Abstract. The article addresses the issues of interaction between modern cultural industries and theatre in Russia, as a result of which the latter often join art-clusters. This is regarded as one of the common approaches to theatre modernisation, which demonstrates how the former productive industry is converted into the cultural one. The new spaces are reclaimed to fulfil rather restricted tasks and generally used to present performances and other projects of the post-dramatic theatre. The author criticises artistic and contensive value of such art-conversions, though states their expansion. It is stressed that in the new cultural context, there arise problems of theatrical language formalisation and gradual extrusion of the traditional repertory theatre by the stage design and machinery theatre.