The Russian director and director Kirill Serebrennikov, opposed to the offensive in Ukraine, rebelled against the change of management of his former theater, which he had transformed into an epicenter of the avant-garde.
Between 2012 and 2021, Kirill Serebrennikov, now in exile abroad, was the artistic director of the Gogol Center in Moscow, a municipal theater, where he staged daring plays mixing social criticism and religion, sexuality, themes that are not in tune with the conservative line of the Kremlin.
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Last year, he had to leave his post, his contract not having been renewed.
A few months earlier, he had been convicted in a controversial embezzlement case.
On Wednesday evening, the Department of Culture of the city of Moscow indicated that a new artistic director, Anton Yakovlev, had been appointed at the Gogol Center and that the establishment would return to its old name: the Nikolai Gogol Drama Theatre.
Immediately, Kirill Serebrennikov denounced the
"murder"
of a place he had completely transformed and most of whose shows were sold out.
For him, this change is linked to the conflict in Ukraine.
“They decided to close the theater. For his position, for his honesty. For trying to be free. For the fact that, for all these months that the war has lasted, the actors, who protest against the war, no longer salute but end each show with the image of a dove”
, affirmed the artist.
“From an artistic point of view, it's not just a malicious act. It's murder. A new ordinary murder”
, he concluded, in a message published on his Telegram account.