News

They Kill Theater Directors!

16 September 2007

Theater director Mark Weil was brutally assaulted on September 6 by two unknown attackers in the lobby of his apartment house in Tashkent (Uzbekistan) and died a few hours later in the hospital, on the eve of a new premiere and a new theater season of his Ilkhom Theater. He was 55 years old. Originally from St Petersburg and educated at the Theater Institute there, Mark established the Ilkhom Theater in Tashkent in 1976 and run it as a semi-autonomous enterprise, a rarity in the Soviet circumstances and under the virtual monopoly of the state supported and party-controlled repertory theater companies. After the demise of the USSR and the independence of Uzbekistan, he decided to stay there but worked regularly in Europe, Japan and the USA and took his company on several international tours. Last year, two of his actors were killed in Moscow under unclear circumstances while on tour. Weil was one of the very few performing artists from Central Asia with a good international network. His loyalty to Tashkent and his company was steady against the islamist violent uprising, the hardening of the Karimov's dictatorship and the growing cultural isolation of Uzbekistan, once a popular tourist destination and for a while a loyal US ally in the 'war on terror". Considering Weil's unique position in Uzbekistan as an internationally known artist and person of Jewish background, it is difficult to think that his murder was a banal criminal incident and not a political deed. Whoever killed him, sent to the theater profession another warning signal. In the post-communist Central Asia cultural production suffers not only from from isolation and poverty but also from personality cults and nation-building ideologies essentially hostile to any sort of critical arts. While many in Europe are getting ready to embark on the bandwagon of 2008 the Year of Intercultural Dialogue, Weil's violent death points out the pitfalls of interculturalism in and with Central Asia.