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The Life and Death of the Moscow Kamerny Theatre 

Dassia Posner, Associate Professor in the Departments of Theatre and Slavic Languages and Literatures, Northwestern, and ACLS Fellow 2018-19.

The Moscow Kamerny Theatre, founded in 1914 by director Alexander Tairov and actress Alisa Koonen, was one of the most dynamic experimental theatres of the Soviet century. It became world-renowned in its first two decades for its sweeping international repertoire, collaborations with avant-garde artists, and virtuosic actors. Yet it remains little-known outside Russia, and it has been frequently misunderstood in the years since its 1949 liquidation. This talk illuminates the significance of the Kamerny Theatre’s vivid life before turning to new archival findings that reveal the complex reasons for its death in the context of the “anti-cosmopolitan” campaign, the second wave of Stalin’s post-World War II anti-Semitic purge.

Lunch will be served.

More about Dassia Posner

Dassia Posner's books include The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance (2014), co-edited with Claudia Orenstein and John Bell, and The Director’s Prism: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde (2016), which analyzes the vivid directorial innovations of Vsevolod Meyerhold, Alexander Tairov, and Sergei Eisenstein. Her digital humanities project, a companion website to The Director’s Prism featuring over a hundred archival Russian theatre sources, can be accessed at fulcrum.org/northwestern.

Image courtesy of Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum.