Stanislavsky Electrotheatre: May
In May, the Stanislavsky Electroheatre expands its streaming program, providing access not only to repertoire productions and lectures, but also to the Boris Yukhananov archive of films.
International Online Theatre Festival
Several of the Electrotheatre's dramatic productions and operas have been included in the program of the International Theatre Online Festival, organized annually by The Theatre Times portal. From May 3 to 10, the festival will host screenings of the opera Octavia. Trepanation by Dmitri Kourliandski and Boris Yukhananov (May 3), Klim Kozinsky's Idiotology (May 5), Boris Yukhananov's The Constant Principle (May 6 and 7), Alexander Zeldovich's Psychosis (May 7) and Heiner Goebbels' Max Black, or, 62 Ways of Supporting the Head with a Hand by (May 10). See the full festival program here.
Streams take place at The Theatre Times and the Electrotheatre's page in Vkontakte. All streams have English subtitles.
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 12, 4 p.m. The Mansion, 1986; a film about Theatre Theatre, 1989
The Mansion (1986) is the first film of the 1,000-cassette Mad Prince video novel. Most of the videos show rehearsals of a site-specific project that Boris Yukhananov created after visiting the Monrepos Park in Vyborg. “The performance was based on a simple idea: an episode was played out in each room, played out endlessly. And as if in a living sculpture of what was happening, spectators walked around it. The rehearsals of this spectacle seemed like a performance - at some point we just opened it up to audiences.” (Boris Yukhananov)
The film Theatre Theatre (1989) is made of unique video materials filmed while working on Yukhananov's most important theatre projects of the 1980s and 1990s: Monrepos (1986), The Misanthrope (1986), The Observer (1988) and Octavia (1989).
See details on the Boris Yukhananov website.
May 13, 4 p.m. The Observer, a filmed theatre piece, 1988
This production combined the twentieth anniversary of Soviet music and rock culture of the 1980s. The Observer, based on a play by Alexei Shipenko, one of the most important theatre figures after the collapse of the U.S.S.R., included music by Boris Grebenshchikov, Zoo, Kino and other rock stars of that time. It was a romance about the “thirty-somethings,” and about how "rock, like Atlas, raised youth culture on its shoulders, and created a new faith." (Boris Yukhananov)
See details on the Boris Yukhananov website.
May 14, 4 p.m.. Sphere, 2017; Genre, 2017, two films directed by Klim Kozinsky
The film Sphere was shot by Klim Kozinsky, based on the legendary Kratovo Mystery, which was the beginning point of The Garden project. A summer house and its surroundings in Kratovo near Moscow were turned into a territory the supported the emergence of The Garden – one of Boris Yukhananov's most important new-processual projects, which underwent eight regenerations from 1990 to 2000.
See details on the Boris Yukhananov website.
The time-frame of the film Genre falls on the events of the August coup of 1991. Rehearsals and auditions for the dramatic game Genre are held against the background of actual radio transmissions of people standing by the Russian White House. Klim Kozinsky created this film from video documentary materials from the Boris Yukhananov archive. The world premiere of the film took place in 2017 at the Doclisboa Festival in Lisbon.
See details on the Boris Yukhananov website.
May 16, 4 p.m. The Garden. The 5th Regeneration, 1995
See details on the Boris Yukhananov website.
May 18, 4 p.m. The Downs Comment on the World project: Uncontrollable for Everyone, 1995; Yes! Downs...or the Hunt for the Golden Birds, 1997
The Downs Comment on the World project was carried out by Boris Yukhananov between 1994 and 1997, and was an action that allows us to see the world through the consciousness of those who are “different” from us. In fact, this is the first theatre project of this type in Russian practice. In the theatrical part of the project, actors with Down syndrome become "garden creatures," and participate in the creation of The Garden (5th Regeneration). In Uncontrollable for Everyone, the same actors comment on the gospel. In Yes! Downs... they reflect on television, interview each other and record journalistic reports, which, in the course of time, turn into confessions. “These individuals exude love and joy. If the human community leaves them alone, does not try to educate them and turn them into bad people, then practically right there - inside of them - the evolution of man has already been completed. (Boris Yukhananov)
See details on the Boris Yukhananov website.
May 20, 2 p.m. The Garden. The 8th Regeneration, Day One, 1996
May 20, 7 p.m. The Garden. The 8th Regeneration, Day Two, 1996
The final regeneration of the The Garden project, which lasted over a decade. The performance took place in the summer of 2001 as part of the III International Theatre Olympiad on the stage of the Meyerhold Center.
See details on the Boris Yukhananov website.
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.
May 24, 4 p.m. Sunflowers, 2002
Boris Yukhananov's production of Sunflowers, based on one of Tennessee Williams’s later plays and starring Leah Akhedzhakova and Viktor Gvozditsky, unique individuals and stars in Russian theatre, was a performance about the boundaries between life and role-playing. “A stranger and more sophisticated duet is hard to imagine. He and she look like unexpectedly matured children - like Gaev and Ranevskaya, or Tyltil and Mytil. They cherish their childhood filled with hidden horror as if it were a safety boat, the laconic image of which was created by Yuri Kharikov. Their boat is a huge chair, as if seen through the eyes of a child. It looks like a bright, sunny staircase, “a ladder,” as the Bible says. A ladder of faith, of which there is but one, and which saves these lost children actors from spiritual death in the 'adult' world'.” (Alyona Karas)
Working hours: 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. 
