President of the theater – Newspaper Kommersant No. 225 (7426) dated 05.12.2022

Valery Shadrin, president of the International Confederation of Theater Unions, founder and permanent director of the Moscow Chekhov International Festival, one of the most authoritative people of the Russian theater, died after a long illness at the age of 84.

His life seemed to be divided into two parts. The first, of which there are now few witnesses, was the usual Soviet biography – a young engineer, a graduate of the Bauman School in the early 1960s, went, as they said then, “along the party line.” He rose to the secretary of the party committee of one of the Moscow districts, then became the head of the entire metropolitan culture. But few people could have imagined that on the day of Valery Shadrin’s death, the entire theatrical world would mourn – literally the whole, not only in Russia, but also in Paris and Avignon, and in Central Asia, and in Japan, and in Rio de Janeiro .

It was said that allegedly Shadrin did not work well with Boris Yeltsin, he left the city authorities. But during his work in the department of culture, he managed to make friends with people of culture, with theater leaders, many of whom he helped, since Gorbachev’s “thaw” had come. And when the Union of Theater Workers of the USSR was created on the wave of changes, the theatrical “foremen of perestroika” invited the former official Shadrin to their company.

This was probably one of the most important personnel decisions in the history of modern Russian culture – Shadrin was to become not just the leader of theatrical life, but, without exaggeration, one of the largest Russian educators.

An active and ambitious man, sincerely loving the theater, Valery Shadrin transformed the STD into the Confederation of Theater Unions and came up with the idea of ​​holding the Chekhov International Theater Festival in Moscow, on the one hand, in order not to lose touch with the theaters of the former Soviet republics, on the other hand, to show the world theater in Moscow.

Already in the 1990s, the Chekhov Festival became an outstanding educational project; performances of the best theaters and directors of the world came to it, about which the audience knew only by hearsay. The list is huge – from Giorgio Strehler to Pina Bausch, from Declan Donnellan to Tadashi Suzuki, from Robert Wilson to Robert Lepage, from Ariana Mnushkina to Christophe Marthaler. Few of them came once. Once caught in the orbit of attention of the Chekhov Festival, the great masters could no longer avoid Shadrin’s force of attraction.

Valery Shadrin turned out to be not only a successful and prudent art manager, but also a real visionary and reformer.

On the one hand, as a person who came out of the Soviet formation, he knew how to communicate with officials and be part of the “system”. On the other hand, his vital energy and his instinct – not scientific knowledge, but natural understanding of the theater – helped him change the theatrical situation in Russia. He not only brought and showed celebrities or outlandish spectacles, but also understood the need for joint work – for example, the famous Moscow performances of Peter Stein and Declan Donnellan appeared. Shadrin instilled in the Russian theater a taste for international work.

The Chekhov Festival grew and developed, it became a source of inspiration for other undertakings, other international forums. And he “overgrown” with other projects, including regional ones. And it reached its true heyday in 2001, when the Chekhov Festival held the International Theater Olympiad in Moscow, an event of incredible scope and richness, with street theaters on central squares, the Brazilian carnival on Tverskaya (even the trolleybus wires were then dismantled), the arrival of the best clowns in the world and more hundreds of other attractions. Moscow has never seen anything like this before.

Of course, Shadrin’s success was based not only on his ability to conduct business, sell tickets and collect the necessary budgets, but on his extraordinary charm and sincere passion for theatrical business, on his ability to captivate people and unite them around him. Valery Shadrin did not speak foreign languages ​​and did not seem to be too fond of computers, but was accepted by the multilingual international theater community, first as an equal partner, and then as one of the most respected “heavyweights”. And many of the most important members of this community became both its guests and its friends. The fact that his authority in the Russian theatrical world was practically indisputable, there is nothing to say.

Valery Shadrin was not just a man of action, but also a man of mission, although he himself eschewed manifestos. The mission was to build reliable bridges and ignore borders.

On the one hand, so that the world knows that Russia is an open and important territory of world art, on the other hand, so that the world accepts, knows and understands the Russian theater and knows how to appreciate it. A month ago, the director of the Chekhov Festival spoke about the program of the next forum, scheduled for spring 2023. But he certainly knew and felt that the mission was no longer possible.

Esther Steinbock