It is customary in our country to divide the current theatre culture into representatives of, as it were, three temporal layers: those who began their activities during the “Khrushchev Thaw” of the 1960s and filled it with ideas of hope associated with that time; those who began to work in the 1970s; and those who began in the 1980s. These three tiers essentially define theatre life in this country today.

The theatre culture of the 1960s flourished mainly in the persons of Georgy Tovstonogov, Yury Lyubimov, Oleg Yefremov, and Anatoly Efros. By the 1970s, all these directors either had their own theatre, or a stable reputation that allowed them to work seriously and well in the two capitals. They tried to free themselves from dogmatic relations with Stanislavsky's rigidly understood system, which, first of all, was associated with the notion of power; theatre in the 1960s discovered that there is a theatre as such, and a free person within it. The main problem for them was how to understand the conflict and the hero in the theatre. And, accordingly, the story that needed to be told. The hero they chose was a common person, filled with the ideological cliches of the 1960s. But the entire '60s generation met with disillusionment. Accordingly, throughout the 1970s, all these directors dealt on stage with their own disillusionments. They lost hope not only in social terms, but they also became disillusioned with theatre as an art capable of endowing a person with hope. They began treating theatre as a job. The history of theatre paralleled personal histories – theatre lost faith in itself. By the 1970s, the director emerged as theatre's central figure. Theatre began to professionalize, it became a relatively high-quality factory for the production of performances. And these directors began very much to resemble the directors of factories. They knew the Soviet environment well, and they were able successfully to sell their products in this market. In fact, they began teaching this in the theatre schools, imposing the following ideas on the process of theatrical education: theatre is a factory, and you must work well in this factory.

Moreover, their humanist and communist vocabulary, unchanged since their youth, was combined with changing technology. This brought about a schizophrenic effect that was expressed, primarily, by the fact that, in the 1970s, theatre began losing contact with reality and with young spectators who were beginning their lives, and were reacting acutely to this process. Major urban theatres began filling up with audiences possessing a "provincial" consciousness. This consciousness not only filled auditoriums, but backstages too; thus slowing down the development of this most important art form for our country. Another serious inhibiting effect was associated with the fact that normal people, in general, did not want to attend theatre schools.

This is a property of imperial theatres: a theatre that is controlled by a central government, and, according to its historical features of development, has always been a state-sanctioned, monumental art form. It was prestigious to become a part of it. Thus, over the course of several years, from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, the theatre was filled with imbeciles who did not consider this art form as something sacrosanct, but used it for their own purposes.

The only ones who did not fall victim to this situation were theatre designers. Due to the fact that this aspect of the theatrical art required knowledge in other art forms, designers were untouched by the situation that affected directors and actors. On the other hand, a theatre supported by the state not only in the capital, but also in the provinces (for theatre was considered the pride of any city), had access to certain allocated funds, and an artist could express himself in theatre. Many talented architects who could not find work in actual construction, turned to theatre to become designers. As such, a paradoxical situation developed: on the one hand, a whole generation of powerful theatre designers was born; on the other hand, theatre was clearly in a state of decline. The designers David Borovsky, Valery Leventhal, Daniil Lider, and Eduard Kochergin had a huge impact on the form and image that performances began to acquire. Moreover, for a while they also seized the ideological initiative in theatre. These individuals were also of the 'sixties generation, they experienced the same catastrophe of losing hope for real change in society. They, too, began dealing with their disappointment. But in the art of scenography this test was positive, not negative. Set decorations do not openly carry ideology. Well-tailored performances were made in good sets, but they were made using technologies that could no longer lead to the development of the art form, they were not thematically in contact with the common man.

Nevertheless, thе 'sixties generation did its job: it shattered Stanislavsky's dogma, discovering that Stanislavsky was not alone in Russian theatrical culture. Paradoxically, it had to be discovered that Meyerhold and Vakhtangov had also existed! Further, they discovered that, in addition to Meyerhold, Vakhtangov and Stanislavsky, there existed a world theatre tradition. They were the first to travel to the West, because they had served the state well, they could be trusted and allowed to travel. On one hand, they brought back information from the West about the world theatrical process, such as Grotowski, the French absurdists, etc. On the other, they came back terribly worried. Because there, in the West, they encountered a completely different quality of theatrical production, and scenography, and a very different relationship between the director and the actor. The West spoiled them immediately, and when they returned to the Soviet Union, they began to rage and yell. They did not grasp the essence of the processes taking place in the West (the 1960s, the sexual revolution), they were incapable of fathoming someone else's reality. They simply borrowed it all as form.

Finally, there was drama. It not only existed in monstrous isolation, lacking a platform on which to study itself, but it also failed to pose problems for theatre, it did not ask questions of theatre. Playwrights were the most orthodox individuals. Theatre was a closed system, forced to work either with Russian classics or 20th-century Western classics that were allowed in our country (Tennessee Williams or Jean Anouilh, i.e. those who did not touch on politics or the person living in the present, in the 1970s). Theatre evolved the art of using the classics to speak to the present. The main thing that the 'sixties generation acquired in the 1970s was the art of reading classical texts. Not the art of communication, of total and pure relationships with the text, but relationships with one's own era via the text. Another schizophrenic paradox in which they remained trapped was that Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko still remained guiding lights. Nemirovich-Danchenko's chief declaration of a method is that theatre is based on the playwright's word. They sacredly believed this and they sacredly learned to work with the text. But that text constantly spoke only in the present tense, for it was their only real outlet, the only opportunity to speak for themselves. Thus, regardless of their own manifestos and articles, they usurped the text, bending it to their own despair, which they considered to be in present tense. This was not, for example, Stein's way of working with the text, where he analyzes text as a professional philologist, distracting himself not only from himself, but also from the present, and gradually, by way of this analysis, arrives at an era. Nor is this Beckett's method, where he took the Gospel and played with it, multiplying it by the present. They did not know all this, and did not realize that things could be done this way.

But the present time, which, in its own way, has always been the salvation of culture, and has always moved it further, worked its way into theatre. This, in fact, gave rise to the generation of the 1970s. Leadership here belonged to the "new wave" in drama, prose writers who began writing plays, for example, Viktor Slavkin and Lyudmila Petrushevskaya. I name them precisely because they accurately express two tendencies. Petrushevskaya came from classical poetry and prose, Slavkin from jazz culture. These were people who, on one hand, were deeply representative of their generation, who had been able to grasp the world cultural experience and apply it to the era that arose in the 1970s here in this country. On the other hand, they were not professionally involved in theatre. But they read Beckett, and followed what was happening in music and literature. The new dramaturgy was not at all concerned with "theatrical production"; it did not care about it. Even in the authors' own estimation, their work was doomed not to be staged. As such, it naturally renewed the foundations of playwriting and drama. This was the impact of the "new wave" of the 1980s, born as an absolutely self-sufficient art, a free, self-sufficient literary genre. These plays were circulated in samizdat, not because of political reasons, but simply because it was convenient at that time. The main feature of these playwrights was that they wrote dialogue in a new way, they wrote precisely, turning dialogue into poetry or jazz. But they wrote stage directions in the old way, for the territory of stage directions is subject to theatre's age-old pressures. These plays still carry a peculiar quality of bifurcation, with old-fashioned stage directions, advice to the director borrowed from the theatre they saw before them, and dialogues written in a new manner.

At the same time that drama revealed itself in a new way, a new generation of directors arose: people set to attack the practices of the 1960s, when theatre was incapable of working with the present moment, thus losing its primary purpose. In their practice, they tried to resolve a new system of technologies, the relationship between the director and the text (and with the text of the “new wave”), between the director and the actor, as well as to rediscover the nature of the actor's existence on stage. Primarily, they discovered a new manner of conflict.

One person is set against another – this is how conflict was understood in the 1960s. The story of a hero in a totalitarian state. And because humanist words of hope were spoken, the nature of the conflict did not change, which, in brief, was the story of a hero in a totalitarian state. “Here I am, and I am going up against you” – this is how plays and theatre were constructed in the 1930s, and theatre was made the same way in the 1960s. One was in conflict with another, and theatre theory served them remarkably well. The method of physical actions, the system of tasks implanted in theatrical institutes, transformed an individual into an ideological computer, an ideological robot. One, burdened with a system of tasks, purposefully collided with another, highlighting the plot of this very ideological clash for an audience.

The warriors on stage were transformed: if before the communist fought the fascist, now, using the same technology, an insignificant man fought a big boss. A good, little man fights the big, bad boss – there you have the Taganka. The hopeful young man of the 1960s fights against the hopeless and bad man of the 1950s – there you have the Sovremennik. They just wore different overcoats: either the overcoat of the People's Will or a Soviet soldier of the 1940s... The "overcoats" changed, but the nature of the conflict did not.

The main discovery belonging to the 1970s generation of directors (admittedly quite late) was the change in the nature of conflict. They began investigating an individual who no longer does battle with another person, but does battle with himself. Thus, we met with the hero who is expressed remarkably, for example, in Godard's Breathless, the hero of the "new wave." They came face to face with the European hero of the 1960s. This hero was rediscovered and turned out to be accessible to certain members of the public in the 1970s in Moscow.

The new understanding of conflict required a different kind of actor. To educate him for their own use, they needed to occupy theatre training zones. They knew well the “factories” that they came to, and there, from inside the “factories,” they began usurping space, allocating zones in which they could exist and live. These spaces turned out to be small; they were called "small stages." The directors changed, although the actors did not, nor did the wave of “stupid” applicants that poured into theatre schools. The directors of the 1970s were opposed not only to the factory, not only to the “behemoth” directors – the rulers of theatre since the 1960s – but also to the actors who actually worked in theatre. As such, they turned out to be lonely combatants in a totally losing battle. This struggle, of course, did great violence to them, as they drew energy from those of the 'sixties generation, who did not participate in the struggle itself, but slowly adopted the new ideas, realizing there was a grain of truth in them.

The paradox of the 1980s was that almost the entire generation of '70s directors had died out as artists by the early 1980s. Almost no one was left. It was a most tragic generation. Of them only dreams remained: the dream of a home as the central theme of their work. Anatoly Vasilyev expressed this dream, and a relationship to this dream, in his production of Cerceau, where he brought into focus the central processes taking place in Soviet theatrical culture. Vasilyev survived thanks to the fact that he directed the poison of his gift directly at this quintessence, where all the motifs of the reigning situation converged, that is, not only at the present day, not only at drama, but also at the fate of theatre itself. Moreover, Cerceau emerged as the most significant production in the theatrical life of the last two decades, the first postmodernist work in Russia.

In order to expose his own nerves, he had to employ not only the experience of the Soviet state, but he had to rely on something that preceded the revolutionary coup – Russian art nouveau. And the Russian art nouveau essentially already comprised a synthesis. When Vasilyev put together a situation that was, in fact, connected with his life and the Russian moderne, the result was a postmodern work, fresh and clear, which he brought to life in that marvelous house created by his designer Igor Popov, in the performances, and in the entire work. The main idea of the performance was related to the fact that people dream of a home, but when given the opportunity to have one, they themselves, with their own hands, do everything they can to waste the opportunity.

Ultimately, amidst the chaos of processes associated with perestroika and changing hierarchies in the mid-1980s, a number of directors of the 'seventies took up major positions in theatre, which essentially did not change. Some acquired their own home. Valery Fokin became a director at the Yermolova Theatre, Vasilyev got his own theatre, Konstantin Raikin, Genrietta Yanovskaya took over the Young Spectator Theatre, Viktyuk, etc.

In parallel with the theatrical intrigue that I am setting out, the following processes were taking place in the larger sociocultural space. Not only did a state culture emerge in the 1960s, but it was also joined by a so-called second culture. This was a culture that attacked the state, which did not share social hopes, was not subject to the temptation of state awards, money, or the "monumental" reorganization of state life. These were not crazy people who wanted to be beggars all their lives. They simply didn’t want to spend their entire artistic life serving doomed social ideas. These were people knowledgeable in European culture, Andrei Bitov and Vasily Aksyonov in prose, Ernst Neizvestny, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid in painting, Joseph Brodsky in poetry, Alfred Schnittke and Edison Denisov in music. They did not fall into schizophrenic situations. The reasons why these people developed normally are as follows: their art did not depend on production. They were artists, musicians, poets. They could work by themselves. Their art did not depend on a collective. And they turned out to be worthy of their own talent. Individuals also appeared among theatre directors who sought to find themselves in a second culture. These people's aspirations remained unfulfilled in the 1960s and the 1970s. The most prominent representative among these directors was Yevgeny Schiffers, an absolutely unknown figure even in the Soviet Union. He was one of the most gifted directors of the 1960s. His path is as follows: he tried to stage a play but burned out; then he turned to philosophy, cultural studies, mysticism, and esoteric culture. At present, he is one of the most important Soviet philosophers. More prescient people did not even try to go into directing. The initiative to disdain the theatre or the initiative to antagonize the theatre belonged precisely to these peoplе. Although, I must admit, many of the directors of the '60s were in contact with them, and did try to advance their ideas through their own art. They tried, but they failed. Yury Lyubimov was the most striking individual to borrow words and themes from this culture. He adopted words and themes from one culture, and used another to stage his productions.

The culture that remained behind in the Soviet Union, which did not emigrate, gradually inserted itself into dissident games with Brezhnev's rule, with the revival of Stalinist methods among the leadership of our country, with numerous political and social processes, and, as a result, came out in opposition to the state and ended up in a real battle with it.

Painters, stumbling on this paradigm of what lay ahead – death in the dissident struggle – found a way out that was most effective for a full two decades. It intersected with the searches in the late 1960s of progressive American and European avant-garde culture, becoming a movement of the Soviet avant-garde in the period of the 1960s to the 1980s. They did not turn their backs on society and go into abstract art, but on the other hand, they did not enter into a battle with it either. They accepted it as their own aesthetic, making it possible for them to overcome. Painters found themselves in a very intense relationship with text itself, with language, but not with society. In the early 1980s, they were joined by a whole wave of a new generation that was positioned in the underground.

This generation was no longer interested in either dissidents or state culture. The generation that went underground in the 1980s embarked on the path of "getting out of the opposition." In this sense, they not only abandoned opposition, but conflicts in general. This was immediately reflected in our generation's first serious, fundamental theatrical explorations, which began in the 1980s. Conflict as a basic position of theatrical technology was utterly renounced.

Our generation did not develop in an attempt to acquire a new conflict, but in completely different directions. We lost interest in a theatre where one person is in conflict with another person, or one person is in conflict with himself. This is what the underground was for our generation at the turn of the 1970s to the 1980s in Russia, for the so-called “new culture.” Unlike the western underground, which attracted radical young people seeking to perform a rite of initiation, in Russia a whole generation entered the underground, which they would never have done under normal conditions. Underground zones arose in Moscow and Leningrad simply because they are huge metropolises where you can hide from society, and from social antinomies. Wonderful artists, musicians and poets went into the underground. It turned out that everyone knew each other. The paradox is that, for a time, everyone came together around rock music. Genuine artistic life began to arise in the underground, which later, in the mid-1980s, influenced many trends in theatre itself: the new theatre and young directors, brought up not only by members of the 'seventies generation, but also by the era itself, seized upon many ideas born in the underground and began to develop them.

But I must admit that for obvious reasons, while maintaining its versatility, theatre could not go underground; for there theatre was deprived of all possibilities for existence. As an art, theatre did not flourish in the underground aside from a few individuals and ventures. Essentially the first such attempt in dramatic theatre was my effort in Leningrad to create the Theatre Theatre right in the heart of the underground. To study directing, I entered GITIS, where I was educated, and where and I fully adopted the tradition that went through Anatoly Efros, one of the central characters of the 'sixties, and through Anatoly Vasilyev, a leader in directing in the 1970s and 1980s. Both of these individuals transmitted their technologies to me, and I was able to take them on. Then I consciously left this narrative behind and entered the underground to try to create a theatre. But at the same time I remained in the territory of state culture, because I knew that otherwise I would lose my insurance, the possibility of escape, for the underground is of such a depth that not everyone returns from it. That platform, the zone from which I took my dive down below, was my work on the play, The Observer, the theme of which is the story of a thirty-year-old rock musician of our generation, of our time. The Observer was written by Alexei Shipenko, the leader of the next generation of playwrights in the 1980s. It is a Russian play with a plot set in the 1980s.

At first, I worked on The Observer in an academic theatre, the Mossoviet. The production was a simple story about a contemporary. He became disillusioned with rock music, rock loses its meaning for him, and so the music he makes loses its meaning for him. He does not know what kind of music to make next.

An important aspect of the production was that I transformed dramatic actors, educated in an academic environment, into rock musicians. Over three years of rehearsals, we created an artificial rock group that played thirty songs, hits of Russian rock gathered from a twenty-year period. This group, naturally working from a dramatic standpoint, discussed music, their life in the play, and the plot itself. At one point, I came into conflict with the Mossoviet Theatre. For obvious reasons the theatre could not support these themes and these "sounds" in its environment. Then Vasilyev, who was one of the initiators of this work, and was one of my closest colleagues, offered some crucial support by inviting me to take my production to his theatre, which he had just created. I went to Vasilyev with the team I had gradually pulled together from my work in the underground and in the academic theatre, mixing them, and combining them into one.

Vasilyev gave me a whole zone to work in and said: "Make your show." I worked on it for two years (a year at the Mossoviet Theatre, and another year at Vasilyev's "Apartment No. 4"). The result was a production in the form of a theatrical romance about our generation. With real texts, stories and monologues from our friends in Leningrad and Moscow, known both in the underground and more widely. Everything took on a serious naturalistic plan. The production had already found an audience, and people began to come. In general, interest in the production began to swell. Vasilyev reacted normally to this interest. Moreover, he even sent The Observer to a festival in Berlin and gave me the opportunity to play it before 1,000 people in a hall of the Metropol. We adapted and cut the performance to two hours. It was well received. As such, it happened that I performed the premiere of the play in Berlin. Finally, we returned to Moscow and began preparing for the premiere there. A rather unique and harmonious situation arose: within one theatre another theatre, friendly to it, was ripening. It was a living organism, connected to Vasilyev by a purely theatrical, professional tradition, but already structured on completely different ideas, the ideas of a variable theatre, a developing organism.

As soon as a theatre creates a performance, turns it into something concrete, the performance begins to die. Our generation, in this case in my guise, posed a question to theatre: how do you create a performance that would continue to self-develop in the course of its existence, and would not die. Everything changes in the manner in which we interact with the production process, the set design, the actors, of course, the principles of theatrical education, and the principles of handling text. Such a theatre takes on many experiences: the experience of performance, and the experience that is inherent to rock music, for example, when that strange magical entity, a rock group, suddenly begins developing on its own. Everything that could be salvaged from the old tradition, everything that was useful to us, we naturally, in an absolutely predatory manner, took along with us. It was the ideal situation – all of Moscow envied us. A brilliant Soviet director, and the most fashionable theatre give you the opportunity to engage in your experiments of production, both technologically and aesthetically. But this whole structure, so harmonious and ideal, ran into one little problem. Our lead actor in the play and, as it were, the bearer of the main story in it, was an actor of the 1970s. He was one of those young people who once found himself in the theatre and never escaped back into real life. There was nothing to be done about it. I pushed on him, and he pushed back in the same way. I found myself in a schizophrenic situation: I am narrating one story by all the means available to me, and the person playing the lead narrates just the opposite. We ended up parting. At first, he left on his own. I said: “Since you're leaving on your own” (I would never have fired him, he worked too hard), “I am replacing you with another person." And I hired an actor with whom for many years I had gone through thick and thin. Vasilyev told me I didn't have the right to change the actor. I said, I am the creator of this production, I am the director, and I do have the right. That was followed by an ultimatum – either I bring back the original actor or there would be no premiere. It is crucial to note that this actor employed the Vasilyev method of narrating a story of one's relationship with daily life. The result was that the performance wonderfully told the story of his generation. But we were seeking a performance that would tell about our life, about our relationship with daily life. So we had to leave the theatre. We left as a group and again found ourselves in the middle of nowhere – in the underground. But there was no longer any insurance, no hope for insurance. The people of the 'seventies generation turned out to be incapable of patronage, not in the sense of putting up money and providing conditions, but in the sense of being able to allow the emergence of a new zone on their territory, one that would transmit other ideas, and a new era. I realized that I must become a patron of the arts in relation to myself. I had no other path, but for the path I call the notion of clean territory. We found ourselves in clean territory. I was no longer interested in showdowns with society or with previous generations. I was interested in the light that lay before us in the form of our own real life.

Our problems, on the one hand, were in creating a school, and on the other, in creating a theatre. And the theatre had to merge with the school, there was no avoiding this, this was the structure we required. I've been putting them together for three years now in the Studio of Individual Directing.

Theatre, in the sense that I define this universal zone of activity, combines two trends: modeling and layout. On one hand, theatre is provided with a primary, original text, which, as it were, has already explored the world in the form of a layout or mock-up. Theatre then must further modulate it by way of play-acting. This is what the theatre of play does. On the other hand, another tendency in theatre is no less powerful – the expression of real being, the present time of an individual's life, not mediated by text. As the screenplay in video exists in limbo after a film is made, so does the play after its performance in theatre. Thus, an actor who exists in a theatre of this kind is required to generate a text in the process of his acting – not as a verbal expression in the form of sounds and phonemes, but a text in the post-structuralist sense. Here we find ourselves in the territory of two very important antinomies: speech and text. Theatre, or contemporary directing, must master the art of generating speech, as well as the art of working with text and creating text. These two main vectors of work are also present in acting. A director today must relinquish much of his professional wealth to an actor. The actor must be not only a performer, but also the author of the role. And it so happens that this is one of the central problems in directing today. When, at a certain point in my courses at the Studio, I cancel out the opposition between “actor and director,” I then deprive a person in advance of a predetermined perspective of who he will become: a director or an actor.

Vasilyev, in principle, is not concerned with such antinomies. He continues to create and serve that image of a totalitarian or centered world, in which an ideologist generates a theme, and then a medium takes it over and translates it, doing its bidding in this centered space. That is why Vasilyev insists on improvisation so much, because improvisation is freedom allowed within the framework of structure. It fears spontaneous energies, uncontrolled, non-ideologized, thematically unconditioned energies. Although spontaneous and improvisational energies do not stand in opposition to one another, they are signs of that totally free, liberated space where authorship truly lives. This is not connected with ideology or worldview – i.e. a person's relationship with the already existing world – but with the person's ability to participate in myth-making.

The improvisational is unfailingly related to theme. Theme in theatre is completely different from theme in jazz. A theme in jazz is presented as a set of related sounds, while in theatre theme is defined as a set of certain meanings, in relation to which the actors must separate and come back together in their performance.

Spontaneous existence on stage removes the actor from any relationship with theme in general. The actor in spontaneous existence is associated with mysterial theatre. He acquires energy not from theme, but from the chaos of being that hovers over him.

Theatre is a "natural" art, it is located in present time. The paradox about theatre today is that it is devoid of the present. It possesses the past and the future, but not the present. And this present time, unscheduled and unplanned, is born only during performance. It cannot be fixated, or given form as a structure. Vasilyev is engaged in structural theatre. Today, structure in theatre and structural theatre are irrelevant. It has long determined the performance, and its influence on the development of theatre. Performance is that territory where all types of art may be presented, each being equal to the other, without claims of leadership. The second vector of performance is the zone where one decides to express one's feelings for a new kind of art. A person in the territory of performance experiences the hope of becoming a specialist in an art form that has never existed before. And this emphasizes with great power his individual right to that style, manner, or technology, which he produces from within himself in the form of a gift, in the form of experience. Text and word exist there, equals of sound, but do not exist like a montage of attractions. The montage of attractions, according to Eisenstein, is devoid of the second postulate, the second vector – the feeling for a new kind of art. These are not merely different formulations, they are different philosophies of theatre. Theatre as a montage of attractions concerns only fixation or a method of fixation. Everything that the art of direction has expressed before us concerned only the generation and fixation of a performance. It did not concern the ways of creating a substance that is capable of self-development and evolution. Thus, directing today is the art of birthing a thing and its further development, but in no case is it a fixation of anything in any particular form.

The failure to take into account spontaneous energy in theatre greatly hinders the development of a number of wonderful ideas related to the theatre of play, and its relationship with the psychological.

Something that is currently undergoing serious attack from the accepted practice of art is the elevation of action to a primary place as the main subject of theatre. Action is not central to theatre today, although European theatre and cinema are primarily based on action. It is very important to master the art of building action in theatre, to master all the previous metamorphoses of theatre, and I consider this a must for my students. Only the hierarchy is different. The levels of cognition must be constructed in a completely different way.

I posit the technology of heuristic speech as a basis of my studio work with students. It is capable of providing us with real discoveries. This seems to me to be a truly amazing set of tools with which culture may be regenerated. This is the toolset of words and poetry. It universally reveals human capabilities. In the Studio of Individual Directing, we have nullified the concepts of "director" and "actor," as well as the concept of "director of a dramatic performance." We have an author-performer who strives to express himself by means of theatre, cinema, visual arts, etc. Undoubtedly, these are difficult things to consider if you hear them as aspects of the production process. It is difficult to create such a space: first in a laboratory setting, then to release it into real existence in the world. Individuals today do not want to obey the existing hierarchy in culture. They want to cancel it, and then to find their place in creativity. In this sense, directing as a separate art form provides just such an opportunity.

Now the following paradoxical situation has arisen: our entire generation is doomed to existing in pure territory, to be patrons of the arts themselves. This is no simple company of beginners, but professionals who have experienced all the vicissitudes of our craft. We now find ourselves practically on the street, in the middle of nowhere. How do we create our performances, how do we keep them performing? It goes without saying that we will not disappear as the practitioners of the 'seventies generation did. As such, we seek to find technologies that will allow us to exist in the middle of nowhere. I have the impression that today such technologies have already been discovered and developed. The paradox of our lives is that we again experience much hope.