Yulia Savikovskaya was born in St Petersburg, Russia. As a teenager, she was involved with Youth Theatre in St Petersburg and took music lessons. She graduated with BA in International Journalism in 2004 and MA in European Studies in 2006 from St Petersburg State University. In 2006 she received Hill Foundation Scholarship for MPhil in Migration Studies at Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology (Merton College, Oxford) which was later extended to allow her to continue with a DPhil in Social and Cultural Anthropology. She was a Pensionnaire Etrangère at Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris in 2010/2011. She graduated from Oxford University with DPHil in Social and Cultural Anthropology in 2018. Her research focused on changes in identities and social trajectories of post-Soviet highly-skilled migrants to the UK. From 2009 to 2015 she had been also pursuing a part-time course in Theatre Studies and Criticism, culminating in a thesis about performances of Chekhov’s plays on modern British stage.
Since 2008 Yulia has been a contributor to various specialized theatre magazines, writing about British and European Theatre. She has been collaborating with St Petersburg Theatre Magazine, The Theatre, Strastnoy Bulvar, Imperium of Drama, Theatre City, Distant Shores, The Stage. She continues to publish her articles on modern British theatre in Russian, currently being one of the few specialists in the subject. In 2017, after moving from Oxford to London, she started contributing extensively to Art Around the Globe Magazine with reviews of opera and classical music, building a reputation for the site and representing it as a classical music journalist at the concerts of London-based orchestras and operas of the Royal Opera House and English National Opera. She has also been interviewing musicians (composers, conductors, performers) in Europe, Russia and the USA (the interviews can be found here in text and (with permission of interviewees) audio versions).
In parallel, Yulia has been developing as a writer and translator. She has written 12 plays (Tate Modern, The Dead City and A Failed Rehearsal have been staged) and is now writing a new one in Russian and English versions. She has translated three British modern plays (by Laura Wade, David Eldridge and Simon Stephens), serving as a link between British and Russian theatre culture. She has also recently translated a biography of Evgeny Zamyatin on commission made by its author, Prof. Julie Curtis (Wolfson College, Oxford). She is the author or short stories cycle RENAISSANCE that could be found here. At the moment she is writing her first novel, and the extracts from it in Russian and English will be published on this site.
Her current project that this site will serve a reflection of will consist of travelling around the world as an anthropologist writing about art, and especially about opera and classical music. She aims at taking interviews with musicians and creative people in Europe, Russia and the USA in her attempt to observe how classical music exists in the contemporary world. She will try to dig deeper into the reasons of its existence, the actual collaborations and exchanges between people that stand beyond creating a work of art (an opera performance or a classical music concert), the ideas and reflections of particular creators about what they do and why they do it.
She will also be the first world-roaming anthropologist who will observe opera houses and orchestras in the process of rehearsals, writing anthropological essays about her travels. She will attempt to unravel the processes standing behind modern music-making processes. Her social stance is in making this world more democratic and horizontally-oriented through inviting musicians, conductors, music agents, directors of orchestras and orchestra musicians to speak openly about their professions and contributions to the art of classical music. You are welcome to support the project by spreading the information, helping with connections to the orchestras and opera houses or donating to help it to exist.