1. The Background

Boris Yukhananov has been an inconstant but resolute presence in Moscow theatre since the late 1980s. He is a soft-spoken man of exceptional erudition, wit and imagination. There is something in him of the paper architect who dreams up extraordinary schemes that cannot always be brought to fruition. Indeed, much of the theatre that percolates in this director’s head has not existed in any other form than a good story well told. My favorite project is his proposal to send guerrilla actors on missions of “theatrical terrorism” in order to disrupt other performances-in-progress.

            It is hard to talk about Yukhananov without using the word “avant-garde,” although the phrase in our day has become hopelessly flaccid.  Yukhananov, who was born in 1957, has always been, if not out front, then at least in the margins by himself. He has, since the mid-1980s, been a pioneer in Russia in the making of video films, serving, since 1997, as a co-manager of the Cine Fantom club of independent cinema. (See the Russian-language website at www.cinefantom.ru.) His theatre productions, usually created for various incarnations of his own theatre bearing different names at different times, have invariably been experimental and non-commercial. Even the names of his theatres give an idea of his sense of humor and independence of mind: the Theatre Theatre; the Post-Theatre; the Studio of Individual Directing; the Laboratory of Angelic Directing. His most famous production has been The Orchard or The Garden, a fantasy based on the text of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, but eliciting thoughts of the Garden of Eden and of gardens, in general, as a place of growth and flourishing. During the eleven years of its life, from 1990 to 2001, this piece was transformed continually into new “Regenerations,” the last of which was number eight. Early versions ran as many as five evenings in a row. The Fifth Regeneration, a seven-hour, two-day affair, incorporated several actors with Down Syndrome. To an extent, they played the role of guerilla actors interrupting and interacting with the professional actors on stage. At the same time, Yukhananov has a strong grounding in the traditional ABCs of Russian psychological theatre. He studied under the great masters Anatoly Efros and Anatoly Vasilyev at the State Institute of Theatre Arts in Moscow from 1981 to 1985.  He was Efros’s assistant on the latter’s production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in 1983, and he was assistant on Vasilyev’s famous production of Viktor Slavkin’s Cerceau from 1984 to 1986.

            The Orchard or The Garden notwithstanding, Yukhananov seemed to fade from view at least as often as he burst unexpectedly into Moscow’s collective consciousness with his strange, daunting, sometimes even taxing productions. A five-hour version of Goethe’s Faust, replete with a magic show involving bicycles and live cats, was performed from time to time in five different redactions from 1998 to 2003. Sometimes in Moscow, sometimes in other cities, he has mounted productions such as Moliere’s The Misanthrope, Tennessee Williams' The Two-Character Play under the title of Sunflowers, and Denis Fonvizin's 18th-century comedy, The Minor.

            In 1997 and 1998, Yukhananov cultivated a project that was, as he put it, “drawn back to us from the future.” It was called The Palace and was intended as an antidote to the notions of repertory theatres and “supermarket” festivals, which everybody, the director claimed blithely, “knows are dead.” The project was to consist of an ever-changing series of performances connected by palaces, which were to appear somewhere in every work. According to the plan, the performances would travel from space to space, never settling in any single location. Always an admirer of metaphorical speech, Yukhananov declared to me at the time that he had “locked up the orchard” and now planned to “build a palace next to it.”

            “And since a king is the most important figure in any palace,” he added with his own brand of understated bravado, “I will be the king in my palace.”

            The Palace engendered a handful of public performances of Don Juan, the Royal Rehearsal, after Moliere, and Yukio Mishima’s The Marquise de Sade, but its projected splendor was never quite realized. In truth, at times over the years, one could not help but wonder if the idea of Boris Yukhananov, the notion of this unblinking non-conformist taking pot shots at the status quo, might be greater than the sum of his actual accomplishments. But the ways of art, perhaps like those of God, are mysterious. And success, at least in the form of achievements generally acknowledged, is often not as important to an artist as what he or she doesn’t, or isn’t able to, do. Even The Orchard, for all the legend that has accrued to it, was performed relatively rarely and never entirely emerged from the underground that nourished it.

            All of this serves as a preface for Yukhananov’s latest work, The Tale of an Upright Man, which opened October 1, 2004, under the banner of the director’s Studio of Angelic Directing. This unusual and often startling production is a kind of summing-up for Yukhananov. It is, in some ways, an impressionistic chronicle of his theatrical activity in the 1990s and a selective biography of one Oksana Velikolug, a young woman who began as a fan of The Orchard, later became an apprentice in Yukhananov’s workshop at the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts, and eventually emerged as the author of texts that would form the basis of The Tale of an Upright Man. These historical elements are merged in the production with a more universal task – to explore what permits a person to “stand upright,” to stand tall, to fulfill potential, to discover dignity. Or, as is more often the case with the production’s characters – what deters them from achieving these states.

            Bucking the ingrained reluctance in Russia to incorporate inanimate technology into the theatrical act, Yukhananov found common ground for video cameras, a computer, electronic toys, traditional psychological theatre, a post-modern, self-referential point of view and a healthy dose of rough ‘n’ ready, semi-improvisational acting. The Tale of an Upright Man is a production about characters seeking the truth about themselves; it is a history of the people who have made this show about characters seeking the truth; and it is a running commentary about the actual, real-time performance of these actors playing characters seeking their identity. This came about, in part, thanks to two things: Velikolug’s gift for writing and the fact that, as a result of cerebral palsy, she is confined to a wheelchair and does not speak. Using video and computers, Yukhananov not only put Velikolug in the middle of the action, he put her in charge of the performance.

2. The Performance

The Tale of an Upright Man commences with the first of many theatrical jokes. As the audience files into the hall, two miniature, slick, shiny, remote-controlled automobiles are zipping around the stage at a break-neck speed. On occasion, as spectators skirt the perimeter of the stage on their way to their seats, one of the cars might teasingly rev up and threaten to run over their feet. Even after everyone is seated, the mechanical toys continue to race around the stage in mesmerizing patterns, the hot-rod buzz of their electric engines blending with random piano notes drifting down from above.

            Finally, an actor, rather rumpled and looking a little cowed, appears with a huge hurdy gurdy. [PHOTO 5051 – No. 1] He struggles to be heard over the din of the race cars, howling louder and louder, but he and his clunky, old-fashioned musical instrument are no match for the racket raised by the toys. Velikolug is now wheeled on stage in her wheelchair and placed before a computer table at the top of a long, low, arching platform at the back of the stage. Spread across the table in front of her are five miniature dolls, the models for the characters that will soon interact with the texts she creates. [PHOTO 4740 – No. 2]

            Suddenly the show undergoes a radical atmospheric shift. The musician has gone, the cars have roared off stage and our attention is drawn to a wide screen hanging above Velikolug. The left third of the screen shows the keyboard of Velikolug’s computer; the right third shows a close-up of her face; the central panel projects a prepared text that slowly scrolls downward. It is an essay written by Velikolug that pulls together her thoughts on theatre and art in general, and on Antonin Artaud and on Yukhananov’s project of The Orchard in particular. Are Artaud’s theatre of cruelty and Yukhananov’s “garden mood” incompatible, she wonders? All artists are ill, she opines, but Artaud’s illness ended in death, while Yukhananov’s brings healing.

            “Then other people appeared in the Garden, including me. And this saved Boris,” she adds matter-of-factly.

            The silence left behind after the cars and the musician disappear is what could be described as “ringing.” In this silence, surrounded by a clean, white performance space designed jointly by Yukhananov and Yury Kharikov, Velikolug responds orally to what she has written with gentle, quiet sounds that are unintelligible to us as words, but which speak volumes in tone, pitch and rhythm. The right side of the screen holds the close-up of the writer’s face, providing a detailed study of her kind smile, generous eyes and intelligent expression.

            The theatrical effect of this utterly untheatrical vision is striking. Aside from Velikolug’s limited head and arm movements, nothing whatsoever is happening on stage. The only real movement is of the projected lines of text scrolling down the screen. And yet the audience is riveted. Yukhananov set it up brilliantly with the funny, noisy, chaotic prologue and Velikolug takes it from there with her pithy, transparent prose that reads with the ease and wisdom of a collection of proverbs. The various planes of images – three on the screen, plus the real presence of the actress/writer whose appearance we continually compare to that projected above her – keep us so occupied we are barely able to process them all. No Hollywood chase scene ever packed so much into such limited time and space.

            As Velikolug’s text moves on to a discussion of the difference between artists and draftsmen, the cast of five slowly emerges from the wings along the back wall. The actors advance in rhythmic, swooping movements, their bodies rising up and slumping down again. [PHOTO 5321 – No. 3 – IF POSSIBLE, MOVE THIS TO PHRASE BELOW THAT ENDS WITH “frenzied” AND RENUMBER ALL SUBSEQUENT PHOTOS] Perhaps they are engaging in aerobic exercises, perhaps they are dancing, perhaps they are sleep walking – whatever it is, the performance space again is transformed radically. First chaotic, then still and silent, it now is filled with graceful motion accompanied by the quiet hush of the actors’ breathing and their white costumes rustling. The battery-operated cars reappear, although now they are completely out of place: a props man enters and renders them useless by unceremoniously taping them to the floor with duct tape. [PHOTO 4820 – No. 4] With a directorial wink of the eye, Yukhananov has let us know what role these mechanical contraptions have in the theatrical act.

            As the actors continue to exercise and/or dance – increasingly their movements are made in unison, their huffing and puffing and rustling continuing to dominate the soundscape – Velikolug’s essay rolls into new territory.

            “An artist must be judged on his own terms.” (This passes down the screen as the props man firmly tapes the toy cars to the floor.)

            “I will build a theatre grounded in joy and good. If I succeed in building my theatre, it will be a ‘theatre of joy.’”

            “Art has consumed people. All that is left are images.”

            “If art becomes vandalism; that is vandalism, not art.”

            Could this be Velikolug tackling Yukhananov’s notion of “theatrical terrorist acts”? It must be, for a moment later she writes suggestively – “We must understand that Artaud’s ‘cruelty’ is not what we usually mean by ‘cruelty’” – and introduces two “angelic terrorists” who enter and completely change the inner rhythm of the performance again.

            These two characters are the Angel and the Loser, and they have come to enact a tale called “The Story About the Loser.” [PHOTO 5168 – No. 5] Velikolug now enters the fray more actively. Her prepared essay has concluded and the actress/writer begins to type in her own version of “The Story About the Loser.” Punching at the keyboard one key at a time, her story takes shape before our eyes, letter by letter. [PHOTO 4811 – No. 6] The Angel (Dmitry Yemilyanov) and the Loser (Pyotr Kudryavtsev), a Laurel and Hardy team in essence, if not in physical resemblance, are almost making it up as they go. The topics they touch on are fixed – the Loser’s desire and inability to fly; his striving to achieve a vertical position; his constant reversion to a horizontal state; his realization that every time he falls out of a vertical posture he is propelled into a forward motion – but the written and spoken texts lurch ahead with a recognizable sense of freedom, occasionally surprising even the actors as unexpected nuances, echoes or connections arise between the written and spoken texts. Velikolug often steps outside her role as a chronicler and storyteller, commenting on, or joking with, the actors and their characters. “The Loser,” Velikolug writes, “did not want to participate in the injustices of the world. He is a sort of brother to me – I also left the world….” She clings to a fairy-tale style of narrative – clear, simple and expressive – while the dueling Angel and Loser veer off into verbose, highly technical, repetitive digressions about what kinds of body movements and body positions one must assume in order to move from a horizontal to a vertical posture.

            A comic interlude featuring a marauding herd of toy mechanical dinosaurs creates a transition to the next stage. [PHOTO 4838 – No. 7] The stalking toys are an echo of the prologue with the sports cars as well as a dismissal of it – in place of the sleek modern machines we are now offered the absurd sight of miniature models of extinct animals swarming across the floor towards us. By the time the last of the beasts breaks through a safety line and waddles angrily up to the feet of a spectator in the front row, the stage is filled with five actors. [PHOTO 4863 – No. 8] They launch into a free-for-all of improvised text and action, catching up and expanding the thread of “The Story of the Loser.” Velikolug’s plain, though sophisticated, text continues to lead and reflect upon the increasingly banal chatter on stage.

            An actress gushes excitedly, “I’m in the theatre! I’m in the theatre of my own personal I!” while the written text taking shape on the screen suggests that the Loser “had come to love and hate himself in others – as well as others in himself.”

            Velikolug introduces the images of God (“Papa”) and Jesus (“in heaven a small person was born”) and the actors become obsessed with throwing questions and challenges at God. Their trite ranting grows increasingly cacophonous and their gymnastic actions grow more frenzied. [IF POSSIBLE, RELOCATE PHOTO 5321 –  FORMERLY No. 3, TO THIS POSITION AND RENUMBER PHOTOS ACCORDINGLY] Sergei Zagny’s music, reminiscent of Bach, slowly rises in volume and frequently drowns out the spoken text which, at one point, disintegrates into a shouting match among actors accusing each other of being “monsters.”

            “I will climb a mountain and write that God does not exist,” an actress boasts.

            “When I write that God does not exist,” the Angel responds, “I feel such love for myself.”

            “Why climb a mountain?” another rejoins. “Why not just love yourself right here?”

            On the screen above, the letters Velikolug is typing quickly form words and sentences: “He descended into self-love and despair. He coiled and jumped. And there, inside, was Papa. The End.”

            As if thrown into a trance, the babbling actors fall silent abruptly and in unison slip into a slow, tightly choreographed dance. Thus begins the final segment, a return to another prepared essay by Velikolug that slowly scrolls down the screen as the author herself smiles and laughs and talks quietly. This essay revives the connections between Artaud’s theatre of cruelty and Yukhananov’s so-called “garden mentality,” but it also goes far afield, calling up personal reminiscences about how she once saw her ailing father’s death pass through her room like a cloud before dissipating harmlessly; about how Yukhananov’s “garden mentality” existed inside of her even when she was unable to see performances of The Orchard; about how she finally met her “heroes,” the show’s actors; and how Yukhananov eventually accepted her as an apprentice. She offers her thoughts on the ethics of human relationships in the theatre, on what the foundations of a “theatre of joy” should be and ponders that eternal question: What characterizes the ideal actor? She is inclined to think it is someone like Vladimir Vysotsky, the Russian actor and bard who was legendary for his willingness to push himself beyond the limits of professional and sometimes even human endurance. “Maybe this is Artaud’s ‘cruelty’?” Velikolug asks. One thing she knows: “An actor must ask questions not only of the world, but of God.”  

            Throughout most of this segment the actors continue their quietly rustling dance exercises. Their expressionless faces and similar, rhythmic gestures impart solemnity to the proceedings even as Velikolug responds to the unfolding lines of her essay with lighthearted smiles and laughs. Ultimately, the actors file off stage quietly, leaving Velikolug alone with her printed words. The last of them roll down the screen above her: “I see a theatre where people blossom like flowers and eyes sparkle like stars!”

3. The Resonance

The Tale of an Upright Man is a most unusual mix of theatrical theory, improvisational acting, fairy-tales, biblical parables, child’s play, personal biography, theatre history, theatre ethics and philosophy. One is struck by the way Yukhananov himself comes out for the curtain calls – he stands in a line with his actors and, with a firm, thoughtful expression on his face, runs his eyes back and forth along each row in the small hall, looking personally at every spectator for a brief split-second. (The show is performed for approximately 80 spectators at the so-called First Studio of Vasilyev’s School of Dramatic Art on Povarskaya Street.) This small, but pointed action on Yukhananov’s part serves as an eloquent epilogue. If the audience hasn’t yet perceived the show as a personal confession, it is hard now, after catching that last individual gaze from the director’s eye, to fail to make that connection.

            This personalization of the proceedings takes nothing away from the themes of the production, of course, but, on the contrary, deepens and enriches them. The driving forces behind this work – Yukhananov and Velikolug – have put themselves into it wholeheartedly. It is not merely a work “about” them, but is a work “of” them. It is their pound of flesh expressed as an act of theatre. It bears witness to the blood, the sweat and the tears that have been sacrificed in order to arrive at that moment in time when a show like The Tale of an Upright Man can be conceived, staged and performed.

            In this, the production strikes me as supremely Russian. Art in Russia has never gone, and probably never will go, down the path of pure technology or intellectual bravura. Even in its most abstract forms, say the paintings of Kandinsky or the music of Edison Denisov, it is ultimately bound up in the human experience as expressed through emotions, feelings, and intuitions. Thus, when Yukhananov employs the slick technical proficiency of computers, mechanical toys, video cameras and split-screen monitors, he does so entirely in order to create a suitable frame for a story about people and art and the interconnections that bind them. As Yukhananov wittily indicates when he has those hot rods crudely taped to the floor, technology here has nothing to do with special effects, nothing to do with “spectacle” or “pageantry.” It is only of value insofar as it can aid in the telling of a human tale.

            This show is Yukhananov’s response to the problem Velikolug raises when she writes that “art has consumed people” and that “all that is left are images.” The Tale of an Upright Man is an attempt to take art back from the craftsmen, the image makers and, paradoxically, from the theorists who have drained art of its blood. It is Yukhananov’s attempt to make sense of the life he has lived in art.

            The transformational powers of theatre – perhaps what Velikolug means by Yukhananov’s “garden mood” or “garden mentality” – are most evident in Yukhananov’s use of Velikolug’s theoretical writings to create a performance piece that is, in fact, not theoretical at all, but highly experiential. By placing the writer on stage, Yukhananov presents her as an actor and a character, while the texts she writes essentially become her dialogues. We do not perceive what she has to say as abstract hypothesizing for her ideas are worked out before us in a practical manner by live actors who interact with her, echoing what she writes or engaging her with glances and gestures.

            Some of the actors in The Tale of an Upright Man performed in Yukhananov’s famous production of The Orchard. Velikolug began as an anonymous spectator of that work but, as she writes, moved into the process herself, first making friends with the actors (now her partners on stage) and later joining Yukhananov’s workshop. The reality and the felicitous convolutions of these historical occurrences are such that the stories and the theses presented in the performance cannot possibly be perceived as mere abstractions. What greater effect can theatre have than to affect its spectators so that they are compelled to become one with the performance? That is a literal description of what Yukhananov and Velikolug achieved in The Tale of an Upright Man.

 

Advance version of an article scheduled to be published in TheatreForum magazine, Summer/Fall No. 27 (2005).

© 2005 John Freedman and TheatreForum.