Boris Yukhananov

Boris Yukhananov (Борис Юрьевич Юхананов; born 30 September 1957) is a Russian director of theatre, video, cinema and TV, a theatre educator and theorist.

He is currently the Artistic Director of the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre, Moscow.

Yukhananov was born in Moscow on 30 September 1957.

In 1974, he began his career as an actor for the Moscow Puppet Theatre.

In 1979 he graduated from the Voronezh Institute of Arts, gaining a major in stage and screen acting.

He acted for the Bryansk Regional Drama Theatre from 1979 to 1980.

He was a pioneering figure in Russia’s underground art movement in the 1980s and 1990s and was one of the founders of the Soviet Parallel Cinema movement, which provided an alternative cinema to that which was produced by the state.

His recent major works include a radical interpretation of Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird, the opera serial Drillalians and the two-part The Constant Principle.

Founder of the new processualism movement, a methodology and artistic strategy that posits theatre as the focal point of all forms of art involving every aspect of time, whether it be cinema, a musical concert or performance art.

During the early 1980s Yukhananov focused his interests on directing and enrolled in the prestigious directing course headed by the renowned Anatoly Efros at GITIS (Russian Theatre Art Academy).

The course was run jointly by Efros and the equally famous Soviet director, Anatoly Vasiliev.

Yukhananov’s first directing experience was as director's assistant to Anatoly Efros on the 1983 production of The Tempest by Shakespeare.

Yukhananov also played the part of Caliban.

From 1983 to 1985 Yukhananov was director’s assistant on Vasiliev's now-legendary production of Cerceau, written by Viktor Slavkin.

This experience developed Yukhananov’s understanding of theatre, which later influenced his own method of directing.

The most notable among Yukhananov’s early experimental projects is Capriccios, based on a record of the trial of Joseph Brodsky in a Soviet court.

The lead role in this project was performed by Nikita Mikhailovsky.

The subsequent friendship between Yukhananov and Mikhailovsky led to the creation of the aesthetically radical troupe called Teatr Teatr, or, Theatre Theatre.

In 1985 he created Teatr Teatr, the first independent (non-government sponsored) theatre troupe in the Soviet Union, and began experimenting with different genres such as performance art and new media art.

He worked with a dynamic team of actors, musicians and artists including; Nikita Mikhailovsky, Larisa Borodina, Yevgeny Chorba, the band Obermaneken featuring Yevgeny Kalachyov, Andrei Zakharishchev-Braush and artists such as Ivan Kochkaryov, Yury Kharikov and Yevgeny Yufit.

Teatr Teatr gave rise to a new brand of theatre.

In productions such as The Misanthrope, The Fu-funeral, and Mon Repos, Yukhananov introduced his actors to a changeable mise-en-scène in which only the relationships between the actors and their characters were set.

Yukhananov refrained from imposing a strict directing method on his actors.

Instead he provided a framework within which the actors were free to explore their characters.

When Yukhananov graduated from the theatre institute in 1986 he entered a world full of radical change and social upheaval.

Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika program was only just beginning to be implemented.

The systematic destruction of the current social order made many individuals question the fundamental principles and traditions, including those in the arts, which had held Soviet society together for seven decades.

Yukhananov was one of the first directors to document these changes and express them through his work in cinema and theatre.

Along with brothers Igor and Gleb Aleinikov (Moscow) and Yevgeny Yufit (Leningrad), Yukhananov was one of the founders of the Parallel Cinema movement in 1986.

Together they created films that stood outside the state film-production system in terms of financing, aesthetics and thematics.

During this time the samizdat Cine Fantom magazine was established.

It was the first independent magazine about cinema published in the USSR.

Yukhananov continues to be a contributing author and member of the editorial board.

Yukhananov wrote about his video experiments in articles such as "Theory of Video Direction," "Fatal Editing," "There is Your Head in Your Hands," "Mutant Imago," and others.

He mythologized the nature of video and reinterpreted the concept of film editing, rejecting conventional narrative structures.

Within the Parallel Cinema framework he created a new art form called "slow video."

Through this medium Yukhananov suggested that artistic thinking must be continuous, must "not be text, but rather speech that flows and flows and flows, while seeking to express meaning."

According to this theory, the actor's approach to acting in the video format must be based on theatre acting techniques.

In 1988 Yukhananov founded The Leningrad Free University with artist and philosopher Timur Novikov, avant-garde musician Sergey Kuryokhin, the Goroshevsky brothers, Olga Khrustalyovа and poet and novelist Dmitry Volchek.

Within the Leningrad Free University, Yukhananov established his own Studio of Individual Directing (MIR), in which he offered aspiring young directors an alternative training to that which was offered by the state.