Meeting with director Dodin

“One of the giants of drama in the world ” – emphasized Luca Doninelli, journalist and writer, in his presentation in the Auditorium D5 to 15, introducing the role of the director and playwright and artistic director of the Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg Lev Dodin. The writer asked the question: “How does drama lets us know the human being?”.
“Drama is not a profession but a way of life and gives the opportunity to learn things that it is difficult to understand otherwise – replied Dodin – for me it has become the perfect tool to learn about myself. I think that young people are attracted to drama to try living more lives. “According to the Russian playwright drama unconsciously helps to seek immortality and to live an upheaval, which is its most important language “and that’s what we all unconsciously long for and which we fear.” “For me – he continued – drama is a company art, which manifests a common soul and expresses the meaning of life because it is in relationship with others that man exists.”
Answering to Doninelli’s question: “How has matured the idea of staging Vasily Grossman’s masterpiece ‘Life and Fate’?, the director replied stressing his need to go deeper to know and understand the famous novel (or better yet “feel” to use the term the same author), while recognizing the difficulty of being able to represent such a complex work in the theater. “I was fascinated by the philosophy of the novel, from the description of a reality that reflects our daily life and is full of the same problems, from opposing concepts that coexist in the same historical experience, where he won the spirit of the people, with a look so tragic on reality. ”
“First thing – added Dodin – once published the novel in the Soviet Union after the censorship of the years of communism, I’ve assigned the reading to my students, inviting them to understanding at a later stage. We began to visit the places mentioned to recreate the same upheaval and there we understood to be ready to represent him. “. The belief of the writer in an irrepressible need for human freedom surfaces from the pages of the novel, more than anything else. Such an invincible freedom that even the worst totalitarian regimes sooner or later are bound to lose against it.
“Today “a state of emergency” means to bring out the man’s face in the difficulties of history – said the director – To understand not the past means risking to live it again in the future. In tragedy there is always the beauty and the artist, as a man, can also commit terrible things: paradoxically the more he is tragic, the more is positive. Memory tries to take away the pain. Drama, as an art form is a tool of pain, and then maybe for me meeting it was not useless. ”
(C.C.)