The Stanislavsky Electrotheatre unveils Boris Yukhananov’s new theatre series, which you can watch from the beginning, the middle or even the end.

Not every spectator will be able to embrace this nearly week-long marathon, but that is not required. Like Yukhananov’s previous megalomanic project, The Golden Ass, Orphic Games lacks a linear plot. As such, there is no need to retell it. But it is useful to describe its structure. The easiest way to understand what is what and why it is important, is to compile a mini-dictionary.

The Texts. Jean Anouilh’s Eurydice and Jean Cocteau's Orpheus (not to be confused with the film of the same name). Anouilh’s play, translated in the U.S.S.R. in the late 1960s, was frequently staged in Soviet theatres as a play for young people. Young Orpheus and Eurydice flee from vulgar parents (Orpheus' father is a musician playing in restaurants, Eurydice's mother is an actress in the commercial theatre) to build a new, clean life, although their escape itself proves to be terribly vulgar. In Cocteau’s mystical and ironic play, Orpheus is a renowned poet who abandons art for the sake of conceptual poetry: he has a horse that suggests the letters he must write in order to achieve phrases that seem to him to be the epitome of poetry. Eurydice sees that this is a dead end, trying to destroy the horse, but she herself perishes instead. In fact, the theme, which the participants of Yukhananov’s MIR-5 studio developed over a two-year period, was the myth of Orpheus in general.

The Duration. The performance runs for six days. It consists of separate modules that are not formally linked; there is no linear narrative. The same scenes are performed in pairs - in varying order, in different styles and treatments. Formally, it's not necessary to see everything, you can watch a single daytime or evening module, but in fact, the more you watch, the stronger the effect will be. Such concepts as "good" and "bad" are not applicable here, because this format answers to other laws. You are best off tuning in for a theatrical marathon.

Open-circuited Space and Variations. The primary law is that there is never an end-point at any stage of this production. Each new episode appears to cancel the previous one, although the motifs or visual metaphors may be picked up again further down the line. The texts are rewritten and replayed again and again. Exercises in changing styles do not end. The form of this performance nullifies the primary complaint about contemporary theatre, which can arise even in a spectator who is both thoughtful and knowledgeable about other art forms: Why is this as it is? Why was this precise manner of production chosen for this text? In this Orpheus, the story with all its options is repeated throughout the entire performance, in such a way that, as they multiply, randomness becomes necessity. Even the bad and weak scenes acquire the right to exist: they must be included too if our goal is to see all the possible variations. End points are the biggest vulgarity of all. Meaning is not fixed and does not cohere. Conclusions never become full-fledged utterances as a whole.

The Disintegration of Characters. All the boys are named Orpheus, all the girls – Eurydice. Orpheus and Eurydice can be anyone. He might be a street drunk, she – a pregnant mountain-climber. Or they might be achingly ironic Chekhovian characters. Or maybe Eurydice writhes and shouts in an inhuman voice, like some being attempting in vain to return from another world. She might be an android robot. Orpheus might be a spider man. The characters’ different manners of existence may be present on stage at the same time - that is, dialogue spoken by the actors, singing or dancing. Among other things, there is a small film in the performance where people sitting in a theatre's snack bar recite lines written by Anouilh. This emphasizes the fact that the text exists in and of itself, and the characters more or less emerge as its random carriers.

Multimedia and Translation. Contemporary theatre, like all contemporary culture, uses all media at once. Film transforms into performance, performance gives rise to installation, etc. There are several references in Orpheus to cinema - in places we see 2046, Kar-Wai Wong’s In the Mood for Love, westerns, and even, it seems, Guillermo del Toro’s serial The Strain. There is a film about how Orpheus visits a psychiatric clinic to see Dr. Charon, who promises to arrange a meeting with the deceased Eurydice. This film is the prelude to a parody of the Let Them Talk talk show, where the relationship between Orpheus and Eurydice is discussed. But this move, seemingly too obvious, is immediately pushed out by the musical theme from Twin Peaks, which emphasizes Lynch’s affinity for offering recordings that cannot exist. The very device of transference from one medium to another is gracefully played out in one scene: a ballerina dances Eurydice's farewell letter, while alongside an interpreter translates her movements into words with characteristic pauses and, as it were, descriptive intonation.

The Non-human. "All my poems are devoted to animals, robots and ghosts," Orpheus blurts. This phrase exhaustively describes modern philosophy: animal research, object-oriented ontology and hauntology (the science of ghosts). Postmodern philosophy declared the death of the subject, but it went out of fashion itself. The subject may be alive, but no one now is interested in its point of view. It is more interesting to understand what it means to be an animal, a thing or a ghost. This topic is best served by purely visual theatre. Or a theatre of objects, a la Heiner Goebbels. In Orpheus there are children's toy cars, radio-controlled swans, a robot-vacuum cleaner, robot stage hands, and much more. There is, finally, Orpheus’ magical horse - an actor in body-colored tights or an actress wrapped in pink from head to toe, as she sits astride a child’s horse. The horse always seems to refer to The Story of a Horse with Yevgeny Lebedev, a strange, but human - too human - theatre production.

The Human. Still, Orphic Games is not just visual theatre. Psychological theatre periodically intrudes, wherein the viewer may find opportunities to identify with the characters. Dialogues at times are not only recited, the actors try to “live them,” at least in a stylization of the theatre of experience. We see the invention of personalities, clever phrases, and references to the present day that are calculated to have success with the audience: Orpheus’ father, who appears in Anouilh’s play, was especially fortunate in this regard. The text accentuates, and creates crucial footing for, pure visuality. Actors perform in different ways. Some are skillful and professional, some are not very - the performers are mostly all directors. But the very possibility of an actor's simple performance, as opposed to alienated recitation or descent into pure grotesque, emerges as an object of analysis in Orphic Games.

Contemplation. Everything is complicated in regards to the grotesque, as well. In one of the production’s first days there appears a picturesque group - Death and its two archangels Azrael and Raphael (from the play by Cocteau). They cannot maintain decorum for long. Almost instantly they slip into the lowest song-and-dance routine, after which they begin feeling ashamed of themselves. In another segment, actors literally scream their cues, illustrating a complaint that is often leveled at contemporary theatre: why doesn’t anyone know how to play in quiet voices and semitones? How does one perform in post-dramatic theatre? Maybe you don’t perform at all - maybe you go without actors, replace them with extras or objects, and chant the text or to speak it as if it were a tongue-twister (all of this takes place in this production)?

Orphic Games is devoted to understanding this problem too. The answer is that you cannot refuse to participate, you must constantly remember this, and show that you remember. One of the characters who appears throughout the cycle is Faun (in the pink and green costume with a silver horn on his head). He is the embodiment of pure pleasure or some other pure nonsense and absurdity. The spectator’s place is represented right on stage, where a red sofa stands. Orpheus and Eurydice may sit on it, or maybe it’s a trio of ruffians. Unlike in the The Golden Ass, Yukhananov himself provides no commentary, but commentary does exist. For example, Natella Speranskaya, a philosopher and colorful personality, makes her appearance. Her function is to explain the myth about Orpheus.

The Fourth Wall. It is alive and well in this production. No one touches the spectators. No one gives out headphones, or forces you to run around the city, talk about yourself or engage with strangers. However, there is one striking moment when the wall between the stage and hall seems to crack. Orpheus recites Pushkin’s "I erected a monument to myself" as his bacchic opponents pour soda pop, ketchup, and flour over him. But he persists, he continues to recite. (We can assume that this episode is intended to reflect the relationship between theatre and critics). At a certain point, he is sprinkled with cocoa and a sharp aroma reaches into the front rows. Chances are it did not go any higher, maybe it wasn’t even planned, but it clearly had implicit impact.