Boris Yukhananov is a theater and film director, theoretician and teacher, who, in just one season, turned the tired, former Stanislavsky Drama Theatre into the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre, one of contemporary Moscow’s most exciting venues. With the goal of creating an innovative director’s theatre, he opened his stage to European masters of various artistic schools — Theodoros Terzopoulos, Romeo Castellucci and Heiner Goebbels — while unveiling three of his own ground-breaking productions that blur the boundaries between opera and drama. In the first year of the theatre’s existence (2015-16), the Electrotheatre premiered fourteen new shows by eleven vastly different directors. Yukhananov graduated from the legendary directing class of Anatoly Efros and Anatoly Vasilyev at the State Institute of Theatre Arts (GITIS) in 1986. He was Efros’s assistant director on the latter’s production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1983), and assisted on Anatoly Vasilyev’s famous production of Viktor Slavkin’s Cerceau (1983–85).
He was a key figure in the Soviet artistic underground in the 1980s, and was a founding member of the so-called “parallel cinema,” which appeared under the banner of CINE PHANTOM in 1986 as an antidote to official Soviet cinema. CINE PHANTOM created independent films that quickly attracted the attention of the international film world. These films were frequently shown abroad at festivals and in stand-alone showings. The group published a samizdat magazine called CINE PHANTOM, and was an important influence on the formation of an independent, non-official creative culture.
Yukhananov created the first independent theatre troupe, Theatre-Theatre, in 1985. With this company he shot an ambitious video project, the so-called Mad Prince “video novel” on 1,000 VHS cassettes (1986–93). His other experimental video projects include: Uncontrollable for All (1995), Yes! Downs... (1997), the documentary video-mystery Nazidanie (Edification, 2017) and others. He was a co-founder of the St. Petersburg Little Ballet, that city’s first private ballet company.
He has taught directing since the 1980s, and in 1988 he founded the Workshop of Individual Directing (MIR). This independent educational organization has the goal of teaching directing as a universal profession. The first big project to grow out of MIR was Orchard (1990–2001), a massive, constantly-changing theatrical performance based on Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. It played at the Michael Chekhov festival at London in 1994 and at the Fringe Festival at Edinburgh in 1995.
Yukhananov has directed over 70 productions in in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Amsterdam, Vilnius, Vicenza and others.
Yukhananov was hired to run the former Stanislavsky Drama Theatre in 2013, after he emerged as the most convincing candidate in a public job search for the position of artistic director. For the first time in Russian history, a major state theatre in the center of Moscow was entrusted to an artist with such a rich background in the underground and counter-culture. Yukhananov completely rebuilt the old, historic building at 23 Tverskaya Street — taking extreme care to preserve any and all original architectural elements – renamed it the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre, and opened it to the public on January 26, 2015 with Theodoros Terzopoulos’s production of The Bacchae. This was followed by productions from Romeo Castellucci (Human Use of Human Beings), Heiner Goebbels (Max Black, or, 62 Ways of Supporting the Head with a Hand) and Yukhananov himself, with his monumental five-day opera series Drillalians, a three-day version of The Blue Bird (based on the play by Maurice Materlinck and the reminiscences of Vladimir Korenev and Aleftina Konstantinova), a two-day piece called The Constant Principle, based on Calderon’s The Constant Prince and Alexander Pushkin’s A Feast in a Time of Plague, Galileo: Opera for Violin and Scientist, and two new processual projects: a five-day performance of The Golden Ass. The Open-circuited Workspace, and the six-day Orphic Games. Punk-macrame.
"This theater will not represent a single point of view", Yukhananov told the press shortly before opening the Electrotheatre. "No! I don't want that. My mission is to present this city with many different kinds of art".
Opera Drillalians
Drillalians is an opera series spanning five evenings with music composed by six leading contemporary Russian composers, based on the verse libretto-novel by Boris Yukhananov. All the composers are members of the Structural Resistance Group (StRes): Dmitri Kourliandski, Boris Filanovsky, Alexey Sioumak, Sergej Newski, Vladimir Rannev and Alexey Sysoev.
Drillalians recounts the tale of a Drillalian Prince’s journey through time and space. The prince is a magician, a pagan priest and a classical hero. He undertakes his journey in order to save an ancient, other-worldly civilization called Drillalia from destruction. The opera is set in the future but is interwoven with elements of the past and present. The first prologue to Drillalians premiered at Moscow's ARTPLAY Design Centre in December 2012. The full five-day serial opened in June–July 2015 at the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre.
Theatre Maeterlinck and The Blue Bird
Boris Yukhananov’s three-day production of The Blue Bird uses Maurice Maeterlinck’s classic play about a young brother and sister in search of the blue bird of happiness as a starting point, but, in an experiment with documentary drama, it is enhanced by the life stories of Aleftina Konstantinova and Boris Korenev, two of the Electrotheatre’s veteran stars who play the lead roles of the eight and ten year-old children. Korenev’s tales of stardom as a film actor in the 1960s, and Konstantinova’s tales of surviving WWII combine with their tales about the history of the former Stanislavsky Drama Theatre, as well as of the recent history of the Soviet and Russian nations as a whole. The production features 300 handmade costumes and the set design includes the cross-section of a real Boeing jet fuselage. The premiere took place in February 2015.
Boris Yukhananov, from the interview for the internet edition of Gazeta.ru, 2013: “We want to create a kind of documentary play made according to certain rules, which will become fleshed out in Maeterlinck’s fairytale. Actors will move along the emerging mysteries of memory and their destiny. Their own real recollections, dreams, phantasms will appear. The 80s, 70s, 60s, 50s, 40s- back in childhood, where in the fears and mysteries of children’s experiences the Blue Bird is hiding.”
The Constant Principle
Boris Yukhananov's production of a mystery-play titled The Constant Principle premiered in November 2015 on the main stage of the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre. It is a combination of two plays that run over two consecutive nights. The first night features the performance of The Constant Prince by Pedro Calderón de la Barca; the second combines various scenes from The Constant Prince performed in contrasting contemporary styles and concludes with a so-called “concert in a cemetery,” a performance of Alexander Pushkin's A Feast in Time of Plague.
Calderon's play tells the tale of Don Fernando, a Portuguese prince, who is taken prisoner by the Sultan of Morocco after an unsuccessful military expedition. In exchange for his freedom, the prince is ordered by the Sultan to destroy the town of Ceuta, a Catholic stronghold in North Africa. Prince Fernando decides that his life is not worth such a sacrifice. He prefers to live and die as a slave in an Arab prison.
The Golden Ass project, 2015 to present
Beginning in 2015, newly graduated directors from the Studio of Individual Directing began staging works at the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre based on texts by various Russian and European writers. However, the beginning point was their work on The Golden Ass by Apuleius (this novel, translated into Russian by the great Silver-age poet Mikhail Kuzmin, is generally known in English as The Metamorphosis of Apuleius). Apuleius’ story of a would-be magician who mistakenly is turned into an ass, thereby putting the protagonist through 20 years of humiliation and deprivation before he achieves salvation thanks to the goddess Isis, embodied the overall concept of this project. In the spring of 2016 Yukhananov revealed a new aspect of this project, the so-called “open-circuited workspace,” in which various directors and actors staging various segments or chapters of The Golden Ass, gave public showings of their work as Yukhananov, in the role of Isis, offered commentary and advice.
Orphic Games. Punk-Macrame, 2018 to present
Orphic Games. Punk-Macrame, created by Boris Yukhananov and his students from MIR-5, has emerged as one of this director's most ambitious and radical projects in both composition and conception. Based on the myth of Orpheus and plays by Jean Cocteau and Jean Anouilh, this single work, consisting of 33 acts, and arranged in 12 performances according to the principle of frescoes, plays in one space and, in its entirety, is virtually inaccessible to a single spectator. This mixed composition of multiple fragments composed by young directors from MIR-5 evolved and entered into complex relationships with one another over a six-day period on the main stage of the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre. The spectator of Orphic Games travels not only through the space of myth, but also through the styles of modern theatre in their various manifestations. An essential part of the project is the work of contemporary composers Vladimir Gorlinsky, Fyodor Sofronov, Dmitri Kourliandski and Kirill Shirokov, who created a unique acoustic environment for the performance. Orphic Games, in fact, highlights the stylistic, substantive and generational diversity that exists among contemporary artists.
Pinocchio, 2019
Pinocchio premiered at the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre in November 2019. The play by contemporary playwright Andrei Vishnevsky was based on Carlo Collodi's famous Italian fairy tale. Yukhananov and Vishnevsky immersed their project in "Pinomythology," at the center of which was the notion of the "twin myth." In the play this ancient genre is embodied in the “bifurcation” of the protagonist: Pinocchio is played simultaneously by two actresses, Svetlana Naidyonova and Maria Belyaeva. The character takes a long journey, dies and is reborn, comprehends the mystery of the enchanted forest, and the temptation of Mangiafuoco's Theatre. The play was in gestation for forty-eight years, the set design was developed in sixty versions, there were over one hundred and fifty costumes involved, and rehearsals lasted nearly three years. The theatre's entire company performs in Pinocchio. A Diptych.
Theatre productions
1986 The Misanthrope after Molière. Theatre-Theatre, Moscow/St. Petersburg
1986 Mon Repos based on Vladimir Nabokov, Brodsky, Molière and original legends by Yukhananov and Yury Kharikov. Theatre-Theatre, Moscow/St. Petersburg
1986 Ha-Ha Funerals (Khokhorony) based on Anton Chekhov, Tennessee Williams, Viktor Slavkin, and newspaper articles. Theatre-Theatre, St. Petersburg
1987 AIDS in a Time of Plague, a co-production of Theatre-Theatre and Post-Theatre, Moscow
1987 Vertical Flight, co-produced with the Chempiony Mira (Champions of the World) group, Moscow
1988 The Observer by Alexei Shipenko. Premiered at the Metropol theatre at Berlin Festspiele, West Berlin. Performed in Moscow at the School of Dramatic Art
1989 Octavia after Seneca and Trotsky. The Free Academy, Moscow
1989 A Laboratory Based on Borges, Studio of Individual Directing (MIR-1), St. Petersburg
1990 Chuchkhe Principle, Studio of Individual Directing (MIR-2)
1990 The Garden, 1st regeneration. Studio of Individual Directing (MIR-2). A miracle-play in Kratovo near Moscow
1990 Black/White, Studio of Individual Directing (MIR-2) 1991 The Garden, 1st regeneration. Studio of Individual Directing (MIR-2). Oranzhereya (Greenhouse) Gallery, Moscow
1992–1993 The Garden, 2nd regeneration. Studio of Individual Directing (MIR-2). 5-day program at The Kindergarten
1993 Cicadas, a ballet. St. Petersburg Little Ballet theatre. Premiered at the Hermitage Imperial Theatre, St. Petersburg
1994 The Three Reveries, St. Petersburg Little Ballet theatre. Premiered at the Hermitage Imperial Theatre, St. Petersburg
1994 The Garden, 3rd regeneration. Studio of Individual Directing (MIR-2). Premiered at Michael Hall, London, Forest Row, London, the Michael Chekhov festival. Performed at Southwork Playhouse, London, and at School of Dramatic Art, Moscow
1995 The Garden, 4th regeneration. Studio of Individual Directing (MIR-2), Contemporary Art Center, Moscow. Premiered at Mossovet Theatre, Moscow. Performed at Church Hill Theatre, Edinburgh, Fringe Festival, KukArt-95 festival, St. Petersburg
1991–1996 Genre: the Drama Game, Studio of Individual Directing (MIR-2). Premiered at Oranzhereya (Greenhouse) Gallery, Moscow. Performed afterwards at The Kindergarten, the Contemporary Art Centre, and the School of Dramatic Art
1995–1996 Hello and Farewell, Don Juan after Molière. Studio of Individual Directing (MIR-3). Contemporary Art Center, Moscow. Premiered at KukArt-95 festival, St. Petersburg. Performed afterwards at School of Dramatic Art, Moscow
1996 The Garden, 5th regeneration. Studio of Individual Directing (MIR-2), School of Dramatic Art, Moscow
1996 The Seagull after Anton Chekhov. Studio of Individual Directing (MIR-2), School of Dramatic Art, Moscow
1997 The Garden, 6th regeneration. School festival, School of Dramatic Art, Kiev
1998 The Crystal, a mysterial project for Dakh center of contemporary art, Kiev
1998 The Constant Prince, a mysterial project. Actors/directors course at Russian Academy of Theatre Arts (GITIS), Moscow
1998 The Garden, 7th regeneration. Studio of Individual Directing. Premiered at the On the Way to School festival within The Garden project at the Vladimir Vysotsky museum, Moscow
1998 Don Juan, the Royal Rehearsal, Studio of Individual Directing. Premiered at the On the Way to School festival within The Palace project. Vladimir Vysotsky museum, Moscow
1998 Marquise de Sade after Yukio Mishima. Studio of Individual Directing. Premiered at the On the Way to School festival within The Palace project. Vladimir Vysotsky museum, Moscow
1999 Faust after Goethe. Premiered at the Pushkin and Goethe festival, Moscow, supported by the Goethe Institute, Moscow
1999 Faust, 2nd edition. Young Spectator Theatre, Moscow
1999 The Minor after Denis Fonvizin. Russian Drama Theatre of Lithuania, Vilnius. Participant of The Second Festival of Russian Theatres of the CIS and Baltia (St. Petersburg, 2000)
2001 Theatre and its Diary, a project encompassing three works: Archaeology by Alexei Shipenko, The Constant Prince, and Bothmer Gymnastics
2001 Rehearsals of the Sunflowers or The Outcry, after Tennessee Williams’ Two-Character Play, featuring Lia Akhedzhakova and Viktor Gvozditsky, Moscow
2001 Faust, 3rd edition. Studio of Individual Directing (MIR) – POZITIV Producer Center. Premiered March 15 at the Stanislavsky Drama Theatre, Moscow
2001 The Garden, 8th regeneration. Shown June 6–7 within the Third International Theatre Olympics at Meyerhold Centre, Moscow.
2002 Faust, 4th edition at the Stanislavsky Drama Theater, Moscow
2002 Sunflowers, a performance shown at various festivals: Baltic House, St. Petersburg; Slavic Bazar, Vitebsk; Siberian Transit, Irkutsk; Kamerata, Chelyabinsk
2002 Theater and its Diary, premiere of a theatrical project for the New Drama festival, Moscow
2003 Faust, 5th edition, premiered at the School of Dramatic Art
2004 The Tale of an Upright Man, premiered at the School of Dramatic Art
2005–2006 The Marathon, LaboraTORiAH, Moscow
2005 The Diaspora Symphony, LaboraTORiAH. Moscow
2007–2011 LaboraTORiAH. Golem, a performance-project performed at the School of Dramatic Art, Moscow, At Tikkun olam (Vienna, 2007) and Gogolfest (Kiev, 2008)
2009 Faust, 6th edition, School of Dramatic Art
2015 The Blue Bird, a trilogy based on the fairytale by Maurice Maeterlinck and the real-life stories and memories of the actors Vladimir Korenev and Aleftina Konstantinova
2015 The Constant Principle, a duology based on Caledron's The Constant Prince and Alexander Pushkin's A Feast in a Time of Plague
2015 Drillalians, an opera serial that runs over five nights
2014 to present The Golden Ass project whose genre is described as “the open-circuited workspace”
2017 Octavia. Trepanation, a joint project of the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre and the Holland Festival. Premieres took place on June 15 and 16 in the festival's main program on the stage of the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam. In October 2017, the opera was shown in the Italian city of Vicenza on the stage of Teatro Olimpico.
2017 Galileo: Opera for Violin and Scientist premiered at the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre
2018 Orphic Games. Punk-macrame. A single work in 33 acts and 12 performances which unfold as if in the space of 12 rooms, the walls of which are decorated with 33 frescoes. The premiere took place in May at the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre.
2019 Octavia. Trepanation. The Russian premiere of this opera by Boris Yukhananov and Dmitri Kourliandski took place on October 17, 18, 19 on the stage of the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre as an entry in the Territory festival.
2019 Pinocchio. A diptych based on Andrei Vishnevsky’s plays in two evenings: Forest and Theatre. The premiere took place on the stage of the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre as an entry in the NET (New European Theater) festival from November 21 to 24.
2021 Catabasis.Demons / Catabasis. Dämonen, based on Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel, The Demons. The premiere took place at the Cottbus Theatre (Germany). Working with German actors, Boris Yukhananov mounted this production based on Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Demons. A neural network was employed as one of the "authors." In addition to Boris Yukhananov, the production team from the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre included composer Dmitri Kourliandski, designer and set designer Stepan Lukyanov, costume designer Anastasia Nefyodova, choreographer Andrei Kuznetsov-Vecheslov, and dramaturg and translator Olga Fedyanina. The production at the Cottbus Theatre is part of the greater Catabasis. Demons project on which Yukhananov began work during the pandemic in the spring of 2020. The first event in the project was an installation, The Suitcases of Boris Yukhananov.
Cinema and video works
1983 The Toy, a short, 35 mm, operator Vladimir Brylyakov
1986 The Mansion, chapter one of The Mad Prince, a Video Novel in 1000 Cassettes. The final version is in production
1986 Reverse Perspective, after an article by Pavel Florensky. The final version is in production
1986 Cafe, the final version is in production
1987–2005 Playing XO, chapter two of The Mad Prince, a Video Novel in 1000 Cassettes.
1988–2005 «"The Mad Prince Fassbinder"», chapter three of The Mad Prince, a Video Novel in 1000 Cassettes.
1988–2005 Hamlet, chapter four of The Mad Prince, a Video Novel in 1000 Cassettes. The final version is in production
1988–2005 The Mad Prince Esther, chapter five of The Mad Prince, a Video Novel in 1000 Cassettes.
1988 Theatre Theatre, after Dialogues by Plato
1988 Dreams of a Queen
1988 Self Portrait, a plug-in chapter of The Mad Prince, a Video Novel in 1000 Cassettes.
1989 Photographer, a plug-in chapter of The Mad Prince, a Video Novel in 1000 Cassettes.
1989 King Kong
1989 Interview, a plug-in chapter of The Mad Prince, a Video Novel in 1000 Cassettes.
1989 A film about Theatre Theatre
1989 The Mad Prince Actor, chapter eight of The Mad Prince, a Video Novel in 1000 Cassettes. The final version is in production
1989 Wings, a video
1989 Octavia, chapter nine of The Mad Prince, a Video Novel in 1000 Cassettes. The final version is in production
1989 The Zoo
1989 Program about independent Russian video for Hungarian TV
1990 Pop Culture, a TV-show, the Bridge broadcasting company, Russia channel
1990 Mad Prince Godard, Leben nach Tot festival, Hamburg. This film was lost in the Hamburg subway
1990 The Garden, based on The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, 13 hours matrix
1992 The Mad Prince Nikita, chapter twelve of The Mad Prince, a Video Novel in 1000 Cassettes.
1995 Uncontrollable for Anybody, a video film
1995 No Budget, a special for the Cinematograph TV program (over 10 series), ORT (Channel One)
1996 Moscow. 20th Century, an art-documentary film about Andrei Bely's novel, Moscow (2 series), ORT (Channel One)
1996 The Garden: the 5th Regeneration
1997 Yes! Downs... a documentary
1997 Zenboxing, a feature film (producer, co-writer)
1999 INDUCTIVE TV – the National Serial, producer, screenplay, director
2003 Hunger, production director of reality show, Berlin – Moscow, ТNТ channel
2005 The Garden: the 8th regeneration, a TV film
2008 to present Theatre Theatre Mystical Travels, art director, producer, ТNТ channel 2017 Nazidanie (Edification), a television novel (work in progress)
2011 Chapiteau-Show, (director Sergei Loban), feature film, producer
2011 Branded, feature film (USA-Russia, executive producer)
2017 Nazidanie (Edification)
2020 The Blue Bird. Transformation film series, co-director and producer. Co-directors: Marina Maximik and Yevgeny Pokhis. In progress.
2020 The Mad Angel Pinocchio, a film-trilogy
Books
2000 Moscow Diary: graphics and a poem in three parts with an epilogue. Part 1: Playing XO (1987); Part 2: The Death of a Dandy (1995); Part 3: The Book of Presence (1999).
2012 Drillalians, a romance opera. Stanislavsky Electrotheatre Publishing House. A Theatre and its Diary series.
2013 The Constant Principle. Photo Album. Studio of Individual Directing Publishing House.
2015 The Nonsensorics of Dreems. Stanislavsky Electrotheatre Publishing House.
2015 The Blue Bird. Memories for a Production. Co-authors: Vladimir Korenev, Aleftina Konstantinova. Stanislavsky Electrotheatre Publishing House.
2015 Drillalians, a deluxe boxed book with graphics by Boris Yukhananov.
2015 Drillalians. A gift edition of six operas in three volumes (5 CDs with studio recordings of all the operas, all operas in 5 films, the full text of the libretto in Russian and English). Publisher Fancy music.
2015 The Instantaneous Jottings of a Sentimental Soldier, or, a Novel About a Righteous Young Man. Bertelsmann Publishing House.
2015 The Constant Principle. Director's Analysis. Stanislavsky Electrotheatre Publishing House. A Theatre and its Diary series.
2016 A Theatre and its Diaries. Fragments of a life, speeches and texts. Fragments from A Novelistic Diary.
2017 The Golem. LaboraTORiAH Publishers.
2017 From Theatre Theatre to The Garden. Stanislavsky Electrotheatre Publishing House. A Theatre and its Diary series.
2017 The Minor. Publishing Stanislavsky Electrotheatre Publishing House. A Theatre and its Diary series.
2018 Project Faust. Stanislavsky Electrotheatre Publishing House. A Theatre and its Diary series.
2018 The Tale of an Upright Man. Stanislavsky Electrotheatre Publishing House. A Theatre and its Diary series.
The publishing wing of the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre has published books about the following productions: The Blue Bird, the opera Octavia. Trepanation, and the Shaggy, City and White compositions of The Golden Ass project. Currently in press is Studies in New Processualism, and future plans include the publication of a collection of poems by Boris Yukhananov, an album of his graphics, books on the theory of directing, and the sequel to A Novelistic Diary.
Boris Yukhananov has created several cycles of graphics. Some are associated with specific projects, for example: The Garden graphics, graphics for Drillalians, and Pinography for Pinocchio. His illustrations were used in his novel The Instantaneous Jottings of a Sentimental Soldier and in other of his books. The Catabasis. Demons project was launched with an exhibit of graphic works that subsequently were used as an element of the set design in the production of the same name at the Cottbus Theatre (Germany).His works have been exhibited at the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre, museums and galleries in various cities. Work can be seen here.
