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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Yukhananov was not opposed to the kind of teaching that took place in state-run film schools, but he believed that diversity and experimentation and he sought to merge traditional methods with a more avant-garde approach.
In the period of 1989 to 1991 Yukhananov directed a piece called Octavia, based on texts by Seneca and an essay about Vladimir Lenin by Leon Trotsky.
Many representatives of Moscow’s underground movement took part in this performance, including: The Sever rock band, actress and medium Yekaterina Ryzhikova, Alexander Lugin, composer Kamil Chalaev and writer Avdotya Smirnova, as well as leading actors of the Teatr Teatr company – Nikita Mikhailovsky and Yevgeny Chorba, Maria Pyrenkova, photographer Ilya Piganov, fashion designer Irina Burmistrova, Irina Piganova, Alexander Petlyura and others.
In early 2013 the department of Culture in Moscow declared an open competition for the post of Artistic Director at the Stanislavsky Drama Theatre.
Applicants were asked to submit their vision and plan for the future of this institution, which had a rich history, but which, in recent years, had fallen into creative decline.
Boris Yukhananov’s three-day production of The Blue Bird uses Maurice Maeterlinck’s classic play about a young brother and sister in search of the blue bird of happiness as a starting point, but, in an experiment with documentary drama, it is enhanced by the life stories of Aleftina Konstantinova and Boris Korenev, two of the Electrotheatre’s veteran stars who play the lead roles of the eight and ten year-old children.
Boris Yukhananov, from the interview for the internet edition of Gazeta.ru, 2013; "We want to create a kind of documentary play made according to certain rules, which will become fleshed out in Maeterlinck’s fairytale.
Boris Yukhananov's production of a mystery-play titled The Constant Principle premiered in November 2015 on the main stage of the Electrotheatre Stanislavsky.
Calderon's play tells the tale of Don Fernando, a Portuguese prince, who is taken prisoner by the Sultan of Morocco after an unsuccessful military expedition.
Beginning in 2015, newly graduated directors from the Studio of Individual Directing began staging works at the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre based on texts by various Russian and European writers.
Apuleius' story of a would-be magician who mistakenly is turned into an ass, thereby putting the protagonist through 20 years of humiliation and deprivation before he achieves salvation thanks to the goddess Isis, embodied the overall concept of this project.
Punk-Macrame, created by Boris Yukhananov and his students from MIR-5, has emerged as one of this director's most ambitious and radical projects in both composition and conception.
This mixed composition of multiple fragments composed by young directors from MIR-5 evolved and entered into complex relationships with one another over a six-day period on the main stage of the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre.
An essential part of the project is the work of contemporary composers Vladimir Gorlinsky, Fyodor Sofronov, Dmitri Kourliandski and Kirill Shirokov, who created a unique acoustic environment for the performance.