THE PRIMARY SENSATION OF OUR TIME IS GLOOM.

It has thickened and it defines everything that is happening: in culture, among people, between individuals and power - everything is covered in gloom, and, as a result, in debilitating uncertainty. Even familiar objects lose their outlines in gloom. If you leave a familiar house late at night, suddenly everything becomes not quite familiar, things blur, there is a sense of losing orientation in space.

By the way, I well remember the years when an empire died, the pre-perestroika years: there was no gloom. There was absolute clarity, which filled very different people with the thrill of change. It’s no coincidence that Viktor Tsoi’s song [“We Expect Change”] was fundamental for that time: the changes seemed to be inspired by history. In the ’90s, too, there was no gloom: people were faced with a choice, but they knew well what they were agreeing or refusing to participate in. The first decade of this century, which we have just lived through, filled our souls with a mixture of skepticism and euphoria, but there was clarity about it. The condensation, the gradual penetration of gloom into our lives took place in the last three years.

START THE AUTONOMOUS GENERATORS.

Feeling this kind of metamorphosis, I chose the name "Electrotheatre." Theatre, by its calling, is a source of light that it shares with its compatriots. Take a simple metaphor involving a house: sometimes a power failure may occur in a house, but there is a simple solution - you set up an autonomous generator. The situation in theatre and inside an artist is such that you must turn on or repair your autonomous generators. Don’t expect the gloom to do it for you. Especially since there is gloom at sunset and gloom at sunrise. The big question is this, which gloom are we experiencing now?

YOU NEED DO NOTHING IN PARTICULAR TO BE CONTEMPORARY.

Anatoly Efros once memorably said: "Why all this contemporaneity, contemporaneity? We can’t escape the present! Because we ourselves are the flesh of the flesh of this very contemporaneity!" This sensation of Efros’s did not always coincide with mine, but I always remembered it. Sometimes I just look at a person walking down the street and I see he is filled with the contemporary, doing nothing whatsoever to make that impression. Theatre, on the other hand, must make serious, intelligent effort to work with the present (although, for example, Duchamp suggested doing nothing). But artistic action is especially necessary for theatre these days – in order to move in time, together with time. This is a method for creating autonomous electric light.

THEATRE IS OUR MOST IMPORTANT ART TODAY.

Science has receded into the background, cinema is impoverished, television is subjected to attacks of propaganda, contemporary art has been provincialized. Much has collapsed, but theatre remains. Borders have opened. People were liberated from the oppression of Stalinist ideas about the Stanislavsky system, and theatre discovered its central position in our culture by natural means. Obviously, this does not happen without cost. But there is much energy in it. Even Leviathan cannot reach it with his clawed paws. An individual is ineradicable thanks to his or her talents, and theatre is the most direct path to making those talents flourish to their full potential.

THE TRIALS INVOLVING KIRILL SEREBRENNIKOV

are a sign of catastrophe. And Gogol Center is at the epicenter. In other words, it’s a catastrophe centered on the name of Gogol, which is a paradoxical, merciless symbol. Gogol is one of those artists who was able to stare into the face of catastrophe and respond to it with the brilliant sensory capabilities of the artistic act. The fact that this name today is again at the center of a social catastrophe is the indication of a new sign of our times, where satire ceases to be itself and becomes tragedy.

IT’S OBVIOUS WE’RE ALL BEING SHAKEN DIFFERENTLY.

We’re all sailors on the same ship. When the ship heaves, when there is a storm: some are sick, some hang onto the handrails, some run under deck and hide beneath a blanket, still others dance, ripping off their clothes. There may be a hole in the ship. But the surrounding gloom keeps us from seeing what is really going on, it complicates our actions. Today we are deprived of precise action. We do not know if this world is torn asunder or if we just think that is so. I suspect nothing has happened to the unity of the universe; all the same laws, divine or natural, continue to rule our world, which causes admiration and fear. Perhaps, therefore, what I see happening in society does not have a paralyzing or narcotic effect on me. Yes, there are situations in which it is necessary to react swiftly, but in general the artist and the individual requires distance, the lofty distance of understanding and consideration. Even the most natural things (one must intervene if someone is being clubbed) require simultaneous action and the formation of discriminating distance. Such is the paradox of participation. Today, especially today, the formation of this productive distance is crucial in theatre, inside the individual, and inside society, which we would all love to call civil, although our tongues won’t let us. Distance gives us the opportunity to understand what is happening.

WE DO NOT HAVE (AND COULD NOT HAVE)

a civil society, no matter what the tremendous philosopher and human Merab Mamardashvili might have thought. Holding a responsible civic position today does not automatically mean being in the opposition. It simply means taking part in life in a reverse manner, where your participation may help society grow, heal or avoid mistakes. But with the technology of communication that our nation has access to, holding a responsible civic position is a potential, it comes to fruition in a person during times of catastrophe. It cannot be exercised normally in everyday life. And that is truly sad.

DON’T HURRY TO JUDGE PEOPLE.

People today do not allow each other to make mistakes. They deprive each other of freedom of expression. A sign of a free society is the right to babble on freely. We must have the right to talk, to make mistakes, to express ourselves without answering for it with our entire life. That’s when we will feel freedom, without which growth is impossible. I am fighting today for the right to babble.

Many advocate for edification, the right to explain to another how things should be, must be. Perhaps this is a consequence of our general orphanhood, the fact that we are abandoned. People are forced to engage in things for which they are not yet prepared by the status of their destiny. We take on our own parenthood before we have passed through the stages of being a child, teaching each other to live, making many mistakes.

I once ran something called the Laboratory of Angelic Direction, where I learned the simple laws of communicating with a person. A person should not assert himself at the expense of others by means of self-importance, aggression, or totalitarian technology. The angelic type of communication - without aggression, without a simplified understanding of power, is even more relevant today than it was then.

I DO NOT EXIST IN THE CENTER OF MYSELF.

I am not particularly interested in myself. Every time I do a production, I must compose a theatre in which it can exist. The Electrotheatre is a director’s theatre. The art of directing is fundamental, it ensures theatre’s integrity. I believe that in the 20^th century the fates not only of Russian artists, but of theatre artists all over the world, won us the right to artistic autonomy, to artistic originality, to not be subordinated to the tastes of crowds or mobs, as Pushkin said, the right to be capricious, whimsical and complex, and the right to have one’s own sense of poetics. A director who parts with this internal law loses touch with the very tradition, about which so many ignoramuses talk, mistaking tradition for piles of used newspapers.

Theatre is not a place for consumption. It is the face of civilization. You can consume a person only in love - by a kiss, or by admiration. As for faces, you, naturally, must take care, but a face is a face, you can’t move it to other places on your body.

IF FATE LANDED ME IN NEW YORK

and, through the words of some sleazy, aging producer, were to say to me: “Borya, stage a musical!” – Borya would stage a musical with pleasure. The concept of “elite” is absent in me. The accusation of “elitism” is a reaction of people to what I do; it’s not my own self-definition. I never felt any terrible antagonism between Hollywood and auteur cinema; between television entertainment and theatre. But yes, I'm not ready to put up with reduction or oversimplification. I am on the side of complex art. Poetry can be published in press runs of millions, but theatrical poetry cannot.

ONE COULD WRITE A NOVEL CALLED GLOOM.

During a drought in the forest animals go to the watering hole, they organize themselves for the common salvation. This is complicated in our case by the gloom that unexpectedly is approaching our forest. It is hard to find our way to water. You may go toward it, or, on the contrary, move away from it as you shy from shadows. Do we take the gloom into account or do we ignore it? This dilemma does not exist for a man walking down a road filled with double shadows as fog rises to his throat. But he does have instinct, he keeps track of each step, and he concentrates his attention. Do not panic. Do not buy into deceptions. In other words, my plans for my theatre remain the same as ever. My intentions do not change, my sensors do not get dirty, the work continues. I began a big project (maybe the biggest I have taken on at this theatre) - The Mad Angel Pinocchio. I am working with [playwright] Andrei Vishnevsky. This is a new kind of drama, a modern mystery. With designer Yury Kharikov we are trying to create a new world with its own cosmogony.

THERE IS AN IN-SIDE TO EVENTS

and an out. The out-side of events is the external manifestation of problems. The in-side is the doing battle with problems. There was the out-side - Brezhnev's decadence, and the in-side - the decadence of dissident culture. The artistic underground in its time, recognizing the futility of both, took a running leap and flew way beyond the notion of tripping-out. And if there was one thing the dudes from the KGB could never put a finger on, it was this Nirvanic flight, filled with the joy of indestructible St. Petersburg festivity, way over and beyond “tripping out.” I experienced all this to the fullest in illusions, feelings and participation. This allowed me to make sense of the nature of the relationship between theatre and society.

AN ERA MAKES ITS DEMANDS;

this is the same thing that we call the demands of society. If we live in Europe, we cannot bypass the problems either of the gay community or of emigrants: if we want to receive funding this is what we must talk about, make speeches about. In fact: if we want to destroy theatre as an art, we will, with theatre’s help, fight for so-called social or civil justice. The burning issues of the day can, indeed, burn us badly. If you spend too much time with them, you, too, will be burned. This is evident in the comments we see on Facebook, in commentaries drowning in anger. This is one of the shocks that the humanitarian community experienced when it discovered not only trolls and dummies, but also the real amount of hatred that arises in response to anything. The reality of hatred with which a nation is filled. Naturally, theatre exists in these same fluids. But if it completely disappears into them, it will lose its autonomy, it will lose itself. I would not like to lose myself.