<br>Valery Fokin

Valery Fokin is the General and Artistic Director of the Meyerhold Centre in Moscow and the Artistic Director of the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. He graduated from the Shchukin Theatre School in 1968, where he staged his first production, From Evening Until Noon. Each of his new productions aroused keen interest from both spectators and critics, and included works by Nabokov, Vampilov, Rozov, Albee and other foreign and Russian dramatists. In 1985 Fokin's career once again took on a new dimension, when he was appointed to head the Ermolova Theatre in Moscow. By 1996 Fokin's theatrical work had reached such acclaim that special festivals of his productions were held both in Moscow and Saint Petersburg: Valery Fokin: Three Performances in the Manège (Moscow, March 1996) and Metamorphosis by Valery Fokin (Saint Petersburg, Liteiny Theatre, November-December 1996). Fokin's productions of A Room in a Hotel in the Town of NN (based on Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls), Metamorphosis (by Franz Kafka), Tatyana Repina (by Anton Chekhov), and The Inspector General (by Nikolai Gogol) were highly commended throughout Russia and the world. In his creative work Fokin touches upon the most poignant and bitter topics of our country's recent past, as well as present-day topics which have long been off-limits. Performances under Fokin's direction have been shown in theatres in Poland, Hungary, Germany, Finland, Greece, Switzerland, Japan, France, and the USA. In 2006 Valery Fokin became a member of the Presidium of the Presidential Council for Culture and the Arts of the Russian Federation.

Photo by Viktor Senzov