Boris Yukhananov

Boris Yukhananov is a director, a theoretician of theatre, video, film and television production, a novelist, poet, artist and educator. He graduated from the Voronezh State Institute of Arts, specializing in acting for theatre and cinema (1979), and from GITIS (Russian Theatre Arts Academy), specializing in theatre direction in the studio of Anatoly Efros and Anatoly Vasilyev (1986). While studying at GITIS he worked as an assistant director for Efros on Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1983) and for Vasilyev on Viktor Slavkin’s Cerceau (Taganka Theatre, 1983-1985). He created Theatre-Theatre, the U.S.S.R.’s first independent theatre company, in 1985. He was a co-founder of the Parallel Cinema film movement (1986), which was known under the name of CINE FANTOM (it comprised a journal, newspaper, festival, film studio and distributor, as well as the first Russian film club). Yukhananov’s video works include The Mad Prince video novel in 1000 cassettes (1986-1993), Uncontrolled for Anybody (1995), Da! Dauny.../Yes! Downs...(1997), a documentary video-mystery titled Edification/ Nazidanie (2017) and others.

Yukhananov began teaching at the Leningrad Free University in 1988, the Free Moscow Academy in 1989, and at the Studio of Individual Direction (from 1988 to the present). He ran a directing and acting course at the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts from 1997 to 2002. He was a co-founder of the St. Petersburg Small Ballet, the city’s first independent ballet troupe. He was the author and director of the theatre research projects known under the name of Laboratory of Angelic Direction (2002-2004) and LaboraTORIA: Golem (2002-2009).

Since 1986 Yukhananov has staged over 40 productions on various stages in Moscow (the School of Dramatic Art, the Young Generation Theatre, the National Youth Theatre and others), St. Petersburg (The Hermitage Theatre), Kiev (Theatre of Drama and Comedy), Vilnius (Russian Drama Theatre of Lithuania), London (Southwark Playhouse), and other cities. These productions include:The Observer by Alexei Shipenko (1988), Octavia, based on texts by Seneca and Lev Trotsky (1989), The Orchard project (1990-2001), a reconstructive production of Denis Fonvizin’s The Minor (1999), Faust (1999-2008), the opera Sverliytsy/ Drillalians. Episode I (2012) and The Constant Principle (first redaction, 2013).

Yukhananov has been the artistic director of the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre since 2013. He had the entire building completely reconstructed and modernized, retaining all its historical aspects, and transformed it into a multicultural space. Here he directed The Blue Bird trilogy; the Drillalians opera series, and the diptych, The Constant Principle, second edition (all in 2015). Working in a method that he describes as "new processualism," he began in that same year a unique project titled The Golden Ass. The Open-circuited Workspace, based on the novel by Apuleius. In 2017 he staged Galileo. Opera for violin and Scientist, and the opera Octavia. Trepanation, which premiered at the Holland Festival in Amsterdam.

2018 brought another project of new processualism, the six-day Orphic Games. Punk-Macrame, based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.