Mariupol Drama Theatre acting course auditions announced in St. Petersburg

St. Petersburg’s Russian State Institute of Performing Arts has announced auditions to join an acting course at the Mariupol Russian Drama Theatre, Help Desk Media reports.

The Mariupol theatre in question is the one built on the site of the Mariupol Drama Theatre that was destroyed last spring. The course will mandate that the students whose studies are paid by the state work in Mariupol for three years following graduation. Citizens of Russia and “new territories” alike can apply. Currently, 23 people have filed applications.

“For me, the acting profession is first and foremost a responsibility. It is sensitivity, something that [director Anatoly] Efros used to call ‘being thin-skinned’. To perceive someone else’s pain as your own is as rare today as the sense of proportion, the absence of which makes an actor monotonous and primitive”, says course leader and actor Alexander Kladko.

The Mariupol theatre that was completely ravaged during the fighting for the city was torn down in December 2022. Aide to the Mariupol mayor Petro Andryushchenko wrote that only the back and the central part of the building were demolished. “In other words, only the parts of the building that prove that the theatre was targeted by shelling, and not the propaganda-imagined explosion from within, are torn down,” he noted.