New wild

Died Yuri Butusov - one of the key innovers of the Russian theater, which everyone loved

In the Bulgarian Sozopol, theatrical director Yuri Butusov died during the vacation: he could not cope with the current, bathing in the sea. He was 63 years old. Butusov worked in St. Petersburg in Moscow and in both cities one of the most noticeable theater innovators. In addition, - the audience and critics admired them everywhere: they dreamed of working with him, the jury of professional awards regularly awarded him prizes. In 2022, at the peak of his careers, Butusov left the Vakhtangov State Theater in protest against the war in Ukraine and censorship. In recent years, he lived in exile. Critic Anton Khitrov recalls Butusov’s performances and tells what the director has in common with his beloved author - Bertolt Brecht.

In the domestic theater, Yuri Butusov occupied a unique place - a director, whom everyone loves. Spectators and critics, actors and directors, students of theater universities and leaders of academic theaters. They could endlessly argue about some other figures or phenomena in art, but not about Butusov-although his performances sometimes went for five hours, reinvented the classics and, on the whole, did not correspond to sustainable ideas about the norm in the theater.

The conflicts in his career, of course, were - to take at least the story with the St. Petersburg Theater. The Leningrad City Council, which he led from 2011 to 2018 and which he ultimately left , unable to withstand disagreements with the director and city culture committee. And yet he is one of the few, literally a few people who used universal recognition in the theater - as evidenced by the five National Golden Mask awards for the best directing.

The artists talk about working with Butusov enthusiastically, but if formulated is very simple, it was interesting with him - and people of different generations. And peers, such as his first co -authors , future movie stars Konstantin Khabensky, Mikhail Trukhin and Mikhail Porechenkov. And the actors with the Soviet background, like Konstantin Raikin, who in the 2000s began to regularly invite a novice director to Satyricon and himself played the main roles in his two key performances of those years: Richarde III and King Lire.

Butusov’s directing resembled expressionist painting. Moreover, even the original expressionists of the beginning of the 20th century, but their later followers, neoexpressionists, who are also called “new wild” - this nickname would suit Butusov himself. The movement of the “new wild” arose in the 1970s, when Western art would seem to have managed to say goodbye to figurative painting-however, Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kififer and their like-minded people insisted that it could still be relevant.

Butusov did something similar in the theater. He put classical plays, not poetic texts of conceptualists and not conditional telephone reference books . He worked on stage, not in the garage and not in the forest. But it was a living, modern theater. Expressive, of course, like the art of "new wild". In particular, Butusov addressed the man’s figure on the stage no less freely than the painters of this circle: expressiveness was infinitely more important than naturalism for him. Take at least a colossal hump, which Raikin had to wear in the role of Richard.

In Satyricon, Butusov managed to find himself again. By the beginning of the 2010s, the audience seemed to understand what this director was doing behind the theater: conditional, spectacular, inventive, full of gloomy grotesque and spectacular metaphors, but generally more or less traditional (they already saw something close to Aimuntas Nyakroshus or Rimas Tuminas ). However, in 2011, Butusov came out the Chekhov "Seagull", which changed everything.

Four hours forty minutes, three intermission. Agrippina Steklov and Timothy of the Tribune, both noticeably older than their young heroes play Nina and Kostya. The famous first remark "Why do you always go to black?" It does not sound at all at the beginning of the performance. In the middle of the dialogue, the artists suddenly begin to sing under the phonogram. Important scenes play several times in different acts. And people on stage are still infinitely sorry, as in the most traditional performance - nothing in common with the “cold” intellectual theater, where you get pleasure from the idea. This was the first example of what the director later called the “Non -linear Theater” - a poetic, musical performance, not constrained by plot logic, similar to either a series of studies, or an open rehearsal.

Mature Butusov is a combination of two non -treasured traditions, cabaret and performance. It is no coincidence that he called one of the best works “Kabaret Brecht”. Not only evening dresses, two-two costumes and carefully selected music were reminiscent of the cabaret, on which the director often built a solution to the whole scene, but also the structure of the performance, collected, as a designer, of a dozen or two finished episodes-nominers.

As for the performance, the director adopted two things from there. Firstly, installation on physical discomfort. The artists screamed for a long time, sprinkled themselves with flour, rice, sand, doused either with water, then with paint, and generally some kind of viscous slurry. Once-in the "Good Man from the Sezuan"-actor Alexander Matrosov sang the song of Aquarius Yang with a 19-liter bottle for the cooler in his hands. In addition to expression, there was a lot of truth in this - not life -like, as in a realistic theater, but a literal truth. The actors did not just play the play where something significant happened to the characters-they themselves were experiencing some kind of spectators in front of the audience, but still changing experience.

Secondly-and this, perhaps, is the most important-in the Butusov Theater, as in the performance, the author and performer are often connected in one person. More precisely, there were a lot of people on the stage, but each to some extent was an author: at rehearsals, the artists brought the director of the study, and many of their finds lived to the premiere. Sometimes, together with the actor, Butusova came to the performances (and felt great there) alien directorial aesthetics: say, the role of Sergei Epishev in “Running” resembled their joint work with Konstantin Bogomolov.

In the programmatic "Seagull" the director himself appeared on the stage, and without any specific role. He jumped out at the most unexpected moment, frantically danced, shouted the Chekhov text for other artists and painted on the scenery of graffiti. There was no makeup or a suit on it, only a black T -shirt and blue jeans: it was Yuri Butusov in the role of Yuri Butusova, exactly as the artist Marina Abramovich went to the audience exclusively in the role of Marina Abramovich. It seemed that something prevented him from remaining in the place of the scenes laid for the director-either an excess of energy, or solidarity with the actors-servants, but most likely, both.

About the same as working with the actors, Butusov’s cooperation with his permanent scenopian Alexander Shishkin looked like. This is generally an exceptional case - a long -term union of the director with an artist who simultaneously makes a successful career in contemporary art (for example, participates in the Venetian Biennale). Shishkin did not just serve the director’s plan: his scenery for Butusov’s performances sometimes resembled (say, in “Richard III” or “Duck Hunt”) a flat sculpture-syluet expanded right on stage. This form itself, by the way, refers to the theater layout, but Shishkin uses it not only in the theater, but also in independent projects. With Butusov and without him Shishkin remains himself, which is already talking about the director’s relationship with creative partners.

Butusov Theater was, in fact, the theater of subjectivity. Freely interpreting the works of Shakespeare and Chekhov, the director welcomed the same creative independence in the artists. A loud voice, bright makeup, theatrical gestures, dancing to deafening music, in general, the categorically non -normal behavior of a person on the stage was in his performances nothing more than a manifesto: “We are! We exist! ” Somewhere here, probably, you need to look for the answer to the question why the audience adored Butusov, the actors dreamed of working with him, and colleagues-register today write about him the “great” and “our elder” . Just in authoritarian societies, subjectivity is a deficit.

Butusov worked most often with classics, in a smaller, but still noticeable degree - with modern drama, but Bertolt Brecht turned out to be the most important author for him. It was a natural meeting. The playwright, the poet, director, the theoretician and the first to come to mind at the words “Political Theater”, Brecht also insisted that the audience should see the personality, and not just a skilled artist in the actor. And also - he despised the stage illusion and intentionally interrupted the action with musical numbers so that the audience, God forbid, would not forget that they were watching the theater performance.

Butusov is the Russian director closest to Brecht since the time of the leader of Taganka, the eternal opponent of Soviet cultural managers Yuri Lyubimov. With the difference that the Taganka literally grew out of Brecht's performances (we are talking about Lyubimov’s staging “Good Man from the Sezuan” of 1964 and the “Life of Galilee” of 1966), and Butusov came to Brechta, already being the prevailing artist. The more he put this author, the more clearly Brecht's principles were manifested in his other performances. And not only in performances.

At first, the apolitical in life and in work, over time, Butusov became more and more reminiscent of Anti -Fascist Brecht. In January 2022, a few weeks before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the director released a very free interpretation of the Gogol's “Aptionar” with the laconic name “P” in Satyricon. The playwright Mikhail Durnenkov wrote a staging. It was a performance about modern Russia - politically completely uncompromising. In the first minutes, the actor Timothy of the Tribunets brought down a desperate monologue on the audience about devastation, indifference and police arbitrariness, and the feeling was such that he said not at all on behalf of the hero, a corrupt mayor, but right from himself.

As it turned out, both for Butusov and for Durnenkov, it was the last project in Russia. With the outbreak of a large war, Durnenkov emigrated to Finland, in April 2022 he publicly wished Ukraine victory and received at home an unofficial ban on the profession. And Butusov in the fall of the same year, without saying a word, resigned from the post of chief director at the Vakhtangov Theater. The position of artistic director was practically provided to him there: a seriously ill Rimas Tuminas clearly saw a successor in Butusov, moreover, in May 2022, he himself left the theater. However, the director chose the life of an emigrant-bonnet.

Soon after leaving the Vakhtangovsky Butus, which almost never - outside the scene - did not comment on the political agenda, publicly opposed the war. In August 2023, he said in an interview with Forbes: he continue to work in Russia-and he would certainly have to reckon with censorship. “I am making this difficult decision - to leave because I want to remain a person,” the director shared. - I want to live, and for me it is a crossing border, this is an attempt to stay alive. I felt that if I accept this, I would be dead. ”

Anton Khitrov