Kirill Serebrennikov, Stage Director

Born in Rostov-on-Don, Kirill Serebrennikov completed his formal education in Physics in his hometown in 1992. During his studies he began a self-taught education as a director of theater, opera, film and television as well as a costume designer.

The first acclaimed productions Serebrennikov was able to direct outside of Russia were Salome at the Stuttgart Opera and ll barbiere di Siviglia at the Komische Oper Berlin.

In collaboration with Teodor Currentzis, Serebrennikov developed the project Mysterion (after Carl Orff’s De Temporum Fine Comedia) and the benefit project Requiem, for which he also served as author. Furthermore he directed opera productions such as Falstaff at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, Le coq d’or at the Bolshoi in Moscow and American Lulu at the Wiener Festwochen.

His interpretation of Cosi fan tutte at the Oper Zürich at the beginning of the 2018/19 season was celebrated as a sensational success, as well as his Nabucco production at the Staatsoper Hamburg in spring 2019 and his Il Barbiere di Siviglia production at the Theater Basel at the beginning of the 2019/20 season. In March 2020 Kirill Serebrennikov led his first theatre production in Germany with an adaptation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decamerone at the Deutsches Theater Berlin. His interpretation of Parsifal in a new production at the Vienna State Opera in April 2021 was highly acclaimed by the public and the media. His next opera projects are Die Nase at the Bavarian State Opera in autumn 2021 and Der Freischütz at De Nederlandse Opera Amsterdam in June 2022. 

Kirill Serebrennikov was recognized by the Cannes Film Festival in 2016 for such film-making work as The Student. Further films by Serebrennikov such as The Swallow, Mysteries of the Storm, Playing the Victim, and The Diary of a Murderer have been shown at the film festivals in Rome, Locarno and Venice, and have been nominated for the Golden Lion and the Grand Prix of Kinotvar in Sochi.

Beyond the numerous classics of Russian literature, which he has brought to the stage, Kirill Serebrennikov has also directed the works of playwrights such as Shakespeare and Brecht, right up to works of the Irish playwright Martin McDonagh. His staging of Vassily Sigarev’s Plastilin was recognized by Arte and programmed by many European theater festivals.

In 2011 Kirill Serebrennikov founded an experimental workshop-project called “Plattform.”

As Artistic Director of the collective of young artists known as Studio Seven, Serebrennikov has staged A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark among other works. Studio Seven is a part of the Gogol Center, which Kirill Serebrennikov has led artistically from 2012 until 2021.

Moscow’s Gogol Center is a genre-bending theater laboratory, which is unique in the Russian cultural landscape, where Serebrennikov staged such works at Gogol’s Dead Souls, a musical adaptation by Duncan Sheik based on Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening, as well as Machine Müller, inspired by Meiner Müller’s Hamletmaschine and in collaboration with the Goethe Institut.

In April 2019 Kirill Serebrennikov was awarded with the “Goldene Maske” for his staging of the ballet Nureyev at the Bolshoi theatre and for his staging of Pushkin’s The Little Tragedies at the Gogol Center.

2021/22

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