After Boris Yukhananov's death, the director Alexey German Jr. recalled that in his youth Yukhananov used to convince beautiful women that he was a prince from a faraway land, and the women believed him
After Boris Yukhananov's death, the director Alexey German Jr. recalled that in his youth Yukhananov used to convince beautiful women that he was a prince from a faraway land, and the women believed him. The theatre critic Marina Davydova quoted a phrase with which Yukhananov himself explained his work: "The performance is already under way, but the play has not yet been written." He called this method new-processual art, by which he meant a theatre in which the performance is not a finished article and goes on changing together with those who make it and those who watch it.
Yukhananov was born on 30 September 1957 and died on 5 August 2025. He graduated from the directing faculty of GITIS, where he studied under Anatoly Efros and Anatoly Vasilyev, in 1985 put together "Teatr-Teatr", described as the first independent theatre company in the USSR, made films outside the official system, and from 1990 to 2001 led "The Garden", an eight-part work based on The Cherry Orchard. In 1988 he founded the Workshop of Individual Directing, MIR for short, where the student was guided towards a personal artistic language rather than towards mastering a ready-made set of techniques. In 2013 Yukhananov won the competition for the post of artistic director of the Stanislavsky Moscow Drama Theatre, and in 2015 that theatre reopened after reconstruction under the name Stanislavsky Electrotheatre.
On 30 September 2026, Boris Yukhananov's birthday, the Electrotheatre is holding a memorial evening, "Picnic. Requiem". At six o'clock in the evening the organisers will present the Boris Yukhananov Foundation for New-Processual Art, announce the festival "Boris Yukhananov and His MIRs", to be held in 2027 for the director's seventieth birthday, and open the exhibition "Temporal-Gravitational Engine". The title repeats a concept of Yukhananov's own, with which he designated the joining of past and future at the moment the present is born. The display includes his graphic works and video art from the archive, and its centrepiece will be the "Ravens" objects made by the artist Yury Kharikov.
From half past six until eleven in the evening a restored version of Yukhananov's last production, "Pic Nic, or Tales of the Old Raven", which he staged in March 2025, will be shown. It is a fantasy about how the Creator, in the guise of the Old Raven, sends Angels on a journey through the City of Mirages, where they are to become human, take the form of stage actresses and play out a drama about love. The Old Raven speaks to the audience in Yukhananov's own voice, and for the musical theme of the finale the director chose Mozart's Requiem.
Admission will be free, by registration, which will be announced separately on the Electrotheatre Stanislavsky website. Guests will begin to be admitted at 17:30. The Electrotheatre is at 23 Tverskaya.
