Lev Dodin (Stage Director)
Born in 1944 in the town of Stalinsk, near Kemerovo, Siberia. He first
experienced theatrical production as a child at the Leningrad Young Viewers’
Theatre directed by Matvey Dubrovin, an outstanding teacher and a student of
Meyerhold. Graduated from the Leningrad Institute for Theatre, Music and Cinema,
where he studied under Boris Sohn, a student of Stanislavsky.
Lev Dodin’s debut as a director was а 1966 teleplay First Love after
Turgenev’s story, followed by dozens of theatrical productions, including The
Meek One by Dostoyevsky at the Bolshoi Drama Theatre and the Moscow Art Theatre,
The Golovlyov Family at the Moscow Art Theatre and It’s a Family Affair at the
Leningrad Young People’s Theatre and at the Finnish National Theatre in
Helsinki.
His collaboration with the Maly Drama Theater began in 1974 with The Robber
by Karel Čapek. The production of The House by Abramov in 1980 sealed the
artistic fate of Lev Dodin and the Maly Drama Theater. In 1983 Dodin became the
Artistic Director of the theater. In 1985 he directed there a play Brothers and
Sisters after Abramov’s trilogy — a production that became the house’s
humanistic and artistic manifesto. As a director of the Maly Drama Theatre and a
teacher at the Lenigrad Theatre Institute Dodin erased the border between
actor’s undergraduate training and professional employment. The Maly Drama
Theatre’s legendary productions of The Lord of the Flies, Gaudeamus, The
Possessed, A Play Without a Title, King Lear and Life and Fate were a result of
a creative union of the experienced members of the company and verdant students.
Today the company is almost entirely comprised of Dodin’s former students of
several generations, closely connected with their master by a common ideal of a
ceaseless artistic quest while working together on the misteries of the great
works of literature and the secrets of human nature. Dodin’s recent premieres at
the Maly Drama Theatre — Intrigue and Love by Schiller, An Enemy of the People
by Ibsen and a new production of The Cherry Orchard — all demostrate that this
quest is dear not only to the theatre’s company, but also to the audience, both
at home and abroad.
Since the early 1990s Dodin’s Maly Drama Theatre has been actively touring in
Russia and worldwide and has performed at all the continents, except the
Antarctic. Its productions have been welcomed in more than eighty cities of
Europe, Australia, the Americas and Asia, and today they serve as a major
representative of the current Russian theatre in the eyes of foreign audience.
In September 1998 Dodin’s theatre received the status of Theatre of Europe, the
third after the Odeon in Paris and the Piccolo in Milan. Lev Dodin is a member
of the General Assembly of the Union of the Theatres of Europe, and in 2012 he
was elected the Union’s Honorary President. It is only legitimate that
specialists call Dodin’s theatre ‘the most european theatre in Russia and the
most russian theatre in Europe’.
Dodin made his first step towards opera directing in 1995, when his friend,
the great Claudio Abbado, invited him to direct Strauss’s Elektra at the
Salzburg Festival. Since then Dodin’s elaborate choice of opera productions have
been graced by matching great composers and outstanding conductors: Strauss’s
Elektra in Salzburg, later transferred to Florence; Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth
of Mtsensk in Florence, first with Semyon Bychkov, then with James Conlon;
Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades in Amsterdam with Semyon Bychkov;
Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa with Mstislav Rostropovich at La Scala, Milan;
Rubinstein’s Demon with Valery Gergiev at the Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris;
Verdi’s Otello with Zubin Mehta in Florence; Strauss’s Salome with James Conlon
in Paris. Dodin has been constantly returning to The Queen of Spades,
co-operating on revisions of his Amsterdam production at the Paris Opera with
such remarkable conductors as Vladimir Jurowski, Gennady Rozhdestvensky and
Dmitry Jurowski.
All these operas were created in a successful tandem with the great set
designer David Borovsky. As an opera director, Dodin is just as demanding upon
the singers, the chorus and the supernumeraries as he is upon his own actors:
always trying to involve them into exploration of historical background,
characters’ stories and the new universe emerging on stage. Many of Dodin’s
opera works were born under a happy star of collaboration, companionship and
co-creation: in 2014 he produced Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina at the Vienna State
Opera, with orchestra led by Semyon Bychkov, sets and costumes by Alexander
Borovsky and light by Damir Ismagilov, the latter two being Dodin’s regular
collaborators at the recent Maly Drama Theatre Productions.
Lev Dodin’s achievements in theatre and pedagogy have brought him a lot
national and international awards, including the Russian Federation National
Award; the USSR State Prize; the 2001 President of Russia Award, Order of Merit
for the Fatherland, 3rd and 4th classes; independent award ‘Triumph’; the
Stanislavsky Award; the Golden Mask National Theatre Awards; the Laurence
Olivier Award, the Franco Abbiati Prize for the best opera production, etc. In
2000 he became the first and by now the only Russian director to receive the
prestigious Europe Theatre Prize. Lev Dodin is an honorary member of the Russian
Academy of Arts, an officer of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, a
winner of the 2012 Platonov Award, an honorary doctor of the Saint Petersburg
University of the Humanities. He hold a chair of Directing and is a professor of
the Saint Petersburg Theatre Arts Academy.
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