Lev Dodin is a contemporary Russian theatre director and the artistic leader of the Maly Drama Theatre/Theatre of Europe in St. Petersburg.
Dodin was born in 1944 near Kemerovo, Siberia and studied theatre in the Leningrad Institute for Theatre, Music and Cinematography under Boris Zon, a student of Stanislavsky.
Since his debut as a director in 1966, Lev Dodin has directed dozens of theatrical productions, including The Gentle Creature by Dostoyevsky at the Bolshoi Drama Theatre and the Moscow Art Theatre, The Golovlyov Family at the Moscow Art Theatre and Bankrupt at the Leningrad Theatre for Youth and the Finnish National Theatre in Helsinki.
Dodin’s opera credits include Elektra at the Salzburg Festival together with Claudio Abbado, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk at the Florence Musical May Festival, The Queen of Spades in Amsterdam, Florence and Paris, Mazepa in La Scala with Mstislav Rostropovich and Demon at the Chatelet in Paris with Valery Gergiev.
In 1967 Dodin began to teach acting and directing. Currently he is a professor and Head of Directing at the St. Petersburg State Theatre Arts Academy.
In 1983 Dodin became the artistic director of the Maly Drama Theatre. In 1985 he directed Brothers and Sisters there, an 8-hour long adaptation of F. Abramov’s trilogy, which became a humanistic and artistic manifesto for his theatre. Dodin has erased the border between an actor’s undergraduate training and professional work. The Maly Drama Theatre’s legendary productions of Lord of the Flies, Gaudeamus, The Possessed, A Play Without a Title, King Lear and Life and Fate were performed by both the experienced members of the company and the student actors. Today the company is almost entirely comprised of Dodin’s former students of several generations.
Since the early 1990s Dodin’s Maly Drama Theatre has been actively touring in Russia and worldwide and has performed on every continent.
In September 1998 Dodin’s theatre received the status of Theatre of Europe, only the third after the Odeon in Paris and the Piccolo in Milan. Lev Dodin is a member of the Union of the Theatres of Europe; and in 2012 he was elected the Union’s Honorary President. Dodin’s theatre was called ‘the most European theatre in Russia and the most Russian theatre in Europe’.
