editor of the book The History of West European Theatre since Renaissance Time until the end of the XIX century (the chapter Renaissance Theatre).

For many years, she was theatre reviewer of the oldest Russian newspaper Izvestia.

Presently, an editor-in-chief of the journal TEATR, an artistic-director of the NET- festival in Moscow, a columnist at Colta.ru

In 2016 she was a programming director of Wiener Festwochen and now she is doing a consulting job for the festival.

Winner of many awards for theater criticism, including Stanislavsky Award for the best book of 2005 and Prize of the Union of Journalists of Russia as the best theater reviewer (2007)

In January 2017, «Eternal Russia», in which Marina Davydova has acted as a director and as the author of the concept and texts and, was premiered in Berlin in Hebbel am Ufer. The performance  got many enthusiastic responses in the German and Russian media and was included in the main program of BITEF-2018 and got a Special Prize of International Jury at BITEF-2018. 

In April 2019 “Checkpoint Woodstock”, the second performance, in which Marina Davydova has acted as a director and as the author, was premiered in Hamburg in Thalia Theater.

Marina Davydova's play "Trance" became part of an international project Die Neuen Todsünden, which premiered at the Karlsruhe Schauspielhaus in October 2020.

In November 2020, she conceived and staged her first performance in Russia, "Diminishing the World".

Project info

Invited by Bogomir Doringer as part of the project Space of Urgency.
I have an idea to make a parcours performance about the phenomenon of emigration. It will examine various cases of emigration from recent and, more importantly, ancient history. The wave of refugees that hit Europe in the 21st century is just a special case of this long-standing and important phenomenon. What is life in exile? How did the Russian nobles who fled to Europe after the Russian revolution feel? And what about the Armenians scattered around the world after the 1915 genocide? What is assimilation and is it good? I want to include my own experience in this project, because my family and I survived the pogroms in Baku in 1990. How does a Russian intellectual feel after this experience? I imagine this project as a journey through different halls, in which exhibition objects enter into complex relationships, first with the voices of performers, and then with these physical bodies.

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