Boris Yukhananov’s Orphic Games is a monumental and capacious spectacle of 12 performances created with 120 actors from MIR-5. Many years of Yukhananov’s laboratory and pedagogical work, the search for the features of a certain type of performing which will be discussed later, came to fruition in Orphic Games as a personal artistic journey, and provides a landmark result. The work grew out of student improvisations and work based on the texts of Anouilh and Cocteau - in the beginning, the raw material was created, artistic ore of varying quality, then a production (or, more precisely, productions, since Orphic Games runs six days in a row) was created from it with each individual author's effort. Watching just one is meaningless, you will not see a thing. It is important to see everything; to examine this island you must walk through it, or, better yet, hike around the entire thing, it's huge - just like Yukhananov's ingenuity and directorial generosity

1.
In 2014 I spent a couple of weeks in a village in Italy and I wrote something that I had to talk to someone about.

At the distance of a two hour drive away, Anatoly Vasilyev was conducting an acting seminar in Pontedera. I hadn’t seen him for several years, but I called him and I set off to see him. I showed up in Pontedera around 10 in the evening, Vasilyev had completed his lesson, and we spent several hours talking in his study. Later I drove him to his apartment and drove back home overnight.

The question with which I came to him was straightforward, even naive: how do you describe the human individual today — or, more precisely: what kind of narrative best describes that individual. I believe I then used the English-based word “narrative,” although that created unnecessary complexity. I was interested in what is wrong with existing techniques of narrative and the implementations of narrative (speaking of the dramatic arts), why they don’t relate what is most important — in the process losing the individual as the topic of creation.

History is an event that arises solely in the act of being described. There is no “individual.” It does not exist until he is created in culture. As we create his description, mental images, as we shape him, we acquire a result that captures the time and begins to live a life. Before that, there was no living individual - the individual is dissolved in chthonic chaos, he does not stand out from the background. His presence is suspected in time - but this is only pre-existence, a prenatal form.

2.

This long conversation began in 1983, when Vasilyev taught at the Higher Directors Courses (where I studied) and he also taught a course at GITIS in tandem with Efros, where Borya studied, and which I also visited. That’s where we met.

Back then Vasilyev launched into a criticism of the Stanislavsky system for its totalitarianism, for its hierarchy of constructing motives. The super task - as a goal, as the top of a cone, or a star on a Stalin high-rise - irritated him with its totalitarian functionality, its definition of objectives: an individual acts for some reason and for some thing. He is a function of his own task, or one imposed upon him. This Bolshevik, totalitarian and Stalinist construction - by way of Stanislavsky, then Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Uspenskaya, Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler and so on - was corrupted over time and formed the basis for the Hollywood technique of acting. On screen, and then in life, this created a Hollywood, capitalist individual. The winner inherits the defeated; amazingly the Hollywood individual emerged from the Stalinist individual embodied in the Stanislavsky system: a totalitarian entity turned into a functional capitalist, reduced to social construction and the plot of success.

Instead of a super task and a totalitarian cone, Vasilyev proposed a system of parallel motivations that push the actor into proposed circumstances, where he already acts freely, by instinct - the way it happens in life. The task was not completed, it changed as solutions came forth.

But the initial feeling, from which, I think, everything has grown, was precisely this: a protest against hierarchical behavioral constructions, a hierarchically organized narrative, a functional concept of a person and life.

A term I suggest, "functional behavior,” means behavior that is the opposite of free, spontaneous self-revelation, which can be called phenomenal - quite in the classical sense as Husserl meant it: existing of itself, free from external determinism and external tasks. This self-realization corresponds to Kant’s idea of freedom as a self-revelation, absolute creativity, which exclusively is the source of self.

Kantian freedom is a creativity that is the source of oneself, and a free individual is a self-expanding phenomenon whose goal, again paraphrasing Kant, is himself. The individual is not a function of some external goal directed at him, he is his own goal, just as God is his own task and goal. (This self-revelation does not take place in an airless space, it requires serious expense and the overcoming, with considerable effort, of inertia, both external and internal: it is not without reason that God, according to the Kabbalah, suffered no little loss in this effort, leading to the “breaking of the vessels.") Effort is the price of self-revelation and creation. In the performing arts, the realization of this freedom requires an external energy and form-building source, that is, a director.

Functionality implies a system of subordinates, ultimately subordinated to a super task or its personified expression - a master or leader. In the dramatic sense, functionality means something to do with plot - something that comes after something and ends with something: someone was born, was married, knew victory, and died. The nature of plot inevitably implies finiteness - a plot always tends toward its denouement and does not exist without it. Finiteness ultimately is death, the cessation of the passing of time. A story is always reducible to its own end, while functionality is exclusively reducible to a result, after which nothing more comes. That is, again, death.

Life cannot be reduced to a plot. An individual cannot be reduced to the plot of his or her life, which, in the most concise form, is always expressed in the inscription on a gravestone.

Vasilyev’s Cerceau, which was staged in the years when I studied with him, was not about plot, but about the evolution of human freedom - that is, about the internal transition from totalitarian Soviet motivations to free, non-functional, self-revelational motivations.

3.

During that conversation in Pontedera in 2014, Vasilyev thought a bit, then responded by bringing up text messages - everybody these days sends text messages: it's pragmatic, and it's an instantaneous exchange of information. But from this process, Vasilyev’s students have lost something they can no longer find in their own experience. Earlier, fifty or a hundred years ago, a person had to get dressed, put on his shoes, and leave the house to go to the post office where he bought an envelope, chose a stamp, and the proper paper on which to write a letter. Then he returned home, sat down at a table or the window sill, wrote a draft (if the letter was important), rewrote it (perhaps more than once), licked the envelope with the tongue, remembering the taste of the glue, and experiencing the feeling of irreversibility when the envelope was sealed, went out again to drop the letter in the box - irreversibility again, only this time much stronger. Then he waited for an answer weeks or months, remembering or forgetting what he did during this waiting period. Out of these non-functional things, a tactile sense of time, experience, and content of life arose, irreducible to the pure function of exchanging information.

A specified end-point is totalitarian. The process of becoming, the birth of life - and creativity, temporal in particular, is precisely the creation of life - must not end with its cessation. In its extreme, it must not end at all - which is why Cerceau, to general indignation remained in rehearsals for three and a half years, as well as all of Vasilyev's later works, were created as a part, a fragment of a long process that does not presuppose the end of the process.

Back then, in the early ’80s, Yukhananov took this protest against functionality to heart, as well as the shift in interest to self-revealing behavior. Throughout his subsequent life, he would be engaged in universal research, and every intermediate result of this journey - there have been many - was brazenly marked by anti-functionality, which, in addition to everything else, he also carefully archived. I used to be very surprised by all this.

Naturally, such persistence could not find an institutional form, but it miraculously continued to exist, moving from MIR-1 to the following MIRs - MIR-2, MIR-3, MIR-4, and now MIR-5. Along the way, this perseverance took the form of LaboraTORiAH, wherein he staged The Golem: Yukhananov sought to discover a metaphysical justification for process, and for a protest against result in its pre-petrified form (Judaism served him well as an endless study of the unending process of world creation, and divine Creation as an endless coming-into-being, the expansion of meaning in all directions). Surprisingly, this process continued generally without cessation, feeding exclusively on Yukhananov’s energy and unshakable belief in his unerring path.

Creation as the expansion of the universe in all directions, the creation of a sphere of meaning is an image that is close to me: it is a sphere that stands in opposition to a functional cone. In the early ’80s Vasilyev held up the cylinder as an opposite to the cone - as a system of parallel motivations - but I find the image of the sphere more attractive. I always likened my films to orbs that must not merely be looked at, but must be viewed from different sides, twisted in the hands. Their inner structure, rather, is spherical and non-hierarchical - the music, the images, the actors are no less (if no more) important than the story. For example, the theatricality of the image arose in them solely from the peculiarity of dialogue in the script, which, for all its lifelike qualities, was a convention and could not survive in a pseudo-realistic environment where it would become vulgar.

4.

Ilya Khrzhanovsky, our common friend and Yukhananov’s “best pupil,” began shooting an entirely plot-based film about the personal life of Landau, but began to feel cramped in the framework of a plot. He built a location for an institute in Kharkov, began bringing people into it, getting them to improvise, and was completely drawn into the all-encompassing project now known as Dau. Amidst the sufficiently conventional scenery, we see quite unconditional behavior, and, as a result, life develops from within itself. Khrzhanovsky synthesized Soviet life and the Soviet man in all its diversity, from cops to intellectuals: life was revealed to give birth to itself under provocative directorial control.

Simplifying it significantly, we can say that the creation of phenomenal behavior implies throwing an actor into unpredictable waters, where he, as in life, must not drown and must swim on his own - for the sake of his character. Khrzhanovsky went further when he learned to immerse not professional actors, but real people in the provocation zone. Children are taught to swim sometimes, like puppies, by throwing them into the water. The immersion of a person in the space of freedom presupposes directorial violence. Such is the paradox of Khrzhanovsky’s directorial method. How he did it exactly, I do not know. Some day he’ll tell us, if he wants. Vasilyev, by the way, played the role of one of the directors at the institute in Dau and, generally, played a systematic part in this long-term work.

(For myself I can say that Dau is a very difficult work, first and foremost, it is difficult directorially. I never dared let go of the reins so much or to take my hands off the steering wheel: this is a rather risky directorial ride, and the director’s natural desire for control protests against it. I once tried to work with improvisation in the short work, Winter Spring, which Khrzhanovsky produced. Some fabulous artists participated in the work, but the need to improvise put them at a dead end - they froze up in ways you wouldn’t expect from a professional. I cannot say this work was my greatest achievement, except that it was a small monument to the splendid Sasha Anurova).

It should be noted that the creation of such anti-functional colossi - meaning both Dau, and Yukhananov’s multi-series productions - paradoxically requires exceptional managerial abilities.

Despite the managerial muscle of both Khrzhanovsky and Yukhananov, these plans would not have been possible without the participation of Sergei Adonyev. Anti-plot, phenomenal art is doomed to remain in the margins, but Adonyev informed them with buoyancy and raised them to a high institutional level. He gave systemic form to these extrasystemic projects (Dau, and the Electrotheatre as a whole), saving them from the humiliating aroma of poverty and financial insufficiency, creating the opportunity for subversive artistic activity that is qualitatively worthy and capable of competing in the market. The budgets he invested in them are the watering of tomorrow's garden, an investment in education.

5.

We create a person when we describe them. By describing them not in plot, not in hierarchical, nor in totalitarian terms (it's interesting that in the case of Dau the Soviet individual was just so described), we create not a totalitarian individual, not someone flat, not someone that fits the framework of a CV, but someone completely different - irreducible neither to function nor to social tasks.

The description of this other person does not require a directional narrative, but rather one structured as a network - this kind of story has a different, networked structure: the story expands like fungi do, a person exists as a meta catalog, meta-dialogue or a network of nerves with a constantly changing, flickering system of motives and dominant ideas.

Everyone today talks about global astrological shift - from the hierarchical era of Pisces to the network age of Aquarius. The network way of organization and self-organization is growing and replacing the former, pyramidal one, right before our eyes. Soon we will live in a completely different society. Individuals will change too.

“Phenomenality” does not mean flaccid or vacuous meaning. A plot-driven narrative is one- or two-dimensional. In works based on plot, or directional narratives, meaning is like sugar in tea: it always dissolves in the finale, the taste of the halavah is gone from the lips. Plot-based behavior is pseudo-realistic, it demonstrates an individual who is already dead, one who is already trapped in his result. Technologically, this is a single-key existence: the characters of most serials look like zombies. (The TV, or “zombie-box,” is a “zombie” not only because of its propagandistic or advertising function, but primarily because it shows a parade of happily dead individuals.)

Creating a phenomenal, voluminous existence on stage or screen requires special kinds of instruments - acting and directing technology. Working on this is a monumental task, akin to the campaign of Magellan. With my own eyes I have seen it become a life’s calling for two generations of people.

...Vasilyev premiered The Old Man and the Sea, the production, plot and idea of which illustrate this thesis. The production tells of a process that is simultaneously a result (the fish was eventually eaten by the sharks). It is set in a time frame that is filled with physical exertion, filled with emotional stress bound to this exertion and this fullness - life, by another name - and is valuable precisely because of this exerted effort that cannot be reduced to a function. The hero’s age is important (he is an old man), and is much more important for Vasilyev than sex. Age is a state when effort is as valuable as time, and when you multiply (or divide?) each by the other, the value increases manifold. Alla Demidova performs for two hours and pronounces the text without a microphone, her physical exertions are senses by the audience and they are the performance’s primary material. The Old Man and the Sea is a manifesto: in it a program is posed in theatrical form, one that was launched back in the early ’80s, and work on which continues to this day.

Orphic Games is unprecedented in scope. Like The Old Man and the Sea it is an autobiographical work.

Both Yukhananov’s theoretical efforts, and his lifelong involvement with various intellectual opportunities, have come together here in a great metaphysical theme and, I suspect, at the expense of great personal, emotional turmoil. What that brought about is a very touching thing - the living material in it strikes us to the heart.

Orphic Games is about returning from the other world, about traveling to Hades in search of your own soul (Russia is a traditional destination for such trips), about waiting and forgetting. This is all illustrated specifically in the performance by the video backgrounds. A station platform shot in slow motion appears on a screen; it is either filled with a waiting crowd or it is a lifeless sea - the water of Styx.

Orphic Games is constructed as a network of narratives, a system of refrains and repetitions, where the same event is presented in different contexts and a variety of stylistic ways, sometimes even within a single episode, contradicting itself and transforming into its own opposite. Episodes comment on one another, and meaning exists not in the storyline, which everybody knows, but in its endless reflections, self-commentary and rhythm. In a plot-driven tale, rhythm is established by the sequence of steps taken on the way to the result. In a network structure, rhythm, or modularity, acquire independent significance and become the skeleton of the story. Orphic Games is the demonstration of a phenomenal person with the aid of the directorial and acting technology that was created for this purpose. This is a phenomenal person, narrated in a suitable manner for the form of a network narrative.

I think the common features of our artistic generation are epitomized by an interest (due to historical and geographical circumstances) in expectation and oblivion, by being suspended in various purgatories, and by a network (or spherical) construction of narrative. (These traits perfectly fit the artistic group AES + F - consider at the least The Feast of Trimalchio - who created the typography for Vasilyev's Cerceau, their first joint project.)

These features began to show with age, and their similarity is ultimately quite natural: we all emerged, as always, from the one-and-only overcoat, and we all move in the same direction - some in even steps, like Yukhananov, some in leaps and bounds, like me.

This text is not a review, it is rather more a diary. (Boris Yukhananov, for example, used to write diary entries on a daily basis, I do not know about now, but no one will throw stones at me if I do this once every thirty years.)

It is of value to see how the puzzle pieces of life of varying degrees of importance ultimately develop into something whole, into an edifice of meaning, and the meaning of these fragments manifests itself as did the pictures on the decals from my no-longer recent childhood. A puzzle is an example of a network narrative. Life is also a network narrative, it develops into a whole not consistently, but in parts, while the gestalt does not appear gradually, but suddenly - as it did in my head after I attended Orphic Games.

The meaning and scope of this edifice are irreducible to its function, and the process of our own life cannot be reduced to its plot. Life, thanks to the Creator, never stands still, but continues as a process of becoming, which is both the beginning, the goal in itself, and the result.

P.S. After completing this text, I received a letter from Anatoly Alexandrovich Vasilyev. I quote it here in its entirely - "in the author’s version,” as it is customary to write in such cases:

I read it quickly, it’s six a.m. in Sao Paolo, it turned out very well. I’d like to say more in detail — but here’s what’s necessary now.

I rehearsed Cerceau for three years, from summer 1982 to spring 1985.

I always practiced repetitions as an artistic principle, but rarely exhibited them as performances, although…

There were repetitions in Six Characters in the first and second acts;

There were 22 performances of Pirandello’s Each in his own Way — and each was unique — that was in Rome, at the Ateneo Theatre;

Joseph and his Brothers in three evenings, premiered at Suzuki’s in; Thomas Mann’s Fiorenza, also in Toga;

and much, much more, I can’t recall it all at the drop of a hat.

After Cerceau, the team and I - Kolyakanova, Tomilin, Glady, Chindyaikin, Belkin, Alshits, the still-young Yatsko, and many other participants, my students - rehearsed and presented Tonight We Improvise, which premiered in Parma, and turned out to have a tragic fate, but that’s not the point here. At that time I first formulated the principle of constructing action spherically, revealing that secret not only in the practice of improvisation, but in the very structure of Pirandello’s comedy. I remember well the Eureka! moment - when I realized this structure differed from that of Six Characters.

That’s how it all was, but time exploded and we were amazed as fragments scattered everywhere.