Drillalians

It is something really unique: it takes you to a completely different place. I was immersed ... no, I was in a trance, but in a different atmosphere, a different creative space. Drillalians gave me the impulse for new creative ideas. Amazing energy! - Vasily Tsereteli, gallery owner

It is very easy to watch — it requires no strain at all. It has a language that belongs to a certain community, a language that I want to speak. I understand that no one worked overtime to impress me, frighten or shock me, but just wanted to give us all a beautiful gift, one that may be accessible only to a few people. - Gleb Aleinikov, director

Striking opera singers. They naturally exist so close to the viewer, which is not at all the nature of this profession. That makes performance all the more vibrant. - Chulpan Khamatova, actor

This performance is a kind of magic tablet. The product of legal hallucinatory drugs. Not just any drug. this one makes you fly. - German Vinogradov, artist

This is a fully-rounded auteur product, where everything from the conception to the final incarnation is the total self-expression of Boris Yukhananov. It seems to me that the effect achieved by the performance is quite critical. It has a cleansing effect - the ground is cleared for new discursive commentary. - Yevgeny Mitta, director

Boris Yukhananov created his own personal myth - the world of Drillalia, the world of the Drill - and he acts as its borer. Yukhananov’s eschatological fantasy employs the usual Utopian mix of supercomputers and simpler, though more reliable “drills,” but it also has a thin temporal layer: Drillalia will be born in the future, just as it will develop in the past, the present, and the future. Petr Pospelov

The world created here is demonstrably redundant, from its literary basis to its incarnation on stage. It exists in an aggressive, even hostile environment, inside the "dumb luck" that distracts each of us from intellectual principles. Society and the "street" have no other task but to step on the throat one’s individual song. One must have courage and strength to see and hear in oneself the "lonely voice of an individual," to develop that and bring it to the state of a finished product. Dmitry Bavilsky, “The Mighty Handful”

The Stanislavsky Electrotheatre and its new artistic director Boris Yukhananov have created something very uncomfortable for the Russian theatre and music community: It is called Drillalians. Virtually everything about it, beginning with the fact that for the first time a Russian dramatic theatre has commissioned and staged a modern opera, displaces the public and the critics from their comfort zone The Stanislavsky Electrotheatre and its new artistic director Boris Yukhananov have created something very uncomfortable for the Russian theatre and music community: It is called Drillalians. Virtually everything about it, beginning with the fact that for the first time a Russian dramatic theatre has commissioned and staged a modern opera, displaces the public and the critics from their comfort zones. - Ilya Kukharenko, Colta.ru

... the noosphere surely thanks Yukhananov – the scale and significance of the experiment he has undertaken is difficult to overestimate. It is not so much that Russian composers participate in an elegant summer festival at the Electrotheatre – they actually create a collective text. - Vadim Rutkovsky, Snob.ru

It is important for Yukhananov to show how feelings and thoughts arise in the "common, modern individual," he shows the logic and the extent of the thought process, which consists of numerous, sometimes contradictory elements. - Dmitry Bavilsky, October journal