Posting on Facebook

Davydova opens up about her dismissal!

Now Marina Davidova is coming clean.

(Bild: © Neumayr/Christian Leopold)

The former head of drama at the Salzburg Festival, Marina Davydova, published a chronicle of her dismissal on Facebook in her native language. She said she felt like she was living in a frightening fairy tale.

A few days after reaching an out-of-court settlement with the Salzburg Festival, Marina Davydova published a chronicle of her dismissal on Facebook on Sunday. In a post in Russian, she shared previously unknown details. At the same time, she regretted that her Salzburg contract forbids her for life from making public any information that could potentially damage the Festival's reputation.

You are terminated. Right now! 
15 minutes before a meeting of the Festival Board of Trustees scheduled for 12 noon on November 28, she was called to the Festival management, where she was told that she had been dismissed, Davydova recounts. The formal reason given was her connection to the Berlin Festival Voices, which allegedly violated the terms of her contract.

"The termination process was lightning fast: you are terminated. Right now!" she describes. In response to objections with reference to the meeting of the board of trustees and the program press conference announced for 3 December, she was only told "You no longer work here".

Office telephone suddenly blocked
Just half an hour later, her work phone was blocked and a large amount of personal information and contacts that had been accumulated over two and a half years were instantly lost. "I feel like I'm in some scary fairy tale," sums up the theater curator from Russia living in exile in Germany, who, on the recommendation of her German lawyer, initially does not sign any documents or make any comments and returns to Berlin, her place of residence, on the same day.

Contract forbids her to give details
Her lawyers later explained to her that you can't actually be fired without warning for free consultations at a theater forum for exiled artists that is incomparable to Salzburg. "I myself understood from the beginning that Voices was just a pretext. But since it is only one step from describing the truth to discrediting (the festival, editor's note), we will not mention the real reason," Davydova says.

In another passage, she writes cryptically with regard to the reason for the termination that she is fundamentally difficult to manipulate and can only do what she believes in aesthetically and politically.

"Don't want to dampen Hinterhäuser's mood."
 She had received messages on her private phone from well-known directors, actors, playwrights and choreographers, all of whom were shocked by her dismissal. "But I won't quote these many messages so as not to dampen the spirits of (Festival Director) Markus Hinterhäuser," explains Davydova.

On December 4, the Festival's lawyers replied to her lawyers and suggested that they sit down at the negotiating table before filing a lawsuit in court, Davydova explains. Her German lawyer took this as a sign that the other side in Salzburg was by no means 100 percent sure of their case.

In the end, the lawyers on both sides reached an out-of-court settlement on December 11, the details of which she could not disclose. This agreement was made public in a Salzburg Festival press release on December 13.