Robert Wilson

Maria Shevtsova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429940828
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Teatro

Robert Wilson is an American–European director who is also a performer, installation artist, writer, designer of light and much more besides – a crossover polymath who dissolves both generic and geographical boundaries and is a precursor of globalisation in the arts. This second edition of Robert Wilson combines:

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• an analysis of his main productions, situated in their American and European socio-cultural and political contexts

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• a focused, detailed study of Wilson's pathbreaking Einstein on the Beach

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• a study of Pushkin's Fairy Tales as the foremost example of his folk-rock music theatre in the twenty-first century

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• an exploration of his 'visual book', workshop and rehearsal methods, and collaborative procedures

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• a study of his aesthetic principles and the elements of composition that distinguish his directorial approach

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• a series of practical exercises for students and practitioners highlighting Wilson's technique.

As a first step towards critical understanding, and as an initial exploration before going on to further, primary research, Routledge Performance Practitioners offer unbeatable value for today's student.

1

A working life

Becoming Robert Wilson

Born in Waco, Texas, in 1941, Robert Wilson suffered from a speech impediment that was cured when he was 17 by Byrd Hoffman, a local teacher of dance. Wilson thinks of her as the first artist he ever met. Byrd Hoffman, who was in her seventies, would play the piano in an adjoining room while he, free from her gaze, moved about in whatever way he wished. As Wilson observes, she delivered him from his stutter by teaching him to release tension, to ‘just relax’ and let ‘energy flow through so, so that I wasn’t blocked’ (quoted in Brecht, 1994: 14).

This event in the life of an adolescent who, he claims, had had a relatively lonely childhood was to leave its mark on Wilson’s work in the theatre. Movement – idiosyncratic, ‘Wilsonian’ – was to become its fundamental principle and penetrate its every aspect so deeply – gesture, light, colour, costume, sound, word – that Wilson could credibly claim, even early in his career, that ‘everything I do can be seen as dance’ (Lesschaeve, 1977: 224). If the pioneer dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, whom Wilson admired, could assert that the body never lies (Copeland, 2004: 12), Wilson could be no less certain because of his own experience that the body speaking truthfully in movement was the way of physical and mental healing. The key was in letting it find its appropriate path. The freedom not to seek effects but just let things be, which Wilson has always encouraged in his performers, arguably stems, at least in part, from this insight.

In 1959, Wilson enrolled in a business administration course at the University of Texas, probably to please his lawyer father who wanted conventional success for his son. He dropped out in 1962, just before he was to graduate (Brecht, 1994: 15), and spent some months studying painting with George McNeil, an American abstract expressionist painter in Paris. He returned to the United States, now to New York, as a student of architecture at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He allegedly had a nervous breakdown and attempted suicide (ibid.: 20), and graduated from Pratt in 1966. Wilson spent the summers of 1964 and 1965 in Texas continuing the theatre work with children that he had begun soon after finishing high school. He and the children wrote their scripts, performing in churches, construction sites, garages and vacant lots – anywhere that could be taken over as a performance space. The thing that most interested him, Wilson was to say in 1970, was ‘education, teaching … it’s like the biggest challenge’ (ibid.: 22).

Graduation from Pratt was followed by Wilson’s short apprenticeship to the anything-but-conventional architect Paolo Soleri in Arizona and, in 1967, by Poles, his first commissioned architectural work:

In a broad flat field he erected 576 vertical telephone poles in a square array resembling an amphitheatre. Rising from a height of two-and-one- half feet to fourteen feet the incline created by the pole tops is attractive, accessible and human in scale. It offers precarious seats, an arena for some event or a jungle-gym for children at play … Isolated from view except for visitors to the field, Poles inhabits its own landscape, a surreal image contradicting the natural site.

(Stearns, 1984: 37)

It is clear from this account that Wilson’s construction or ‘architectural sculpture’ (ibid.) was also a potential theatre and playground in one, a combination that may well have come to him from his theatre work with children in Texas. His work afterwards on a variety of stages across the world reflected a similarly architectural concern with building a space in which all play elements could be organised systematically. Many years later, Wilson would win the prize for sculpture at the 1993 Venice Biennale with an otherwise theatrical and ‘surreal’ work (the adjective would justifiably stick to Wilson throughout his career) that was actually an installation sculpture. This was Memory/Loss, which featured a mould of Wilson’s head and shoulders in a large floor of cracked mud. Wilson’s voice could be heard reading fragments of a text he had written, and was complemented by a soundscore by Hans Peter Kuhn who, by then, had become one of his regular collaborators.

Julia Kristeva, the renowned French theorist turned psychoanalyst, was on the jury hotly criticised for awarding the prize to Wilson for a sculpture, the assumption being that the work did not fit the bill. Kristeva countered:

But clearly the traditional categories – painting, sculpture, stagecraft, etc. – no longer correspond to reality. Personally, I think this is due to the crisis in our psychic space and the borders that separate the object and the subject. In the same way that there is a breaking down of the boundaries between objects, there is an intrication [sic] of the roles of the artist and the spectator, erasing the borders between the self and the other. This lack of differentiation can have a dramatic effect on some people: loss of sense of self, hallucinations, etc. But it can also give rise to jubilation, because it creates a sense of osmosis with Being, the Absolute.

(Kristeva, 1994: 65)

Kristeva stresses that Wilson’s abolition of established artistic categories obliges viewers to cross perceptual boundaries, which is a double-edged (even faintly psychotic) experience – both ‘loss of sense of self’ and ‘jubilation’. For Wilson, however, cross-border perception, for creator and spectator alike, can only be positive since it calls upon unexercised dimensions of the imagination. This liberating power, while applicable to Memory/Loss, as to Poles and all his performance pieces, is at the heart of the matter: Wilson is a polymath – an architect, designer, painter, installation artist, writer, performer, director, and more – yet the diversity of his output is on a continuum. ‘It’s all part of one concern’, Wilson states in response to criticism of his 2000 installation retrospective of fashion designer Giorgio Armani at the Guggenheim Museum in New York: ‘many people … thought it should not be in a museum of “fine art”’ (The Guardian, 11 September 2003). He no more thinks in hierarchical terms about his work (like ‘fine’ versus ‘popular’) than he does about it and his daily life: ‘Now I’ll go home and watch television. Now I have sex. Now I’m with my boyfriend. Now I go to work. I don’t see it as separate’ (The Guardian, 19 May 2001).

Wilson’s involvement in performance gathered speed while he was at Pratt. Along with others, he ‘pitched in’ to help choreographer Alwin Nikolais (Nikolais in Shyer, 1989: 290), designed the sets for Murray Louis’s Junk Dances and made gigantic puppets for Motel, the third part of Jean-Claude Van Itallie’s America Hurrah. According to Van Itallie, he also wanted to set the whole of America Hurrah ‘in a yellow submarine – I guess from the Beatles’ song’ (ibid.: 292), an idea certainly in tune with the 1960s celebration of ‘getting stoned’ alluded to by the song. He also revamped for show at the Pratt Institute two dances that he had created for a youth theatre programme in Waco.

In the meantime, he earned his living as a special instructor for the Department of Welfare, teaching brain-damaged children, some of pre-school age, whose motor skills he aroused with endless patience by simple means – hold chalk to paper and, slowly, slowly, eventually draw a line, splash paint over newspaper-covered floors and walls, crawl inch by inch – all of it, to Wilson’s mind, an application of what he had learned from Byrd Hoffman. Some of the adult crawling on all fours in later productions, among them Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights (1992, text by Gertrude Stein), might well be memory traces of his hours of crawling about with children, thus extending his life experience into his art practice. While he was still at Pratt, Wilson first met the dancer and choreographer Jerome Robbins, who invited him to offer a series of therapeutic exercises at his experimental centre, the American Theater Laboratory. Wilson recalled in 1999 that Robbins was curious about the way he worked with brain-damaged children while he, Wilson, ‘had no idea’ that he ‘would ever work in the theatre and wasn’t particularly interested in theatre’ (quoted in Lawrence, 2002: 364). Wilson continues:

I was studying architecture, but what I was doing was a sort of crossover between architecture and performance, design, and it was a time in the sixties where you had this crossover. Someone like [Robert] Rauschenberg would paint a goat and put it in the middle of the room, so it was painting or was it sculpture, sort of coming off the wall and becoming three dimensional? And some of the work I was doing with children was free work, and I guess really related to theatre.

(Ibid.)

Wilson’s reference is to Rauschenberg’s Monogram (1955–59), a painted goat poking its head and body through the hole of a tyre. Provocative in the avant-garde mode of the time, Monogram may well have had no allegorical or symbolic intention, although art historian Robert Hughes claims it is one of the wittiest statements ever to be made on sexual penetration (Pegram, 1980) and is ‘one of the few great icons of male homosexual love in modern culture’ (Hughes, 1980: 335). Wilson, it is clear, was attracted by the work’s non-determined (not ‘indeterminate’) status, this being integral to the creative endeavour of the 1960s that sustained his unique approach. It will become evident in the course of this book how the kid of the 1960s survived in the international man of the twenty-first century.

When Wilson returned to New York after constructing Poles, he came back to the two areas in which he had been most active: teaching–enabling through performance and working on performance. The former included his activities with terminally ill patients at Goldwater Hospital on Welfare Island, where he organised a performance with patients in wheelchairs. Another was with patients in iron lungs who, by means of a system of dangling strings and pulleys devised by Wilson, moved fluorescent streamers and rolled-down posters with their mouths. His work on performance mostly took place in his Spring Street loft. Wilson made four pieces between 1967 and 1969. The first, Baby Blood, was composed of disconnected sequences which featured rings and candles moved by hooded figures, and Wilson ‘walking like an equilibrist on a narrow wooden plank using a giant lollipop as equilibrating stick’ (Libe Bayrak in Brecht, 1994: 31).

The second, Theatre Activity 1, featured dancer Kenneth King, another early influence, and Andy de Groat, the choreographer for Wilson’s path-breaking Einstein on the Beach in 1976. Some of the performers sat in the audience with their heads covered by paper bags. At one point, the performers on the stage blew bubbles, but nothing else happened. At another, the movements of a soldier-like figure, crashing glass and a soundtrack in the background appeared to be ‘all about Vietnam’ (Fanny Brooks in Brecht, 1994: 36). If true, then it suggests that, for all his immersion in the world of the imagination, Wilson was not oblivious to the violent antagonisms in the United States over the Vietnam War. The bag-covered heads could have been a metaphor for the people blinkered by the War, although just how much semantic content was invested in the show’s images is a matter for conjecture. Whether Wilson’s works actually have semantic content and meaning or are purely ‘aesthetic’ constructions has remained a problematic issue ever since.

The next piece, Theatre Activity 2, took up the motif of crashing glass. The fourth, ByrdwoMAN, included Meredith Monk, a performer and innovator of music theatre. Composed, like its predecessors, of numerous disjointed bits, some static, others busy, ByrdwoMAN was in two parts, and lasted about two hours. Wilson played the role of the Byrdwoman in the first part in his loft, its floor covered with hay. A parrot in a cage, perhaps a joke on the ‘character’, sat at the back of the loft. Monk played the role in the second part in nearby Jones Alley, to which the audience was transported by two trucks. She danced in the street while somebody else descended a fire escape and Byrdwoman figures dotted nearby rooftops. Lawrence Shyer records: ‘The audience was then taken around to the other side of the alley where they found nearly 40 Byrdwoman figures bouncing on wooden boards. At the conclusion of the performance, a rock band played and performers and spectators danced together’ (Shyer, 1989: 293). Wilson performed with Monk again in 1968 in his duet Alley Cats for her piece Co-op. His contribution included performers bouncing up and down in long fur coats, which Monk found ‘witty and fun’ (ibid.: 296) – traits often found in Wilson’s work, although they are frequently overlooked.

The little information available about these performances manages to suggest the effervescence of the 1960s: wild imagination, naïve hedonism, tomfoolery, narcissism posing as artistic experimentation and serious innovation looking like narcissism. Wilson’s loft-generated performances were, in effect, more like ‘Events’ (the first in 1964), as understood by Merce Cunningham and his partner John Cage, both of whom made a lasting impact on Wilson. They were even more like the visual-art ‘Happenings’ invented by Allan Kaprow virtually a decade earlier. Like ‘Happenings’, they looked casual and used found spaces rather than dedicated ones, theatres or galleries. Their playing around with the boundaries between spectators and participants – dissolved in the party concluding ByrdwoMAN – was a nod to a practice popularised in the late 1960s, notably by Julian Beck and Judith Malina of the Living Theatre – most of all in Paradise Now (1968) – and Richard Schechner, whose ‘environmental’ theatre abandoned the proscenium arch and mixed and mingled performers and spectators in a common space.

In 1968, Wilson named the team gathered around him the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds in honour of his old teacher. Wilson even called himself ‘Byrd’, appropriating his mentor’s identity while playing with ideas of gender in cross-dress appearances in his ‘Happenings’.

The School of Byrds was a communal but fluid group providing him with hundreds of largely amateur performers for nearly a decade, some quite literally pulled by Wilson from the streets. In 1968, as well, Wilson became the artistic director of the Byrd Hoffman Foundation, Inc. and began preparations for The King of Spain. It was performed at the Anderson Theatre in 1969, the first of his early works on a proscenium stage. This production, his change of status and the constitution of the Foundation (‘legalised’ when Wilson filed a Certificate of Incorporation for it in 1970) might be said to have kicked off his professional career.

Dance plays, silent operas and words

The King of Spain was essentially a preamble to The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud (1969) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Wilson’s second proscenium theatre. Subtitled ‘a dance play in three acts’, it was performed in silence or, intermittently, to a muted sound score. Freud repeated several key images from The King of Spain – a man running continually at the back of the stage, cat legs the height of the stage striding across it, the back of the gigantic head of a figure in an armchair – and added many more that were just as incongruous: a beach with real sand covering the vast stage; a black woman in a black Victorian dress to whose wrist was attached a large stuffed raven; a man with a snake; a cave around which were grouped lions, tigers, cows and sheep, among other animals that appeared to wander randomly in and out of the show; young half-naked men and women exercising beyond the cave. Freud walked with his wife or grandson, or sat at the mouth of the cave among the beasts.

The character was played by a man whom Wilson had noticed, struck by his resemblance to Freud, at a New York station and had persuaded to perform in his production. When he could not for the last two of four performances, he was replaced by Jerome Robbins, whose high forehead and balding head could pass for those of Freud. Wilson added to his team of Byrds some 30 ordinary people recruited or, like Freud, found by chance, who walked on and off the stage, performing no one but themselves. The play’s links to Freud were tenuous, its interest lying, apart from its disconcerting images, in its open space, slow pace and unhurried duration, the whole lasting some four hours without a break...