by Bettina Rudhof
His minimalist choreography, his unusual visual and formal language and the strange way he uses light in his productions have made the American opera and theatre producer, author, painter, architect and set designer Robert Wilson famous throughout the world since the 1970s.
His crowning achievement is generally regarded as being the opera Einstein on the Beach, conceived in collaboration with composer Philip Glass, though he is best known in the German-speaking world for his opus CIVIL warS, which embraces productions from five different countries and also saw him working with the dramatist Heiner Müller. Wilson garnered extensive acclaim for his play Death, Destruction & Detroit I + II shown at the Schaubühne in Berlin as well as for The Black Rider, a reworking of the Freischütz with music by Tom Waits, that ran at the Thalia in Hamburg.
Thanks are due to Brigitte Labs-Ehlert, initiator of the long-running Wege durch das Land series of events, and to main sponsors FSB for the three-hour stage performance put on by Wilson at Essen’s Museum Folkwang, to which 400 guests were treated on 20 May this year. The 64-year-old star spent most of the time speaking about his adolescence in New York and his beginnings as an artistic all-rounder.
From Waco to New York
My attempt to write about this event leads me first into my small library which, though seemingly arranged in a disorderly way, is in fact strictly organised even if this is not immediately apparent to the untrained eye. I was hoping to find a fifteen-year-old supplement from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in which an article on Robert Wilson had caught my eye at the time. My otherwise effortlessly efficacious archiving criteria let me down on this occasion, however. I couldn’t find the magazine containing the relevant article either under the headings Experimental Architecture or Stage Sets or any other of the most closely associated categories. As my study of the artist intensified I began to realise that this had less to do with my filing system than with the man’s persona and work.
Robert Wilson was born on 4 October 1941 in Waco, a small Texan town that in known locally as a collecting point for livestock consignments and in the enlightened America of the East Coast as a synonym for small-minded life in the backwoods. The young Wilson was plagued by a severe speech defect from which he was cured by the dancer Byrd Hoffmann. With his father intent on Robert succeeding him as mayor of Waco, the 17-year-old duly enrolled in Business Studies at nearby Austin. Once he had “come out” in 1961, it was obvious that his future could hardly lie in provincial Texas. Without further ado, therefore, he made off for New York and studied Art and Architecture at the famous Pratt Institute. Later (in 1978), he portrayed the inarticulacy and unconnectedness of his childhood and youth in Texas in the short film “Video 50”.
www.medienkunstnetz.de/kuenstler/wilson/biografie
The 20-year-old Wilson learnt Architecture with Daniel Stern, Paolo Soleri and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy and Choreography with George Balanchine and Merce Cunningham, whilst also being decisively influenced by John Cage’s “formally staged dance performances“. Still today he emphasizes the high quality of this training and is particularly gushing about “Sibyl’s shocking method” of simply entering the classroom and asking her students – “Ready, steady, go!” – to design a town in three minutes: “During her lectures she presented us in rapid succession with a car from 1950, a Renaissance painting, a Baroque chandelier, a Byzantine mosaic, a chair by Frank Lloyd Wright, a shoe from the early 19th century – so that I could hardly avoid grasping the inherent correlation between architecture and theatre.“
Surrealist beginnings
It was during this time that he came across a policeman hitting a coloured youth on a street corner. He intervened only to discover that the 13-year-old Raymond Andrews was deaf and dumb. Given utterly no means of fulfilling himself, the youngster was rotting away in a closed institution and had no option in the end but to run away.
Robert Wilson took up the boy’s cause and adopted him, the two of them sharing a disused warehouse on Spring Street, whose three storeys Wilson also used as stage space. There, he put together a theatre production without words with his adopted son and learnt from him how to “hear and speak with one’s body”. The actors’ precise, slow movements in the seven-hour performance (Deafman Glance) were registered with excitement not only by New Yorkers: French fashion designer Pierre Cardin invited the two to put on the play in Paris. After the performance, surrealist writer Louis Aragon paid homage to Wilson’s work thus: “He has captured what we who originated surrealism were dreaming of by going beyond us.” He shares with the surrealists a sensitivity for people who are socially shunned on account of their being different, either by design or not. He was familiar with the suffering they go through day in, day out, from his own childhood, during which he was thrust into a “normality” that he was unable to understand at the time and unwilling to later on.
"Who sees to it that your spirit is calm and gentle?”
(Christopher Noles)
Upon his return from Europe he founded the “Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds”, a school of theatrical instruction for non-professionals he got to know in the streets and bars of New York, in reverent memory of his therapist Byrd Hoffman. He worked with mentally and physically disabled children in Harlem and administered therapy to seriously ill patients in public hospitals. He choreographed a ballet at a New York clinic for patients connected to iron lungs. Participants moved luminous bands with their mouths, whilst the hospital porter danced on stage dressed up as Miss America.
Some time in the early 1970s, Wilson got to know the adolescent Christopher Noles, who was considered by his parents and teachers to be mentally retarded. He spent a lot of time with the boy, analysing the rhythm of his unintelligible words, deciphering his language patterns and addressing himself for the first time to the issue of asignificant language. Once he had managed to convince Chris’s parents to remove him from the home, Wilson took him to rehearsals of his play The Life and Times of Josef Stalin (1973), which he was then putting on in Copenhagen, New York and Sao Paolo. The “deranged” boy liked being on stage and, quite out of the blue, one day he recited a text. Asked what it was, he replied that it was a letter to Queen Victoria. The experience impressed Wilson so much that, in 1974, he developed it into a production of his own, which he entitled A Letter to Queen Victoria. He subsequently disbanded the Byrds as an acting ensemble, turned the school into a foundation and, accompanied by his two advisors Raymond and Chris, began working with professional actors.
Einstein on the Beach
Wilson is seriously intent on sharpening his audience’s perception of the poetry of outsiders, of his and their art brut, on stage. He draws inspiration from the real-yet-so-surreal situations of everyday life, which he renders stranger still on stage by means of fragmented and artificially illuminated sets. His unpredictable creativity constantly causes him to come up with novel, fantastic productions in which the element of aesthetic displacement should not be underestimated: Raymond happens to tell him about a big frog that was sitting on the edge of the table during lunch, and the animal finds its way – by chance or not – into his production of Medea. Acting for Wilson is primarily a physical activity and hence he rejects the notion of holding lengthy intellectual discussions prior to staging a work, instead urging his actors to “simply get out there and act” in the first instance. During one production of his opera Einstein on the Beach, for example, he picked his grandmother up from the airport and proceeded to put her on stage – in the role of Queen Victoria. There’s no set libretto so she just told the audience about the various medicines and tablets she was having to take at the time. She put on a pair of sun glasses in mid-performance when the stagelights got too bright.
Wilson was unable to muster up the 60 naked pregnant women his adopted son proposed for the production of The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud and, instead, brought sixty ostriches onto the stage. A high chair was placed on stage at Chris’s request, which Chris then climbed onto to fish from. Typical of this play and, indeed, of all Wilson’s works are precise movements and countermovements in slow motion: a tortoise in The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud takes 33 minutes to cross the stage whilst, in the fourth Act of Einstein as a Dreamer in Court, no one at all is on stage for 16 minutes, during which time soprano singing emanates from the empty stage.
Works such as these have made Wilson one of the busiest, most successful and most prize-winning producers in international theatre. He has so far produced over 100 plays, solo performances, films and workshops as well as designing the attendant stage decorations and furniture. Besides his work for theatre, Wilson is also active as a painter, drawer and designer, his first full exhibition having been shown in 1976 in the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York. In 2006, a Mozart jubilee year, he was commissioned to set up a permanent exhibition in the house in Salzburg in which the composer was born; Wilson did so by combining original exhibits with work of his own. He turned engravings with views of Salzburg upside down, whilst the room in which Mozart was born features a child’s bed with a doll inside and a circular neon luminaire suspended above it.
I eventually found the article from the FAZ supplement I was looking for under the heading Life Reform Today, by the way, along with a report on the “Centre for Art and Psychotherapy” set up by psychiatrist Leo Navratil at Gugging in Austria and translations of Patti Smith lyrics. The Prestel publishing house will soon be issuing the book Absolute Wilson, the authoress of which has also produced a film of the same name.