Robert Wilson

- Robert Wilson is a painter

- Emerged with the New York Vanguard arts community of the 1960s

- Calls his works Operas

The Theatre of Robert Wilson – Arthur Holmberg

- His talents include directing, dancing, painting, playwriting, performing, sculpting, video arts,
sound designing, set designing, light designing, choreographing, pedagogue, therapist, and
entrepreneur.
- Multichannel theater which is called Gesamtkunstwerk.

- Also is influenced multiculturally.

- Silent Operas, Deconstructing Language, From semiotics to semantics, how to do things with
words
- Silent operas culminate in 1973 with The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, a twelve hour epic with
150 performers.
o It was non-linear.
o Conceived as pictures structured architecturally
o Script consisted only of stage directions

- Began his career in New York in the 60s

o A time of collective art, the blending of art and life, communal living, return to ritual
o About the 60s “No, I came out of it. I hated the theatre in the 60s. I was never part of
that movement. What I was doing did not resemble the Living Theatre, The Open
Theatre, or the Performance Group. I went against everything they were doing. I
loathed the way their theatre looked. I had more in common with nineteenth-century
theatre and vaudeville than with those groups. I was formalistic. I used the proscenium
arch. My theatre was interior, and I treated the audience with courtesy. When New York
was going for minimalism in a big way, I was doing rich baroque pieces like Stalin and
Deafman Glance.”
o Graduated from Pratt Institute of Arts in 1965 and after worked with people who
suffered from a wide range of mental and physical handicaps.
 o Worked with hyperactive and brain damaged people, people in iron lungs, and people in
mental institutions. Was hired to get patients to talk. After two years decided that he
wasn’t there to teach but to listen and find out what they wanted to do and help with
that.
o Wilson says he “believes in autistic behavior.”
o He met people on their terms, not society’s.
o 1968: Wilson sees a cop beating a twelve year old boy over the head with a club who
was making inarticulate sounds. He intervenes. It turns out that he is a deaf-mute
African American named Raymond Andrews. He was declared uneducable. Wilson
adopted the boy to try and educate him. He learned from Raymond as well. “realized
that he thought, not in words, but in visual signs.”
 Learned from Raymond by doing body language workshops. Learned how subtle
and sophisticated body language can be!
 Lead to the creation of Deafman Glance which is based on the pictures
Raymond drew to communicate with him.
o Wilson created early pieces by working with non-professionals and a group of disciples
he called Byrds.
o Created early pieces through workshops that centered on movement and body
awareness
o Generate material by working closely with collaborators
o Work was very popular in America and Europe

- Wilson touch: A stage divided into horizontal zones parallel to the proscenium. Processional
movement across these zones in straight lines. The additive process, which gradually fills a space
with energy and people, then gradually empties it out. Formal design replaces a chronological
story line.
- Became interested in breaking linguistic codes and creating new ones based on some of
Raymond’s unconventional writings.
- This period is characterized by stage pictures that refer to childhood drawings and story books.

Second period: Deconstructing Language

- The muse for this period was a child named Chris Knowles.
o An autistic child who plays with language like a jigsaw puzzle
o Arranges the pieces into unexpected patterns; patterns according to sounds, visual
architecture, and mathematical formulas
- This period begins with A Letter for Queen Victoria
- Wilson disbands the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds and works more with professionals

- Takes on the role of Playwright

- Style changes visually

o Geometric aesthetic becomes sharper
o Black, White, and Gray are dominant colors
 This privileges architecture, line, & design
 Visually it becomes more sophisticated and formal, abstract and elegant. Less
naïve.
- Einstein on the Beach (1976) is the most celebrated work from this period.
o A mystical farce
o Rampages through the absurdity of the human condition
o Uses music, dance, drama, and visual art
o Constructed around three visual motifs: the train, the trial, the spaceship. Each happens
thrice.
o Music by Phillip Glass (minimalist composer)

- Plays are non-linear, but not non narrative.

- Veils narrative by emphasizing artistic devices rather than story line.

From Semiotics to Semantics

- Muse for this period is Heiner Müller

o Regarded as one of the greatest living playwrights
o Collaborated with Wilson on his play the CIVILwars (1984)
 Incorporated parts of Müller’s play GRUNDLINGS LIFE FREDERICK OF PRUSSIA
LESSING’S SLEEP DREAM SCREAM
o Used many of Müller’s texts in various productions
o Directed both Müller’s Hamletmachine and Quartet

- In the 70s, Wilson stated that he did not want to direct the work of others. That it is important
to create new work.
- Started to explore classic text
o 1985 did a workshop of King Lear

- Wilson worked frequently in Germany, where his work was nurtured and grew.

- The CIVILwars was cancelled at the LA Olympics Arts Festival in 1984

 o Could not raise the money to bring it together in LA in America
o David Bowie as Abraham Lincoln reading the Gettysberg Address in Japanese sent
American corporate donors into paroxysms of anger.
- Learned a lot about sound from Hans-Peter Kuhn, who was a leading sound artist in Germany

- After which his soundscapes became more sophisticated

- He also learned a lot about light in German theatres as well

- Only lets actors in rare and special moments express emotion directly.

How to Do Things with Words

- In this period Wilson confronts the classics

- Uses opera to explore language as sound

- Previous work has led to this point

- When doing classical works he may move scenes, reassign text, use repetition, or intercalate
another text.
- Wilson only does the work of dramatists whom he respects

- “ I don’t have to make theatre with LEAR, Shakespeare already made the theatre. What I have to
find is a way to put his theatre on a stage with enough room around those words so that people
can hear them and think about them. I don’t believe in talking back to a masterpiece. I let it talk
to me.”
- “A Wilson production challenges, questions, provokes. Opening up the text, it forces rge
spectator to the, and rethink, the material.”
- Wilson loves language

- Main character in A Letter for Queen Victoria is language.

o The play asks : What is language made of? Why do we need it? How do we use it? How
does it work? How does it generate meaning? To what extent is this meaning an
illusion? What can it communicate? What can’t it communicate? When and why does it
break down? What rules govern its use? What happens when we ignore those rules?
How do rules change over time? What happens when we ignore these rules? What is
the relation between language and paralinguistic systems like facial expressions and
body language? Etc.
- First strategy is to discard language. Calls this structured silence.

- “The way actors are trained here is wrong. All they think about is interpreting a text. They worry
about how to speak words and know nothing about their bodies. You see that by the way they
 walk. They don’t understand the weight of a gesture in space. A good actor can command an
audience by moving a finger.”
- Müller remarks that Wilson’s most important contribution to drama is the disassociation of
theatrical codes( Second strategy).
o Wilson refers to this as his “why paint a white horse white theory.”
 Visual is not an illustration of the text. It has equal importance.
 Visual must be so compelling that a deaf man would sit through the
performance fascinated.
- Wilson’s theatre never denies that it is theatre. It draws attention to its status as an art object

- It explores perception.

- Dramatizes how we impose a mental construct we call reality on the multifarious and dissonant
stimuli bombarding our mind from without.
- Uses disjunction to question this “natural” order

- Third strategy is discontinuity.

o Wilson fragments language
o Uses no-sequiturs
o Words about to coalesce into a complete sentence collapse into silence.
o Stories are hinted at, but stop before starting.
o Language refuses to make sense; stories refuse to tell themselves

- Fourth strategy is to dramatize the play of meaning.

o Meaning is not an inert object the reader excavates. Meaning is a process. It is a
response produced by receiving a consciousness in relationship with a text. A text
capable of generating response.
o Movements, gestires, tone of voice, music, lights, costumes – all these paralinguistic
systems of communication shifted the semantic weigth and destabilized the text’s
meaning.
o Theatre that desires the audience to complete it. The audience must take an active role
in the production of meaning.

Robert Wilson and his Collaborators Laurence Shyer

- Compared his organizational method to that of an architect

 - Wilson was bored by theatre, quit painting because he couldn’t put on canvas the pictures that
were in his mind
- Interested in time and slow motion

- Miss Bird Hoffman, an elderly dance instructor that he met in the 1950s helped him with his
speech impediment by encouraging him to relax and release the tensions in his body through
movement exercises.
- Learned to speak very slowly

- Believed that in watching his work, the spectator was inevitably drawn into its rhythms and
reached a point at which the heart rate lowed.
- Audiences were frequently stoned

- He calls it not slow motion, but natural time

- Wilson’s theatre aspires to a condition of total freedom, freedom not only from authority and
convention but the constraints of time, language, and even meaning.
- Plays did not demand the full attention of the audience

- Does not know the meaning of his own work.

- Deafman Glance was a 6 hour opera in 1971 Paris

- The Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds

o A group of disciples, friends, and associates who made Wilson’s early work possible.
o Started in 1968
o Diverse group

- Phillip Glass
o Began in 1974 after seeing Stalin
o Worked with the Mabou Mines since 1965
o Followed Living theatre since 1958

Robert Wilson Maria Shevtsova

- Born in Waco, Texas in 1941

- Studied painting with George McNeil an American abstract expressionist painter in Paris after
dropping out of business school
- Studied with unconventional architect Paolo Soleri in Arizona following graduation from pratt
- Wilson believed colour was capable of stimulating emotion

- Wilson keeps theory at arms length and works intuitively

- Wilson’s Workshop method:

o Wilson storyboards by thinking in terms of visual, musical, and non-verbal means, with
the body and silence.
o Wilson admired Japanese and Balinese classical theatre.
o Goal is to establish gestural language adequate to his productions, and he keeps this
language in mind as he draws his visual books.
o Preparation starts years in advance.
o Three phases: Table workshop (A meeting of the collaborators to talk through the
piece), Casting and a first workshop with the actors ( in acuditions actors are asked to
walk, sit, speak short text, sing a few lines, and repeat a movement pattern
demonstrated by Wilson), and Production proper (Wilson arranges a week of previews
before the planed premier).
- Elements and principals
o Architecture, Space, Time
 Objective for the theatre was th architectural arrangement in space and time
 Architecture is not building, but for counterpoint in music, shafts of light, lines
traced in space by moving bodies or the placement of props.
o Actor
o Light/Colour
 Without light, no space. Without space, no theatre.
o Text
o Image
o Silence, Sound, and Music
o Body/Movement
o Costumes
o Objects
 There are few