(artworker)
heorhye —
Hello! I’m George Gabaraev — an art worker. My roots are in North Ossetia, in the city of Vladikavkaz, where I was born. As a child, I moved with my parents to Saint Petersburg, where I first fell in love with theatre — a space for exploring the mysterious nature of human beings and life itself.
Experience
Over the past years, I have explored a wide range of roles as an art worker — moving between pedagogy, directing, and visual art. I have worked with video and image, developed performances in basement theatre spaces, and collaborated with the Bolshoi Drama Theatre named after G. A. Tovstonogov, as well as across very different contexts — from schools in Saint Petersburg to the State Hermitage Museum. I also co-developed an educational outreach project for school students, through which I traveled to dozens of schools. I studied as a theatre educator at the Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia and as a drama director at the Russian State Institute of Performing Arts in the workshop of Gennady Trostyanetsky.
2026
Tovstonogov Bolshoi Drama Theater
2025
Russian State Institute of Performing Arts
2023
Saint Petersburg to the State Hermitage Museum
2018
Herzen University
Some cases
The Holy Family by Heiner Müller
A play about a miracle that can come even to a monster, and about how the only thing more dangerous than a monster is a monster who believes he is chosen. We staged this work with a group of young actors in a basement on Radishcheva Street during my final year of study. With no rehearsal space at the institute, the basement — filled with a harsh smell, large rats, and insects — became the perfect environment to house the main character, his mother-Germany, and his friend-Goebbels: inside a Khrushchyovka-like cell, with a bucket in the center and a ceiling pierced by a Bethlehem star.
Faust Session
after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s «Faust»
after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s «Faust»
I invited a group of mysterious strangers — non-professional but deeply compelling performers I found in theatre studios. Over several months, we tried to make «Faust».
When I realized the text was only getting in their way, I asked them to meow and quack. And when I saw what emerged, I could hardly believe my eyes: I saw Faust and Mephistopheles — a patient and a doctor (sometimes exchanging roles). They sensed that the world was built incorrectly — and now they are desperately trying to fix it.
When I realized the text was only getting in their way, I asked them to meow and quack. And when I saw what emerged, I could hardly believe my eyes: I saw Faust and Mephistopheles — a patient and a doctor (sometimes exchanging roles). They sensed that the world was built incorrectly — and now they are desperately trying to fix it.
The Patience of the Meek Will Not Perish to the End
after «The Life of Archpriest Avvakum Written
by Himself»
after «The Life of Archpriest Avvakum Written
by Himself»
For a project at the Bolshoi Drama Theatre, I chose this text — the life of Avvakum Petrov — and carried it through to the final stage. The performance is a training ground for warriors of beauty, unfolding in a space that is at once a traditional Russian log structure used for burning — where Avvakum was executed in Pustozersk — a blown-apart church, and the carcass of Leviathan. Into this space enter the warriors of beauty — from Plato to Jerzy Grotowski. And we enter it with them. Archpriest Avvakum is neither a social activist nor a religious fanatic; at times his words radically contradict even Old Believer canons. He does not fight against church reform, but against its distortion — which reduces the sacred to decoration, an act not of beauty but of ugliness. Avvakum is a warrior of beauty. He is stirred by first principles — harmonious and perfect: beauty, goodness, and truth — and is ready to die for them. The sincerity of his faith is such that outward traditionalism turns into genuine reform, while at the same time opposing both reformers and traditionalists immersed in a space of imitation.
Dreams of Terror an AI-based exhibition-performance.
Inspired by reading the research book «Dreams of Terror: Dreams as a Source for the History of Stalinism»by Irina Paperno — about totalitarian regimes invading the dreams of their citizens — I created a basement piece: smoke, a projector, a chair, and a sequence of visions — dreams of passion and fear.
A Conference of Living and Dead Writers
For Dovlatov Day, I relocated the Lisbon Conference on Literature of 1988 to St. Petersburg in the summer of 2022. Alongside Sergei Dovlatov, Joseph Brodsky, and Tatyana Tolstaya, the conference brought together writers from across Europe, Africa, and the Americas, all attempting to answer a single question: does a writer bear responsibility for the tanks of their country? The living writers were joined by the dead: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, and Charles Dickens. Tatyana Tolstaya spoke about borscht, while the audience demanded answers about tanks. And Pushkin was such a nuisance to everyone that he was shot at the very beginning.
Bears, Vampires, and Zombies
after a joke by Anton Chekhov based on «The Bear
after a joke by Anton Chekhov based on «The Bear
I chose Anton Chekhov’s «The Bear» after reading Yuri Shcheglov’s article «The Bear in Three Dimensions» — and suddenly felt, within Chekhov’s joke, the presence of a much larger Chekhov. I wanted to stage it so that it would be funny, frightening, and painful all at once: I buried the auditorium in foam insulation, dead horses, and mermaids, and by summer I had built a mausoleum for Popova in the institute courtyard. From this text, the story began. After it, not a single word of Chekhov was changed: «After the government’s thermonuclear self-strike on Siberia, the space from the Caspian Sea to the Amur Gulf turned to dust and debris — shattered by an unbound, endless war over nothing, everyone against everyone, in the boundless radioactive desert of the Russian world: of bears, vampires, and zombies, of ballet and literature.»
Heinrich and Semyon by Grigory Dashevsky
I worked on a poem by my beloved Grigory Dashevsky — about the unrequited friendship between a Nazi and a Communist — throughout my third year. I created several dream-versions in different styles: former friends meet in a nursing home, in an episode of «Streets of Broken Lights», at a protest rally, in a church. They move along a path from commedia dell’arte — through Noh theatre — to psychological drama.
Diotima after Symposium by Plato
For a festival at the Saratov Theatre Institute, I chose my favorite dialogue by Plato, and together with the actors we devised a story: a Mantinean priestess comes to Senior Investigator Sliznyachkov to reveal to him an Eros-elevator.
The Poetry of Falls, Blows, and Collisions
at the General Staff Building of the Hermitage Museum
at the General Staff Building of the Hermitage Museum
It felt like madness — to show something of my own alongside Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse’s «Dance». At some point, I simply collapsed in front of Pierre Soulages, out of sheer helplessness. And then this came to me: a film without a pianist-accompanist, from which everything has been cut except scenes of blows, falls, and collisions. An attempt to decipher the poetic device in Soulages’s painting — the hypnotic energy of color colliding with space and within space.
Cooperation
I’m open to collaboration as a director, artist, scenographer, teacher, and producer–manager. In every role, what matters most to me is a drive toward discovery — toward wonder and the joy of creating together. Starting from the tensions and pain of the present, I seek to break into spaces not yet explored, like an explorer. This pursuit of discovery is невозможен without discipline, responsibility, and mutual respect.
Director
As a director, I begin with the search for a theme that becomes the foundation of the work and its research. From there, I move toward shaping a unique language of the performance — a way of acting, and the “doors” through which one can enter the text. I also work on adaptations myself, as a dramaturg, creating a sonic and rhythmic field of the text-as-sound. At the core of everything is authenticity — not everyday realism, but something beyond it — and an attempt to approach it: not only the life of the human spirit in the Stanislavskian sense, but the spirit itself.
Teacher
As a teacher, what matters most to me is hearing the student’s voice and understanding who they are. I aim to help them experience both the joy of the process and a sense of freedom within the work. I share concrete tools — whether for directing or acting — depending on the student’s path, drawing from a wide range of theatrical practices, from the Eleusinian Mysteries to Grotowski’s Poor Theatre.
Artist
As an artist, I create images that pierce me deeply and search for a unique form capable of expressing them — one that can disturb, unsettle, and ultimately move me.
Contacts
8:00——19:00
email
heorhye@gmail.com
