ROBERT WILSON

Robert Wilson

[Name of the Institute]

Robert Wilson

Introduction

Robert Wilson has left a deep impression as a dominant force in experimental theatre. His work defies traditional categories and covers the roles of director, screenwriter, actor, painter, and choreographer. By using text and images, light and sound, his style transcends the conventional forms of theatre, beyond the boundaries of time. His repertoire includes outstanding work as civil wars, Einstein on the beach and three versions of Death, Destruction and Detroit.

Achievements

An experimental performing artist whose major work compared to Pablo Picasso's painting Guernica and Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring (1913), and characterized by Surrealist Louis Aragon. As “a miracle,” Robert Wilson is considered by many to be the single most gifted and creative theatre artist of the twentieth century. In scope, vision, imagination, and sheer size, Wilson's marathon “operas” (as he insists on calling them) are giant panoramas of all the possibilities of the stage, physical and temporal (one environmental event in Iran lasted a whole week) (Holmberg, 1996, pp. 21-25). His reputation in Europe as the modern theatre's most significant avant-garde director/playwright is not so universally acknowledged in his native country, the United States, but with the performance of major works on Broadway and at the Metropolitan Opera House, as well as the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the studios of Wilson's theatre group. The Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, his place in the history of American contemporary theatre, especially the strong and widespread experimental movement of the 1960's and 1970's, is assured.

Theatrical and Rehearsal Analysis

Robert Wilson's “Theatre of Visions” can best be described as a series of stage tableaux and slowly moving, apparently non-dramatic activities, which, in the individual minds of the witnesses, connect to form a non-reductive, non-rhetorical, non-narrative but subjectively unified theatrical experience. This experience may or may not bear a relationship to the piece's title, usually referring to a famous person, as in The King of Spain, The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud, A Letter for Queen Victoria, and Edison. In the course of the performance (always extremely long by customary standards), the witness presented with an opportunity to form whatever subjective connections the images suggest, either intellectually or subconsciously, during which process new “bisociations” are created (Geidt, Marks, 1984, pp. 10-24). Although appearing arbitrary and unrehearsed, the activities are carefully arranged for maximum visual effect. Wilson, however, does not prescribe that effect; it remains for witnesses to make what they will of the series of “visions,” adding to the mix the private experiences and perceptions each one brings to the theatrical event.

All of his productions explore the relationship between time and space, onstage and vis-à-vis the audience. He is most noted and often criticized for his “slow motion” technique in which, it has been said, he attempts to create “mythic time.” One critic, Brigid Grauman in the Wall Street Journal, took Wilson to task, saying, “His actors in Aida, in fact, look more like fish swimming slowly in an aquarium, or people performing Tai ...