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 26, 4 p.m. The Tale of an Upright Man, a filmed performance, 2004

The Tale of an Upright Man was staged by Boris Yukhananov at the School of Dramatic Art with participants of the Laboratory of Angelic Direction, and with the participation of Oksana Velikolug, a girl in a wheelchair who calls herself an apprentice of the Studio of Individual Directing. The actors in this performance studied Bothmer gymnastics - a set of eurhythmic exercises developed by Fritz Von Bothmer, a student of Rudolf Steiner, the famous founder of the anthroposophical school. Velikolug sat at a laptop and typed texts on the keyboard with her finger - manifestos of the future "Theatre of Joy," the search for which turned out to be The Tale of an Upright Man. “In Yukhananov's production beautiful metaphors of creativity and freedom arise alongside a mysterious plot quite naturally, even as the actors play with radio-controlled cars and self-propelled dinosaurs.” (Oleg Zintsov)

See details on the Boris Yukhananov website.