From the production — the heart: what legacy Boris Yukhananov left

This Tuesday, August 5, Boris Yukhananov, director and artistic director of the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre, died. A major figure of theater, video art and cinema, for some he was a pioneer of the Russian art house, for others he was an inventor and a hoaxer, for others he was a teacher and a messiah. Together with the colleagues of the director, Izvestia recalled the main milestones of his creative path.

Continuous stream of consciousness

Boris Yukhananov's personality cannot be described in a few words. A dry enumeration of the stages of his biography is more likely to mislead, confuse, and confuse, but will not give a clear idea of how one of the central figures of the Russian underground was able to turn the Stanislavsky Moscow Drama Theater into a large-scale experimental institution.

His career began with the Voronezh Institute of Arts, from which he graduated with a degree in theater and cinema actor. There, the future reformer wrote his first novel, "Damn it! or On the run for running time," where the features of the director's future style have already appeared.

Later, Yukhananov replaced paper and pen with a video camera, gained knowledge in the GITIS directing workshop under the guidance of Anatoly Efros and Anatoly Vasiliev, and founded the first independent theater group in the USSR, Theater-Theater.

At the same time, the director was actively engaged in "parallel cinema", which became the antipode to the official cinema of the late 1980s and early 1990s. One of his most impressive works is "The Deception of 1000 cassettes. The Mad Prince", in which Yukhananov immerses the viewer in a continuous stream of his consciousness.

The seriousness of talking to the public

Yukhananov's experiments were often ahead of their time. He abandoned traditional editing and linear narrative, created opera serials and multi-day installation performances, invited world-class directors for productions and created large-scale projects himself.

— Theater is a sphere where the very physical existence of an artist can change the temperature and atmosphere. Boris Yukhananov influenced the Russian theater by the very fact of his existence, with his performances. For everyone who was involved in theater, more traditional or less, and especially in search, where his influence was especially important and powerful," GITIS Rector Grigory Zaslavsky told Izvestia.

The director has staged over 100 performances. He has worked in Moscow, St. Petersburg, London, Amsterdam, Vilnius, Vicenza and Cottbus. For three years he was engaged in the socio-cultural project "Downs comment on the world", in which actors with Down syndrome participated.

"His very first performances brought together a group of like—minded people around him, who became his students, and the audience, critics, who saw in his experiments the seriousness of talking to the public, the search for a new theatrical language, a new way of educating an actor and the existence of an artist on stage," said Zaslavsky.

Creating a world of spectacle

In recent years, the Stanislavsky Moscow Drama Theater has become Boris Yukhananov's life's work. The director not only gave it a new name, the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre, but also completely reconstructed it, turning it into a technically equipped institution and a space for continuous experiment. And he staged performance after performance there, starting with The Blue Bird and ending with the most recent Kafka in Athens project.

— He knew how to fall in love with himself. Not only did he have rich people willing to invest in his theatrical transformations, but he was also able to turn the theater into one of the most modern and equipped venues in the capital! Even staging performances that ran for two or three evenings in parts of three and a half hours, Yukhananov attracted more and more new apologists. This is a unique situation," Zaslavsky added.

Yukhananov created his own approach to theatrical art and educated several generations of students. Back in 1988, he founded the Workshop of Individual Directing (MIR), which existed until the end of the master's life. Together with his graduates, he did so-called new procedural projects: "The Garden" (1990-2001) based on Anton Chekhov's "Cherry Orchard", which survived eight "regenerations", "The Golden Ass" (2016), "Orphic Games" (2018) and "The WORLD of ROME" (2022). The students studied the novels of Franz Kafka and the plays of ancient authors — Sophocles, Aeschylus, Menander, Aristophanes and Euripides.

— It was a pleasure and a great trust to work with Boris Yurievich. Both from the associates of his talent and Boris Yurievich's own trust in the personality, individuality, and uniqueness of those with whom he worked," Alexandra Evdokunina, a student of the director, told Izvestia. — He was able to see the "spark of Light", the unique human power in the place where a person himself, under the onslaught of "survival" and society's ideas of strength, is ready to erase and abandon himself, to become "one of". It was his skill, attention, and depth of vision that illuminated the work. His attentiveness and love were also applied to the analysis of the text, the construction of the mise en scene, to the creation of the world of the performance.

The Art Researcher

According to director Alexei German, Boris Yukhananov was an incredible experimenter of his time.

— Boris Yurievich was an art researcher, educator, and teacher. He gave a start in life to a huge number of people in completely different professions, but in one way or another related to theater, media, and production. He was a brilliant, magnetic man. Unfortunately, we have almost no such people left. He was a phenomenon in his own right. More than a director. More than a teacher," Herman emphasized.

In 2025, the Electrotheatre celebrated ten years of life under the wing of Boris Yukhananov. Over the years, the space has become a place of attraction for actors, directors, designers, videographers, artists, composers, writers and playwrights. The theater hosted the audience all day: whether it was the three-channel installation "Melting Apocalypse", the author's program "Electrotheatre at the Microphone" or the director's laboratory of Anatoly Vasiliev.

—Yukhananov was a focus around which talented people always gathered and art was brewed,— Herman continued. — He was a maxim in the Russian art space. An island. A space that was important by its very existence. What he did, what he said, what he thought, what he taught, was, I think, necessary for us. He was a lighthouse. I always smiled when I saw him. I was always glad that he continued to do what he loved. His very presence in the theater calmed and inspired faith in the future.

According to the rector of GITS, every meeting with Yukhananov was a meeting with a visionary who sees through time.

— I always felt that he knows not only what tomorrow's theater will be like and what today's theater should be like, but also when the current era of turbulence in life will end, — concluded Grigory Zaslavsky.

Boris Yukhananov died at the age of 68 from acute heart failure due to an exacerbation of chronic heart disease.