New management – Salzburg Festival: Davydova is the new acting director
Marina Davydova will be responsible for the drama program at the Salzburg Festival for three years from the 2024 season, succeeding Bettina Hering. With Davydova, the festival has appointed an outstanding representative of the Moscow theater scene.
The possible theater scholar, who started at the Wiener Festwochen in 2016 with festival director Markus Hinterhäuser, is more than an expert for theater in Russia: the festival she founded, “Neues Europäisches Theater” (NET), was jointly responsible for the Russian theater boom of the past , which Putin’s policy put an abrupt end to.
Davydova openly criticized the Ukraine war and had to leave Moscow in March in a hurry: after writing a petition calling on Russia to stop hostilities in Ukraine, she was initially threatened by telephone. Then an unknown person painted a “Z”, the combat symbol of the “required special operation”, on her apartment door. The prominent theater critic and curator took this as a warning and fled.
“soul mate”
Born in 1966 in Baku, Azerbaijan, Davydova lost her homeland a second time, at least temporarily, as a result of these events. While the daughter of an Armenian and a Russian at the prestigious GITIS for theater arts in Moscow, nationalist riots broke out in Armenia and Azerbaijan in the late 1980s. The older apartment in Baku was occupied by strangers, and the library and all souvenirs of the family were destroyed.
In an Apa interview, Davydova says of Markus Hinterhäuser: “There is a kinship between us, we appreciate the same thing in art.”