The Cinema of Boris Yukhananov.

The Cinema of Boris Yukhananov: We Gaze into the Past as if it Were the Present

Films and theatre productions from the Boris Yukhananov archive

Jointly with Seance magazine 

This is a collection of productions on video that originated in numerous past eras of Russian culture. Some of them capture projects of the 1980s and 1990s, when several hotbeds of underground art arose inside the Soviet Union. Others are laboratory projects exploring all sorts of texts, as well as the nature of the actor/amateur in a performance. Finally, the third part offers completed productions that were performed at various theatre venues in the 2000s. Filmed as cinema, not as theatre, these works are a snapshot of Boris Yukhananov's oeuvre, which anticipated many trends in contemporary theatre and performance art.

Streams will take place on the Seance website and on the Electrotheatre page in Vkontakte.

May 22, 4 p.m. The Minor project: TV program, interviews, and filmed performance, 1999–2001

Boris Yukhananov's The Minor, staged in 1998 at the Vilnius Russian Drama Theatre, which was then run by jazz musician Vladimir Tarasov. Together with designer Yuri Kharikov, choreographer Andrei Kuznetsov-Vecheslov, and actors of the theatre, Yukhananov set out to “reconstruct a reconstruction.” The work is based on a reconstruction of Denis Fonvizin's classic play directed by Yury Ozarovsky in 1911. It brought together architects, designers, makeup artists and wigmakers to collaborate. On paper, it looked like a dotted and numbered layout of actors moving about the stage. The Vilnius production brought together Russian classicism, the Silver Age, and the reality of the political climate of the late 1990s. The film consists of fragments of rehearsals, interviews with the director and a television program, whose freewheeling nature is characteristic of that time. Together, this turns out to be a journey not only toward theatre, but also to a transitional period in the life of the Soviet Union.

See details on the Boris Yukhananov website.