Robert Wilson (director)

Robert Wilson (born October 4, 1941) is an American experimental theater stage director and playwright who has been described by ''The New York Times'' as " mericas – or even the world's – foremost vanguard 'theater artist. He has also worked as a choreographer, performer, painter, sculptor, video artist, and sound and lighting designer.

Wilson is best known for his collaboration with Philip Glass and Lucinda Childs on ''Einstein on the Beach'', and his frequent collaborations with Tom Waits. In 1991, Wilson established The Watermill Center, "a laboratory for performance" on the East End of Long Island, New York, regularly working with opera and theatre companies, as well as cultural festivals. Wilson "has developed as an avant-garde artist specifically in Europe amongst its modern quests, in its most significant cultural centers, galleries, museums, opera houses and theaters, and festivals".

Early life and education

Wilson was born in Waco, Texas, the son of Loree Velma (née Hamilton) and D.M. Wilson, a lawyer.
He had a difficult youth as the gay son of a conservative family. "When I was growing up, it was a sin to go to the theater. It was a sin if a woman wore pants. There was a prayer box in school, and if you saw someone sinning you could put their name in the prayer box, and on Fridays everyone would pray for those people whose names were in the prayer box." He was stuttering and taken to a local dance instructor called Bird "Baby" Hoffman, who helped him overcome his stutter.
After attending local schools, he studied business administration at the University of Texas from 1959 to 1962.

He moved to Brooklyn, New York in 1963 to change fields, study art and architecture. At some point he went to Arizona to study architecture with Paolo Soleri at his desert complex. Wilson found himself drawn to the work of pioneering choreographers George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, and Martha Graham, among others. He engaged in therapeutic theater work with brain-injured and disabled children in New York. He received a BFA in architecture from the Pratt Institute in 1965. He directed a "ballet for iron-lung patients where the participants moved a fluorescent streamer with their mouths while the janitor danced dressed as Miss America". During this period, he also attended lectures by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy (widow of László Moholy-Nagy), and studied painting with artist George McNeil.

Career

Theater

In 1968, he founded an experimental performance company, the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds (named for a teacher who helped him manage a stutter while a teenager). With this company, he directed his first major works, beginning with 1969's ''The King of Spain'' and ''The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud''. He began to work in opera in the early 1970s, creating ''Einstein on the Beach'' with composer Philip Glass and choreographer Lucinda Childs. This work brought the artists worldwide renown. Following ''Einstein'', Wilson worked increasingly with major European theaters and opera houses. For the New York debut of his first opera, the Metropolitan Opera allowed Wilson to rent the house on a Sunday, when they did not have a production, but would not produce the work.Rachel Donadio (January 3, 2014)
"Paris Embraces ''Einstein'' Again"
''The New York Times''.

In 1970, Wilson and a group of collaborators, including choreographer Andy deGroat and the dancer and actor Sheryl Sutton, devised the "silent opera" ''Deafman Glance'' in Iowa City, where it premiered at the Center for New Performing Arts on December 15. The large cast of the premiere production of ''Deafman Glance'' included Raymond Andrews and Ana Mendieta. The show subsequently traveled to the Nancy Festival in France and to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It later opened in Paris, championed by the designer Pierre Cardin. The Surrealist poet Louis Aragon loved it and published a letter to the Surrealist poet André Breton (who had died in 1966), in which he praised Wilson as: "What we, from whom Surrealism was born, dreamed would come after us and go beyond us". In 1975, Wilson dissolved the Byrds and started to use professional actors.

In 1983/84, Wilson planned a performance for the 1984 Summer Olympics, '' the CIVIL warS: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down''; the complete work was to have been 12 hours long, in 6 parts. The production was only partially completed; the full event was cancelled by the Olympic Arts Festival, due to insufficient funds.John Rockwell (June 20, 1990)
"Critic's Notebook; Robert Wilson Wins A Faithful Following, But It's in Europe"
''The New York Times'' In 1986, the Pulitzer Prize jury unanimously selected ''the CIVIL warS'' for the drama prize, but the supervisory board rejected the choice and gave no drama award that year.

In 1990 alone, Wilson created four new productions in four different West German cities: Shakespeare's ''King Lear'' in Frankfurt, Chekhov's ''Swan Song'' in Munich, an adaptation of Virginia Woolf's ''Orlando'' in West Berlin, and The Black Rider a collaboration by Wilson, Tom Waits and William S. Burroughs, in Hamburg.

In 1997, he was awarded the Europe Theatre Prize.

In 1998, Wilson staged August Strindberg's ''A Dream Play,'' first in Stockholm, then in Nice, London, and New York.

In 2010 Wilson was working on a new stage musical with composer (and long-time collaborator) Tom Waits and the Irish playwright, Martin McDonagh. His theatrical production of John Cage's ''Lecture on Nothing'', which was commissioned for a celebration of the Cage centenary at the 2012 Ruhrtriennale, had its U.S. premiere in Royce Hall, UCLA, by the Center for the Art of Performance. Wilson performed ''Lectures on Nothing'' in its Australian premiere at the 2019 Supersense festival at the Arts Centre Melbourne.

In 2013 Wilson, in collaboration with Mikhail Baryshnikov and co-starring Willem Dafoe, developed ''The Old Woman'', an adaptation of the work by the Russian author Daniil Kharms. The play premiered at MIF13, Manchester International Festival. Wilson wrote that he and Baryshnikov had discussed creating a play together for years, perhaps based on a Russian text. The final production included dance, light, singing and bilingual monologue.

Since 1999, Wilson has premiered nine theatrical works in Berlin. By contrast, as of 2013, his last commission in the United States was 21 years ago.

As of 2010, he continued to direct revivals of his most celebrated productions, including ''The Black Rider'' in London, San Francisco, Sydney, Australia, and Los Angeles; ''The Temptation of St. Anthony'' in New York and Barcelona; ''Erwartung'' in Berlin; ''Madama Butterfly'' at the Bolshoi Opera in Moscow; and Wagner's ''Der Ring des Nibelungen'' at Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris."Robert Wilson, ''Deafman Glance''": Video Installation, September 24 – November 13, 2010
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

Wilson also directs all Monteverdi operas for the opera houses of La Scala in Milan and the Palais Garnier in Paris.

In 2021 Wilson directed a revival of Shakespeare's '' The Tempest'' at the Ivan Vazov National Theatre in Sofia, Bulgaria.

In 2022 he directed ''UBU'', a theatrical performance, premiered at Es Baluard Museu in Palma.

Visual art and design

In addition to his work for the stage, Wilson has created sculpture, drawings, and furniture designs. Exhibited in December 1976 at the Paula Cooper Gallery, Wilson's storyboards were described by one critic as "serial art, equivalent to the slow-motion tempo of ilson'stheatrical style. In drawing after drawing after drawing, a detail is proposed, analyzed, refined, redefined, moved through various positions."
He won the Golden Lion at the 1993 Venice Biennale for a sculptural installation.
In 2004, Ali Hossaini offered Wilson a residency at the television channel LAB HD. Since then Wilson, with producer Esther Gordon and later with Matthew Shattuck, has produced dozens of high-definition videos known as the Voom Portraits. Collaborators on this well-received project included the composer Michael Galasso, the late artist and designer Eugene Tsai, fashion designer Kevin Santos, and lighting designer Urs Schönebaum. In addition to celebrity subjects, sitters have included royalty, animals, Nobel Prize winners and hobos.

In 2011, Wilson designed an art park dedicated to the Finnish designer Tapio Wirkkala (1915–1985), situated in the Arabianranta district of Helsinki. His plans for the rectangular park feature a central square divided into nine equally sized fields separated by bushes. Each field will be installed with objects related to the home. For example, one unit will consist of a small fireplace surrounded by stones that serve as seating. The park will be lit by large, lightbox-style lamps build into the ground and by smaller ones modelled on ordinary floor lamps.

In 2013 American pop singer Lady Gaga announced that she would collaborate with Wilson as part of her ARTPOP project. He subsequently designed the set for her 2013 MTV Video Music Awards performance.Amy Serafin (December 12, 2013)
"Robert Wilson's macabre video portraits of Lady Gaga"
(December 12, 2013) ''Wallpaper''. Wilson also suggested that Gaga pose for his Voom Portraits. Knowing he had an upcoming residency as guest curator at the Louvre, Wilson chose themes from the museum's collection, all dealing with death. They shot the videos in a London studio over three days, Gaga standing for 14 or 15 hours at a time. Called "Living Rooms," the resulting exhibition included two video works: one inspired by Jacques-Louis David's ''The Death of Marat'', hung in the painting galleries, and another in which Lady Gaga brings to life a painting by Ingres. In the Louvre's auditorium, Wilson hosted and took part in a series of performances, conversations, film screenings, and discussions. The centerpiece of the residency is a room filled with objects from the artist's personal collection in New York, including African masks, a Shaker chair, ancient Chinese ceramics, shoes worn by Marlene Dietrich and a photo of Wilson and Glass taken in the early 1980s by Robert Mapplethorpe.

Personal life

Wilson lives in New York. As of 2000, he estimated that he "spends 10 days a year at his apartment in New York". For many years he was romantically involved with Andy de Groat, a dancer and choreographer with whom he collaborated in the 1970s.

Style

Wilson is known for pushing the boundaries of theatre. His works are noted for their austere style, very slow movement, and often extreme scale in space or in time. ''The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin'' was a 12-hour performance, while ''KA MOUNTain and GUARDenia Terrace'' was staged on a mountaintop in Iran and lasted seven days.

Language

Language is one of the most important elements of theatre and Robert Wilson feels at home with commanding it in many different ways. Wilson's impact on this part of theatre alone is immense. Arthur Holmberg, professor of theatre at Brandeis University, says that "In theatre, no one has dramatized the crisis of language with as much ferocious genius as Robert Wilson."Holmberg, Arthur (1996
''The Theatre Of Robert Wilson''
Cambridge: Cambridge UP Wilson makes it evident in his work that whats and whys of language are terribly important and cannot be overlooked. Tom Waits, acclaimed songwriter and collaborator with Wilson, said this about Wilson's unique relationship with words:

Words for Bob are like tacks on the kitchen floor in the dark of night and you're barefoot. So Bob clears a path he can walk through words without getting hurt. Bob changes the values and shapes of words. In some sense they take on more meaning; in some cases, less.

Wilson shows the importance of language through all of his works and in many varying fashions. He credits his reading of the work of Gertrude Stein and listening to recordings of her speaking with "changing isway of thinking forever." Wilson directed three of Stein's works in the 1990s: '' Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights'' (1992), ''Four Saints in Three Acts'' (1996), and ''Saints and Singing'' (1998).

Wilson considers language and, down to its very ingredients, words, as a sort of "a social artifact". Not only does language change with time but it changes with person, with culture. Using his experience of working with mentally handicapped children and enlisting the collaboration of Christopher Knowles

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