Lecture: Marina Davydova "The Axial Age of Contemporary Theatre: When Does It Begin and How to Understand It"

Marina Davydova. "The Axial Age of Contemporary Theatre: When Does It Begin and How to Understand It"

September 3, 6:00 PM at the Vilnius Old Theatre (J. Basanavičiaus St. 13, Vilnius), theatre critic and producer Marina Davydova will give a lecture titled "The Axial Age of Contemporary Theatre: When Does It Begin and How to Understand It" (in Russian).

This lecture serves as a prelude to the premiere of director Ilya Moshchitsky's play "LIMBO" (September 4, 5). This is an event from the "Ložės eteris" cycle.

How did the emergence of the director change theatre, and how has the director's theatre itself evolved? Has it experienced, in the words of Karl Jaspers, its own "axial age"? Why do some of the most famous plays of past decades seem archaic to the educated contemporary viewer, while others do not? What does the category of "contemporaneity" mean in the context of theatre at all? In the more than one hundred years since the emergence of the phenomenon of directing, theatre has undergone many evolutions and absorbed many new territories, but is it not experiencing a crisis now? Marina Davydova's lecture will discuss not only famous theatre creators – from Tadeusz Kantor to Katie Mitchell, from Robert Wilson to Romeo Castellucci – but also how theatre has been changing in recent years. The lecture will be accompanied by video excerpts of masterpieces that, in the lecturer's opinion, have set the guidelines for 21st-century theatre.

Marina Davydova is a theatre critic, director, playwright, and producer. She has written the monographs "The End of the Theatre Epoch" (2005) and "Culture ZERO" (2017), and contributed to the preparation of the book "History of European Theatre from the Renaissance to the End of the 19th Century." She has won numerous awards for theatre criticism. In 1998, she was one of the founders of the "NET" ("New European Theatre") festival. She curated the drama program for "Wiener Festwochen" (2016) and served as the drama director of the Salzburg Festival (2023–2024). Notable directorial works include the play "Eternal Russia" ("Hebbel am Ufer", Berlin, 2017) and "Checkpoint Woodstock" ("Thalia" Theatre in Hamburg, 2019). At the invitation of the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre (LNDT), these plays were also shown in Vilnius in 2019. In 2023, the play "Museum of Uncounted Voices" was presented at the "Wiener Festwochen" festival in Vienna. M. Davydova's plays are often political, openly criticizing Russian reality, the system, counterculture, the regime, and freedom imprisoned by security. In March 2022, M. Davydova was forced to leave Russia after publishing an anti-militarist petition on the first day of the war against Ukraine.